The Forgotten Baldwin

Joseph Vogel in Boston Review:

Few have inspired the Movement for Black Lives as much as James Baldwin. His books that plumb the psychological depths of U.S. racism, notably Notes of a Native Son (1955) and The Fire Next Time (1963), speak to the present in ways that seem not only relevant but prophetic. However, Baldwin’s renewed status as a household name, cemented by the critical success of Raoul Peck’s 2016 film I Am Not Your Negro, makes it easy to forget that for several decades Baldwin fell from public favor.

Although Baldwin continued to work through the late 1980s, his canonical works were all published during the 1950s and ’60s, and he is seldom associated with the post–civil rights era. Some ascribe this abrupt decline in his reputation to a falling out with the white literary establishment, who believed Baldwin sacrificed his promise for political and moral commitments to Black Power. Others felt it had to do with Baldwin’s insecure role in black America. According to Hilton Als, when Baldwin became the official voice of black America, he compromised his voice as a writer. Others argued just the opposite: Baldwin lost his place precisely because he refused to identify with the essentialist logic of identity politics and any of its associated movements. Still others believed his diminishment resulted from becoming bitter. Baldwin, they said, refused to acknowledge the progress the United States had made since the 1950s. As the New York Times’ Michael Anderson wrote in a 1998 review of Baldwin’s collected essays: “Little wonder he lost his audience: America did what Baldwin could not—it moved forward.” In a world of Black Lives Matter activism and the Trump administration, this triumphalist narrative of the United States’ racial progress looks especially naïve. And it is not surprising then that Baldwin’s words resonate for us yet again.

More here.

Mistaken Identity – the best criticism of identity politics

Ben Tarnoff in The Guardian:

A boy speaks one language at home and another at school. The white kids want to know where he is from. The answer is “here”, same as them, but that’s not what they’re asking. After 9/11 they call him Osama. His parents are from Pakistan. When he visits Karachi, his relatives point out his US accent. He lives between two worlds, belonging to neither. Then, in the sixth grade, something happens. He is doing a science project on Isaac Newton. He visits the public library of the small town in Pennsylvania where he lives, and, browsing books about Newton the scientist he comes across another Newton – Huey P Newton, cofounder of the Black Panther Party. In 1973, Newton published an autobiography called Revolutionary Suicide. Intrigued by the title, the boy picks up the book, and it changes his life.

This is the scene that opens Mistaken Identity: Race and Class in the Age of Trump. It’s vividly drawn, and sets the stakes for what follows. Asad Haider has written a book about identity, politics, and the relationship between the two. In particular, he has written a book about “identity politics”, a phrase that, like “political correctness”, is extremely slippery, but which generally means an emphasis on issues of racial, gender and sexual identity. Identity politics finds critics everywhere. Throw a rock at a rack of newspapers and you’ll probably hit an editorial condemning it. Conservatives such as Republican House speaker Paul Ryan blame it for polarisation, while liberals like the Columbia University historian Mark Lilla hold it responsible for Donald Trump’s victory, applying the baroque logic that letting people use their preferred gender pronouns is why Democrats struggle to be seen as the party of working people.

More here.

Standard Arabic is on the Decline: Here’s What’s Worrying About That

Hossam Abouzahr at the Atlantic Council:

Many warn that Standard Arabic, or Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), is on the decline, and some are happy to see it go. However, it is important to note the factors driving this decline, and what this means for the region.

Arabs often see MSA’s decline as the failure of their nations to uphold the legacy of Arabic, the language of the Qur’an and Islam. Though some rejoice in the strengthening of vernaculars, the so-called colloquials or dialects, as a sign of local identities gaining prominence, the withdrawal of MSA is in fact a warning about the weakening social infrastructure and declining education system.

Before going further, it is worth asking whether MSA truly is on the decline. Unfortunately, there are not clear statistics one way or the other, and generally what people are looking at are individual indicators. MSA is typically used in pan-Arab media, formal situations such as political speeches, religious sermons and texts, and literature. When people speak of the decline of MSA, they generally refer to decline in literature, literacy, and increasing predilections to use dialects or foreign languages instead of MSA.

More here.

Neoliberalism has conned us into fighting climate change as individuals

Martin Lukacs in The Guardian (from last year, but still worth reading):

Would you advise someone to flap towels in a burning house? To bring a flyswatter to a gunfight? Yet the counsel we hear on climate change could scarcely be more out of sync with the nature of the crisis.

The email in my inbox last week offered thirty suggestions to green my office space: use reusable pens, redecorate with light colours, stop using the elevator.

Back at home, done huffing stairs, I could get on with other options: change my lightbulbs, buy local veggies, purchase eco-appliances, put a solar panel on my roof.

And a study released on Thursday claimed it had figured out the single best way to fight climate change: I could swear off ever having a child.

These pervasive exhortations to individual action — in corporate ads, school textbooks, and the campaigns of mainstream environmental groups, especially in the west — seem as natural as the air we breathe. But we could hardly be worse-served.

While we busy ourselves greening our personal lives, fossil fuel corporations are rendering these efforts irrelevant. The breakdown of carbon emissions since 1988? A hundred companies alone are responsible for an astonishing 71%. You tinker with those pens or that panel; they go on torching the planet.

More here.

No, “liberal” and “progressive” aren’t synonyms. They have completely different histories—and the differences matter

Sean Wilentz in Democracy Journal:

What’s in a name? Franklin Delano Roosevelt called himself a Christian, a Democrat, and a liberal. He did not call himself a democratic socialist, or any other kind of socialist. He was, in fact, no socialist at all. Nor was he a conservative or a reactionary, although many on the socialist and communist left charged that he was—including the Communist Party USA, which attacked his New Deal for a time (until Moscow’s political line changed) as American “masked fascization.”

The only Americans who considered Franklin Roosevelt a socialist were right-wing Republicans. “The New Deal is now undisguised state socialism,” Senator Simeon D. Fess of Ohio declared in 1934. “Roosevelt is a socialist, not a Democrat,” Congressman Robert Rich of Pennsylvania announced on the House floor a year later. Roosevelt scoffed at such talk, but in 1939 he paused to present a very concise political dictionary of his own. “A radical,” he told the New York Herald Tribune, “is a man with both feet firmly planted—in the air.” A conservative, he continued, “never learned to walk forward”; a reactionary walked backward in his sleep. A liberal, though, used legs and hands “at the behest—at the command—of his head.” The metaphor was poignant coming from him, but it also emphasized his point: In the face of all adversity, he was every inch a liberal.

More here.

Artificial Intelligence Is Infiltrating Medicine — But Is It Ethical?

Arlene Weintraub in Forbes:

Artificial intelligence (AI) is being embraced by hospitals and other healthcare organizations, which are using the technology to do everything from interpreting CT scans to predicting which patients are most likely to suffer debilitating falls while being treated. Electronic medical records are scoured and run through algorithms designed to help doctors pick the best cancer treatments based on the mutations in patients’ tumors, for example, or to predict their likelihood to respond well to a treatment regimen based on past experiences of similar patients. But do algorithms, robots and machine learning cross ethical boundaries in healthcare? A group of physicians out of Stanford University contend that AI does raise ethical challenges that healthcare leaders must anticipate and deal with before they embrace this technology. “Remaining ignorant about the construction of machine-learning systems or allowing them to be constructed as black boxes could lead to ethically problematic outcomes,” they wrote in an editorial published this week in the New England Journal of Medicine.

Their warning was timely, considering developments such as this one, announced today with a rather breathless headline: “Smart software can diagnose prostate cancer as well as a pathologist.” A group of researchers from Drum Tower Hospital in Nanjing, China, who are attending the European Association of Urology congress in Copenhagen, said they have developed an AI system that can identify prostate cancer from human tissue samples and classify each case according to how malignant the cancer is. “This may be very useful in some areas where there is a lack of trained pathologists. Like all automation, this will lead to a lesser reliance on human expertise,” said an Italian researcher who reviewed the work of the Chinese team, in a statement.

Few medical experts expect AI to completely replace doctors—at least not in the short term. Instead machine learning is being used mostly for “decision support,” to help guide physicians towards accurate diagnoses and tailored treatment plans. These can be quite useful. Forbes contributor Robert Pearl, a professor at Stanford, wrote earlier this week about an AI application developed by Permanente Medical Group that uses data compiled from 650,000 hospital patients to identify which people admitted to hospitals today are at risk of needing intensive care. The system alerts physicians to the at-risk patients so they can try to intervene before patients end up in the ICU.

More here.

Inside Trends And Forecast For The $3.9T AI Industry

Lauren deLisa Coleman in Forbes:

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is nothing if not controversial. Whether the subject of scrutiny behind hair-raising advances in sex robots which was heavily reported the other week or the topic of the latest disgruntled executive voicing opinions about Elon Musk’s crusade against AI’s perceived perils, all eyes are on this new area in tech. While no one is yet absolutely sure of AI’s definitive path, one thing is certain. Value and expenditures pertaining to this area of emerging technology are on a definite upward curve. In fact, there is already a 70 percent growth in business value in AI just this far into 2018. This is clearly an area-to-watch. So, here’s how the rest of the year and beyond could take shape when it comes to the area of Artificial Intelligence. Derek Holt, a former IBM executive as well as former Managing Director of Business Development at Startup America Partnership, a public-private partnership with the White House believes the biggest play with be in healthcare:

Wellness Trend Data and Associated Care — “Gone will be the days of annual or bi-annual physicals as more and more of our wellness will be digitized,” explains Holt. “Both AI and Machine Learning will aid and empower the traditional medical field to unlock new preventative and early intervention care.”

Technology-Aided Caregivers — “Over the next 30 years, the number of caregivers available to take care of older adults and individual s living with disabilities is expected to decrease,” he continues. “Given this shortage, we’ll begin to see technology-aided caregivers emerge to help with day-to-day tasks that have become harder for older adults and individuals living with disabilities to complete.”

More here.

a radical new translation of The New Testament

Salley Vickers at Literary Review:

David Bentley Hart is an Eastern Orthodox theologian who has made waves in his own sphere through his radical atavism (he refers often to the early Church fathers’ concept of the divine), his sympathy for and grasp of the languages and cultures of the ancient world and his unsqueamish, ferocious attacks on modern atheism. Perhaps more relevant to this readership, he writes acute and vivacious prose that betrays a thoroughgoing knowledge of literature, both secular and sacred. This is worth bearing in mind when considering his latest and, to date, boldest project: a fresh translation of the books of the New Testament.

Hart’s stated aim is to offer an ‘almost pitilessly literal translation’ that is ‘not shaped by later theological and doctrinal history’, with the intention of making ‘the familiar strange, novel, and perhaps newly compelling’. ‘Where an author has written bad Greek,’ he announces bluntly, ‘I have written bad English.’ In doing so he has provoked a backlash of complaints from more traditionally minded colleagues, as well as attracting some respectful applause.

more here.

an interview with Vanna White

Leopoldine Core and Vanna White at The Believer:

BLVR: Yeah, and it made me wonder about your dreams—do you have any recurring dreams?

VW: Hmm. I haven’t had one in a really long time. When I was a kid—that’s weird you should say that—the only thing that comes to mind, I dreamed that I was in my little house that I grew up in and for some reason a train would come through. I would hear the whistle of the train and it would, like, come through. It didn’t hurt me, but it would go by really fast and it was real windy and it just—I don’t know what that meant, but it’s like, Oh my gosh, I’m having that train dream again—what does this mean? But I don’t have it anymore.

BLVR: Wow, I love that.

more here.

Peculiarly American: Grant Wood at the Whitney

Emilio Comay del Junco at The Point:

Grant Wood wanted to make art American. As with so many attempts to make things American, what this meant was distilling a particular region into the essence of the United States. New England and the Deep South are strong contenders, but the Midwest is perhaps the most plausibly all-American region. The visual and cultural tropes of the Midwest are the commonplaces of American kitsch—corn fields, barns, apple pie, churches, Main Street. By choosing to remain in his native Iowa, Wood was well positioned to do what he wanted, without having to forego success. The current Wood retrospective on view at the Whitney (closing June 10th) is hardly the first time his work has received sustained attention from the highest levels of the American art world. The Whitney itself held its last retrospective in 1983, and during Wood’s lifetime he was arguably the most famous artist in the United States. The current show acknowledges that one of Wood’s paintings dominates all other. The exhibition simply uses the name of American Gothic, adding, appropriately, “and other fables” after the obligatory colon.

more here.