Noah Kulwin at Select All:

Something has gone wrong with the internet. Even Mark Zuckerberg knows it. Testifying before Congress, the Facebook CEO ticked off a list of everything his platform has screwed up, from fake news and foreign meddling in the 2016 election to hate speech and data privacy. “We didn’t take a broad enough view of our responsibility,” he confessed. Then he added the words that everyone was waiting for: “I’m sorry.”

There have always been outsiders who criticized the tech industry — even if their concerns have been drowned out by the oohs and aahs of consumers, investors, and journalists. But today, the most dire warnings are coming from the heart of Silicon Valley itself. The man who oversaw the creation of the original iPhone believes the device he helped build is too addictive. The inventor of the World Wide Web fears his creation is being “weaponized.” Even Sean Parker, Facebook’s first president, has blasted social media as a dangerous form of psychological manipulation. “God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains,” he lamented recently.

To understand what went wrong — how the Silicon Valley dream of building a networked utopia turned into a globalized strip-mall casino overrun by pop-up ads and cyberbullies and Vladimir Putin — we spoke to more than a dozen architects of our digital present.

more here.

Sughra Raza. Bay-naam, 2013.

Digital photograph.

Freeman Dyson in the New York Review of Books:

Geoffrey West spent most of his life as a research scientist and administrator at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, running programs concerned not with nuclear weapons but with peaceful physics. After retiring from Los Alamos, he became director of the nearby Santa Fe Institute, where he switched from physics to a broader interdisciplinary program known as complexity science. The Santa Fe Institute is leading the world in complexity science, with a mixed group of physicists, biologists, economists, political scientists, computer experts, and mathematicians working together. Their aim is to reach a deep understanding of the complexities of the natural environment and of human society, using the methods of science.

Scale is a progress report, summarizing the insights that West and his colleagues at Santa Fe have achieved. West does remarkably well as a writer, making a complicated world seem simple. He uses pictures and diagrams to explain the facts, with a leisurely text to put the facts into their proper setting, and no equations. There are many digressions, expressing personal opinions and telling stories that give a commonsense meaning to scientific conclusions. The text and the pictures could probably be understood and enjoyed by a bright ten-year-old or by a not-so-bright grandparent.

The title, Scale, needs some clarification. To explain what his book is about, West added the subtitle “The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies.” The title tells us that the universal laws the book lays down are scaling laws. The word “scale” is a verb meaning “vary together.” Each scaling law says that two measurable quantities vary together in a particular way.

More here.

Muhammad Idrees Ahmad at Al Jazeera:

Last Saturday, when the United States, the UK and France launched strikes on three chemical facilities in Syria, the move was met with disapproval in some quarters. The pre-announced spectacle blew up three buildings and took no lives, but some pronounced it a "dangerous escalation". Some spoke of its "illegality". All complained about its disregard for the OPCW investigation.

The action, which lasted less than an hour, was an escalation only if everything that preceded it was normal. By this reckoning, Syria has now returned to its status quo of genocide by the Assad regime.

The action was illegal only if by legality we mean approval by the UN Security Council. But the Security Council is not a neutral adjudicating authority like a court. Its decisions are constrained by the interests of its permanent members. To say an action is "legal", in this case, would be to say: "Vladimir Putin approved".

What then of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) investigation?

This depends on what answer is being sought. Because the OPCW's remit does not include apportioning blame. Untrammelled access for the OPCW would have merely proved what was already known: that a chemical attack took place. It would not have resolved the manufactured controversy over who was responsible (manufactured, because there is only one party in Syria with the means, intention and history of deploying chemical weapons by air).

But had the OPCW confirmed Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad's responsibility, what consequences should have followed?

More here.

Alex Fox in Nature:

A microscope that combines two imaging techniques — including one used by astronomers — now allows researchers to capture 3D videos of living cells inside organisms.

The approach addresses long-standing problems with imaging cells in living tissue. Because of how light interacts with different shapes and materials, trying to get a picture of a cell alongside its neighbours is like looking through a bag of marbles, says Eric Betzig, a physicist at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute's Janelia Research Campus in Ashburn, Virginia, who led the team that developed the device. To produce crisp images, conventional microscopes often isolate their subjects on a glass slide or bombard them with potentially harmful amounts of light.

But observing cells in isolation under glass is like going to the zoo to study lion behaviour, says Betzig. His team’s technique lets researchers observe cells in their natural habitat: the video above depicts an immune cell on the prowl in a zebrafish embryo’s inner ear. Betzig and his colleagues described their process¹ on 19 April in Science.

The technique shows researchers what cellular structures can do without them having to speculate about it first, says biochemist Tom Kornberg of the University of California, San Francisco.

More here. [Thanks to Ali Minai.]

Olga Khazan in The Atlantic:

Though their numbers are growing, only 27 percent of all students taking the AP Computer Science exam in the United States are female. The gender gap only grows worse from there: Just 18 percent of American computer-science college degrees go to women. This is in the United States, where many college men proudly describe themselves as “male feminists” and girls are taught they can be anything they want to be.

Meanwhile, in Algeria, 41 percent of college graduates in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and math—or “stem,” as it’s known—are female. There, employment discrimination against women is rife and women are often pressured to make amends with their abusive husbands.

According to a report I covered a few years ago, Jordan, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates were the only three countries in which boys are significantly less likely to feel comfortable working on math problems than girls are. In all of the other nations surveyed, girls were more likely to say they feel “helpless while performing a math problem.”

So what explains the tendency for nations that have traditionally less gender equality to have more women in science and technology than their gender-progressive counterparts do?

More here.

Stanley Cohen in counterpunch:

“The wrongs which we seek to condemn and punish have been so calculated, so malignant, and so devastating, that civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored, because it cannot survive their being repeated.”

Spring and All

By the road to the contagious hospital
under the surge of the blue
mottled clouds driven from the
northeast—a cold wind. Beyond, the
waste of broad, muddy fields
brown with dried weeds, standing and fallen

patches of standing water
the scattering of tall trees

All along the road the reddish
purplish, forked, upstanding, twiggy
stuff of bushes and small trees
with dead, brown leaves under them
leafless vines—

Lifeless in appearance, sluggish
dazed spring approaches—

They enter the new world naked,
cold, uncertain of all
save that they enter. All about them
the cold, familiar wind—

Now the grass, tomorrow
the stiff curl of wildcarrot leaf

One by one objects are defined—
It quickens: clarity, outline of leaf

But now the stark dignity of
entrance—Still, the profound change
has come upon them: rooted they
grip down and begin to awaken
.

by William Carlos Williams
from Spring and All
Robert McAlmon's Contact Publishing Co. 1923
.

Rebecca Renner at Literary Hub:

“There was once a town in the heart of America where all life seemed to live in harmony with its surroundings.” This is the surprising first sentence of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, the 1962 book that arguably sparked the modern environmental movement as we know it. Rachel Carson was a naturalist and science writer whose early work focused on oceanographic conservation. Her most famous book, however, details the harm wreaked on nature and humans by the rampant use of chemical pesticides. One of Silent Spring’s lasting legacies is the grassroots environmental campaign that it stirred up, leading to, among other achievements, the phasing out of DDT in the United States in 1972.

While most people have heard of Silent Spring, even if they don’t consider themselves readers or environmentalists, many fewer have actually read it. Though it was a Book-of-the-Month pick in 1962 and serialized in The New Yorker that same year, the popular furor for the book has since died down, and it is now largely relegated to textbooks or other educational contexts.

That is why its first sentence is so surprising: Silent Spring does not read like a textbook. It begins with a fable and is filled with lyricism and passion throughout.

more here.

Tim Crane at The Point:

The familiar charge that atheism itself is a kind of religion or church is therefore deeply mistaken. Without sacred things, there is no church. But are atheists really excluded from employing some idea of the sacred? While some seem to think that they too are entitled to employ the idea of sacred things, if I am right, they are either mistaken or are using the word in a very different way. The philosopher Simon Blackburn, for example, complains about the “religious appropriation of the sacred” and says that “to regard something as sacred is to see it as marking a boundary to what may be done.” That’s true, but there are many ways of drawing boundaries without marking out the sacred: moral prohibitions and other taboos draw sharp boundaries between things to be done, but these are not necessarily between the sacred and the profane. What atheists mean by calling something sacred, normally, is that it is very precious or has some special kind of significance that goes beyond any pleasure or satisfaction it delivers in a present moment. But the notion of the sacred that I have been using is very different, since it essentially involves religious practice or ritual that “points” towards the transcendent. There can be nothing like this in an atheist’s world picture—and this is why there can be no atheist church.

more here.

Rachel Cusk at the TLS:

The voice of the Italian novelist and essayist Natalia Ginzburg comes to us with absolute clarity amid the veils of time and language. Writings from more than half a century ago read as if they have just been – in some mysterious sense are still being – composed. No context is required to read her: in fact, to read her is to realize how burdened literature frequently is by its own social and material milieux. Yet her work is not abstract or overtly philosophical: it is deeply practical and personal. You come away from it feeling that you know the author profoundly, without having very much idea of who she is.

It isn’t quite right to call these contradictions, because they are also the marks of a great artist, but in this case perhaps it is worth treating them as such, since they enabled Ginzburg to evolve techniques with which contemporary literature is only just catching up. Chief among these is her grasp of the self and of its moral function in narrative; second – a consequence of the first – is her liberation from conventional literary form and from the structures of thought and expression that Virginia Woolf likewise conjectured would have to be swept away if an authentic female literature were to be born.

more here.

Maggie Koerth-Baker in Five Thirty Eight:

If I were a witch, my Hogwarts House would be Ravenclaw. Or possibly Slytherin. It depends on what publication is directing the Harry Potter Sorting Hat’s work.

I am also a mild extrovert, my moral alignment is neutral, and the Star Wars character I’m most like is the Tauntaun Luke sleeps inside of in “Empire Strikes Back.”

Another big part of my personality: I really like online personality quizzes. Maybe you could tell.

But I’ve never really taken these tests seriously. Not even the Myers-Briggs — a test that is frequently used in professional development and hiring settings and costs $50 to take online. ($55.94 with tax. I’m an ENTP.) Call me cynical. Call me a skeptic. Call me a Ravenclaw with a dash of Slytherin. The point is, I always regarded personality quizzes as strangely addictive horse hockey, good for trading memes with friends, excellent at consuming your cash (or your employer’s — sorry, Nate), but not much more. “Astrology for nerds,” I called it. And as my colleagues and I compiled a list of the junk science we were resolved to let go of in the new year, I fully expected to be writing about how I was going to stop taking these damn things.

Instead, I get to spend 2018 immersed in a new series of personality tests — ones that are actually evidence-based and scientifically sound. That’s because, while most of the personality tests shared around the internet are, indeed, bogus procrastination devices, there is a science to personality, and it’s something that researchers really can put into a quantified, testable format, said Simine Vazire, a psychology professor at the University of California, Davis.

More here.

Ed Yong in The Atlantic:

The first time I came face to face with a sea lion, I nearly screamed. I was snorkeling, and after a long time spent staring down at colorful corals, I looked up to see a gigantic bull, a couple of feet in front of my mask. Its eyes were opalescent. Its long canines hinted at its close evolutionary ties to land-based predators like bears and dogs. And most unnervingly of all, it was huge.

Mammals tend to get that way when they invade the ocean. The pinnipeds—seals, sea lions, and walruses—tend to be immense blobs of muscle and blubber. The same could be said for manatees and dugongs. And whales are almost synonymous with bigness. Time and again, lineages of furry mammals have gone for a swim and over evolutionary time, they’ve ballooned in size. Why?

Most of the explanations for this trend treat the ocean as a kind of release. The water partly frees mammalian bodies from the yoke of gravity, allowing them to evolve heavy bodies that they couldn’t possibly support on land. The water unshackles them from the constraints of territory, giving them massive areas over which to forage. The water liberates them from the slim pickings of a land-based diet and offer them vast swarms of plankton, crustaceans, and fish to gorge upon.

But William Gearty from Stanford University has a very different explanation. To him, the ocean makes mammals big not because it relieves them of limits, but because it imposes new ones.

More here.

Colin Eatock in his own blog:

Among the many “breakthroughs” that have followed in the wake of Kendrick Lamar’s 2018 Pulitzer Prize for the album Damn is the fact that a hip-hop artist is now being discussed in classical music circles. “What are we to make of this development?”, various classical-music commentators, practitioners and enthusiasts are asking. Is this a good thing? Or a bad thing? Or what?

I’ve noticed that some classical types have been careful to sound respectful and inclusive when discussing this issue. Perhaps fearful of being labelled “elitist,” or hoping that just a little bit of hip-hop’s coolness might rub off on them, they praise Damn for its musical craft, sophistication and cultural authenticity, and say supportive things about Lamar’s prize-win. (See here, here or here.)

On the other hand, the permanently outraged Norman Lebrecht called the decision, “an almighty kick in the teeth of contemporary composition.” And, predictably, the decision has also coaxed some downright racist reactions out of the woodwork. I suspect that some of these outraged folks, bravely defending good taste and high standards, didn’t even know there was a Pulitzer Prize for music until Lamar won it.

As a classical guy myself (living in Toronto, Canada, by the way), I must admit that I didn’t know much about Lamar until a couple of days ago.

More here.

Alain de Botton in School of Life:

The normal way we set about trying to extend our lives is by striving to add more years to them – usually by eating more couscous and broccoli, going to bed early and running in the rain. But this approach may turn out to be quixotic, not only because Death can’t reliably be warded off with kale, but at a deeper level, because the best way to lengthen a life is not by attempting to stick more years on to its tail.

One of the most basic facts about time is that, even though we insist on measuring it as if it were an objective unit, it doesn’t, in all conditions, feel as if it were moving at the same pace. Five minutes can feel like an hour; ten hours can feel like five minutes. A decade may pass like two years; two years may acquire the weight of half a century. And so on.

In other words, our subjective experience of time bears precious little relation to the way we like to measure it on a clock. Time moves more or less slowly according to the vagaries of the human mind: it may fly or it may drag. It may evaporate into airy nothing or achieve enduring density.

If the goal is to have a longer life, whatever the dieticians may urge, it seems like the priority should not be to add raw increments of time but to ensure that whatever years remain feel appropriately substantial. The aim should be to densify time rather than to try to extract one or two more years from the fickle grip of Death.

More here.

I Invite My Parents to a Dinner Party
.

In the invitation, I tell them for the seventeenth time
(the fourth in writing), that I am gay.

In the invitation, I include a picture of my boyfriend
& write, You’ve met him two times. But this time,

you will ask him things other than can you pass the
whatever. You will ask him

about him. You will enjoy dinner. You will be
enjoyable. Please RSVP.

They RSVP. They come.
They sit at the table & ask my boyfriend

the first of the conversation starters I slip them
upon arrival: How is work going?

I’m like the kid in Home Alone, orchestrating
every movement of a proper family, as if a pair

of scary yet deeply incompetent burglars
is watching from the outside.

My boyfriend responds in his chipper way.
I pass my father a bowl of fish ball soup—So comforting,

isn’t it? My mother smiles her best
Sitting with Her Son’s Boyfriend

Who Is a Boy Smile. I smile my Hurray for Doing
a Little Better Smile.

Read more »

Martin Oldham in 1843 Magazine:

Claude Monet is known and loved as a painter of light and mist, rivers and sea and water-lily ponds. It is doubtful whether he would have recognised himself as a painter of architecture. “Other painters paint a bridge, a house, a boat,” Monet said in 1895. “I want to paint the air that surrounds the bridge, the house, the boat – the beauty of the light in which they exist.” He was reasserting the Impressionist creed: it was subjective experience that mattered, not objective description. Inconsequential corners of nature were as worthy of his attention as any of humanity’s grand designs. And yet the National Gallery has launched an exhibition called “Monet & Architecture”, which argues that buildings in his paintings are an “overlooked aspect of Monet’s work.”

From INET: