Mary Crabapple in the New York Review of Books:

During his elder years, my great-grandfather, the post-Impressionist artist Sam Rothbort, tried to paint back into existence the murdered world of his shtetl childhood. Amid the hundreds of watercolors that he called Memory Paintings, one stood out. A girl silhouetted against some cottages, her dress the same color as the crepuscular sky above. A moment before, she’d hurled a rock through one now-shattered cottage window. On the painting’s margin, her boyfriend offers more rocks.

“Itka the Bundist, Breaking Windows,” Sam captioned the work.

I may have been fifteen, seventeen, or twenty when I saw the watercolor, in my great aunt’s sunbaked living room or my mother’s apartment; I don’t recall exactly. What sticks with me is the Old World awkwardness of the heroine’s name. Itka. I turned the Yiddish syllables on my tongue. And Bundist. What was that?

This question became a thread that led me to the Bund, a revolutionary society of which my mother’s Grandpa Sam had been a member, whose story was interwoven with the agonies and triumphs of Jews in Eastern Europe, and whose name has all but been erased.

More here.

Ronan Thomson in Phys.Org:

For the first time in 55 years, a woman has won the Nobel Prize in physics —Prof. Donna Strickland. This win has publicly highlighted that women are still under-represented in science, particularly in physics. As a woman in physics, this lack of diversity is something that I encounter almost daily, and also something that we can take action to change. As an undergraduate science student, I was confronted with the lack of women in science at the National Research Council (NRC) of Canada in 2001. The first day of my summer job in NRC’s now-defunct “Women in Engineering and Science” program, I was shocked looking around the lunchroom. Where were the women? The vast majority of scientists were men!

The situation was similar in my university studies —I only ever had two female professors.

That lack of diversity was something I grew accustomed to. A resident at Perimeter Institute for my Ph.D. studies, I was often the only woman in the room at scientific meetings or seminars. My office was shared with four male students, and there were some jokes that I had been assigned “the secretary’s desk” and remarks about the colour of my T-shirt. I was the only woman in the room for my Ph.D. defence at the University of Waterloo in 2007. When I became a faculty member in 2010, I was thrilled to be one of four women physics professors —more than 20 per cent of physics faculty at Carleton University. This bucked the trend among physics faculty members at many universities (and this continues, as we now have five women physics professors at Carleton). But as I started teaching, the lack of gender diversity among undergraduate physics students was striking: a class of 50 students with only three women, another with no women, in my first year of teaching. As a researcher, the lack of women as invited and keynote speakers at scientific conferences continues to be discouraging. There are certainly women giving excellent conference presentations, but they are too often overlooked when it comes to invited and keynote speakers lists. An invited or keynote speaker entry on a CV indicates respect and recognition of excellence; omission of women hinders their careers.

More here.

Harper Simon talks to Jaron Lanier at the LARB:

You brought up this other question of why is it so important for people to leave, and the thing I want to say is that, because of addiction and because of network effects, I realize that only a small minority of people can do it, and I don’t know how many I have influenced to get off of there. I don’t have a means of measuring that. But here’s what I would say: there have been times before, recently and even in America, when society had to confront mass addiction that had a commercial component.

I’m thinking of Mothers Against Drunk Drivers. And I’m thinking of the public smoking of cigarettes. In both of those cases, there were industries that relied on mass addiction, but somehow or other, a rational conversation gradually created a change. In neither case was the substance totally outlawed, but its role in society was vastly changed.

more here.

Sophie Haigney at The Baffler:

We really are sleeping less. As Crary writes, in the early twentieth century, adults slept an unthinkable ten hours every night on average. A generation ago, people were tucking in for eight hours. Today, the average North American adult sleeps a paltry six-and-a-half hours every night. This is often blamed on our devices, which do play a major role. But Crary argues that, interrelatedly, the forces of twenty-first-century capitalism have shown an obsessive enthusiasm for destroying sleep.

Sleep, he argues, is a last frontier, something that unlike every other strand of modern life has not yet been commodified. This is because sleep is perfectly pointless and therefore useless. “The stunning, inconceivable reality is that nothing of value can be extracted from it,” Crary writes.

more here.

Franz Nicolay at The Paris Review:

When he passed away this week at the age of ninety-four, the singer, songwriter, and actor Charles Aznavour was still touring. He was a living link to the golden age of French chanson. As a young man, he had been maligned as short and ugly, an immigrant with a hoarse voice, but he became a protégée of Édith Piaf, and then a global star in his own right. While his success in the anglophone world never equaled his renown in other countries, he was, by any reckoning, one of the twentieth century’s most popular entertainers, often referred to as the French Sinatra (Aznavour sang with Sinatra on the latter’s Duets record). He sang in five languages, appeared in at least thirty films, wrote somewhere in the vicinity of a thousand songs, and sold hundreds of millions of records worldwide.

“I am popular because I am like everybody in France,” he told Lillian Ross in 1963. “My face is the face of anybody. My voice is the voice of anybody. My face is the face of their hope.”

more here.

What It Was Like

If you want to know what
it was like, I’ll tell you
what my tío told me:
There was a truck driver,
Antonio, who could handle a
rig as easily in reverse as
anybody else straight ahead:

Too bad he’s a Mexican was
what my tío said the
Anglos had to say
about that.

And thus the moral:

Where do you begin if
you begin with if
you’re too good
it’s too bad?

by Leroy Quintana
from El Coro
Uniniversity of Massachusetts Press, 1997

Robin McKie in The Guardian:

In 2017, scientists in Australia observed some striking avian behaviour. A handful of kites and falcons in the outback were seen picking up burning sticks from bush fires. The birds would then carry these smoking embers in their beaks to areas of dry grass and drop them. New fires were set off, triggering frenzied evacuations by small animals – which were promptly snatched from above by the waiting raptors. Such actions are extraordinary, says Adam Rutherford, a science writer and broadcaster. “It is, as far as I am aware, the only documented account of deliberate fire-starting by an animal other than a human. These birds are using fire as a tool.” Indigenous Australians occasionally deliberately start fires in order to flush out game, he notes. Did they learn the habit from birds? “Or maybe it is just a good trick and only us and the raptors have worked it out.” Either way, it is clear humans are not the only ones who see fire as a means for getting what they want – and that is key to Rutherford’s examination of what it means to be human. In what way, exactly, are we exceptional as a species? Science has continually chipped away at the notion of human specialness, the idea of our being “the paragon of animals”. Prowess at pyrotechnics is just the latest “human-only” attribute that has since been revealed to have animal exponents.

So what is left? What behaviours uniquely define our species? The usual list includes speech, tool-making, culture, as well as art and fashion. We are masters and mistresses of all, but none are exclusive human attributes. Crows make and use tools; apes can be taught sign language; dolphins and birds have been observed adopting habits through cultural transmission; chimps have been seen using styles of headwear “just to be in with the in-crowd”, as Rutherford puts it.

That leaves war and sex, both popular human pastimes. But is either peculiar to our species? Sex certainly occupies a titanic amount of our time and interest. One study has indicated that in Britain alone roughly 900,000,000 acts of heterosexual intercourse take place every year. (That’s about 100,000 an hour, if you are interested.) Yet only 0.1% of these bouts of British bonking results in a conception – and that is a very, very low rate of reproduction. Our species has almost, but not quite, decoupled sexual intercourse from its replication, it seems. But that still does not make us unique. Bonobo apes turn out to be even more genitally obsessed and sexually motivated than humans. All have intercourse several times a day, usually with different partners.

That leaves us with war. Again we seem infatuated with violence.

More here.

The Editorial Board at The New York Times:

If we keep burning coal and petroleum to power our society, we’re cooked — and a lot faster than we thought. The United Nations scientific panel on climate change issued a terrifying new warning on Monday that continued emissions of greenhouse gases from power plants and vehicles will bring dire and irreversible changes by 2040, years earlier than previously forecast. The cost will be measured in trillions of dollars and in sweeping societal and environmental damage, including mass die-off of coral reefs and animal species, flooded coastlines, intensified droughts, food shortages, mass migrations and deeper poverty.

The worst impacts can be avoided only by a “far-reaching and unprecedented” transformation of the global energy system, including virtually eliminating the use of coal as a source of electricity, the panel warned. Yet President Trump, who has questioned the accepted scientific consensus on climate change, continues to praise “clean beautiful coal” and has directed his Environmental Protection Agency to reverse major strides undertaken by the Obama administration to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from coal-fired power plants. This is unbelievably reckless. In addition to undermining the fight against climate change, the president’s efforts to prop up the dirtiest of all fuels will also exact a significant toll on public health, on the hearts and lungs of ordinary Americans.

More here.

Daniel Dennett and Gregg Caruso in Aeon:

Caruso: [Dan,] you have famously argued that freedom evolves and that humans, alone among the animals, have evolved minds that give us free will and moral responsibility. I, on the other hand, have argued that what we do and the way we are is ultimately the result of factors beyond our control, and that because of this we are never morally responsible for our actions, in a particular but pervasive sense – the sense that would make us truly deserving of blame and praise, punishment and reward. While these two views appear to be at odds with each other, one of the things I would like to explore in this conversation is how far apart we actually are. I suspect that we may have more in common than some think – but I could be wrong. To begin, can you explain what you mean by ‘free will’ and why you think humans alone have it?

Dennett: A key word in understanding our differences is ‘control’. [Gregg,] you say ‘the way we are is ultimately the result of factors beyond our control’ and that is true of only those unfortunates who have not been able to become autonomous agents during their childhood upbringing. There really are people, with mental disabilities, who are not able to control themselves, but normal people can manage under all but the most extreme circumstances, and this difference is both morally important and obvious, once you divorce the idea of control from the idea of causation. Your past does not control you; for it to control you, it would have to be able to monitor feedback about your behaviour and adjust its interventions – which is nonsense.

More here.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary in Public Seminar:

We Americans are “constitutional fetishists” in the apt phrase of the lesser-known mid-20^th century critical theorist of law and economy, Franz Neumann. We tend to think that a particular order of state institutions — for example, our current incarnation of the separation-of-powers — embodies the essence of democracy instead of looking to see what kind of politics, democratic or otherwise, such institutions facilitate. Although Neumann was speaking in the broad strokes of theory, the United States is, perhaps, the case-in-point.

Far from living at the bay of “the mob,” the United States is institutionally the least democratic among nominally democratic countries in the OECD world. When the political scientists Alfred Stepan and Juan Linz — who had devoted their careers to studying democratization around the world – turned their analysis to the United States, what they discovered was a not a pretty picture. While most democratic states have at best one or two so-called “veto players” — checks on the expression of popular sovereignty through elected representation — the United States has four. The United States has an additional four further amplifications of the power of an elected minority. Taken together, these establish the United States as the least representative democracy among developed democracies in the world. Stepan and Linz were hardly radical scholars but the implications of what they observed in the 1990s is indeed quite radical today.

It’s not that somehow this system has gone off the rails in recent years. Rather, as democratic pressures for the recognition of women and racial minorities as full human beings – to redress our gross economic inequality, to fundamentally transform our state and society into ones of freedom and flourishing for all — have increased, our constitutional order has acted precisely as it was intended. The “founders” feared a democratic society — that eventually an ever increasingly enfranchised majority would encroach on the privileges and the property of society’s “betters.”

More here.

Sanjay G. Reddy in Development and Change:

In The Nobel Factor, Avner Offer and Gabriel Söderberg help us to understand the politics behind the awarding of what is colloquially known as the Nobel Prize in Economics (and more correctly as the Swedish Central Bank Prize in Honour of Alfred Nobel). The main idea of the book is that the Prize has been often awarded to market‐oriented thinkers with the aim of undermining social democracy, of which Sweden was the most famous exemplar, in favour of market principles. This rather local agenda, pressed by the influential economist Assar Lindbeck (and presumably by others, although they receive less attention in the book) was, the authors argue, crucial to explaining the pattern of awards. The authors go so far as to contrast Economics with Social Democracy, in the process identifying the discipline as a whole with its most market‐oriented strand. The authors recognize that there were other elements within modern economics, but argue that the ‘high theory’ of neoclassical economics, interpreted as making the case for the optimality of markets, was greatly bolstered by the prize, especially after its first decade (when social democratic stalwarts such as Gunnar Myrdal won it.). The preponderance of University of Chicago faculty members among winners in the later period is one indication of this tendency, although the presence of exceptions even in the later years (notably Amartya Sen) is acknowledged (pp. 122–23). The authors state that ‘from an ideological point of view, the Nobel Committee was even‐handed in its awards, but the balance it achieved was biased to the right in comparison with opinion within the discipline, especially during the 1990s’ (ibid.).

The proposition that the pattern of prizes awarded reflected an agenda to change Swedish society should be distinguished from two others, each important in their own right, and distinct but potentially causally interrelated, that can be identified, namely 1.) that the prizes awarded actually did have the intended effect, or indeed any specific effect, on public policies shaping society (in Sweden or more generally), and 2.) that the pattern of the prizes awarded shaped the economics discipline, perhaps by offering prestige and authority to particular ideas or by shaping the activity of prize seekers.

More here.