Quassim Cassam at the Institute of Art and Ideas:

Conspiracy theorists get a seriously bad press. Gullible, irresponsible, paranoid, stupid. These are some of the politer labels applied to them, usually by establishment figures who aren’t averse to promoting their own conspiracy theories when it suits them. President George W. Bush denounced outrageous conspiracy theories about 9/11 while his own administration was busy promoting the outrageous conspiracy theory that Iraq was behind 9/11.

If the abuse isn’t bad enough, conspiracy theorists now have the dubious honour of being studied by psychologists. The psychology of conspiracy theories is a thing, and the news for conspiracy theorists isn’t good. A recent study describes their theories as ‘corrosive to societal and individual well-being’. Conspiracy theorists, the study reveals, are more likely to be male, unmarried, less educated, have lower household incomes and see themselves as having low social standing. They have lower levels of physical and psychological well-being and are more likely to meet the criteria for having a psychiatric disorder.

In case you’re starting to feel a sorry for conspiracy theorists (or for yourself if you are one), perhaps it’s worth remembering that they aren’t exactly shrinking violets. They are vociferous defenders of their theories and scornful of their opponents. Anyone who has been on the receiving end of the wrath of conspiracy theorists will know that it can be a bruising experience.

More here.

From Wikipedia:

Murray Gell-Mann (/ˈmʌri ˈɡɛl ˈmæn/; September 15, 1929 – May 24, 2019) was an American physicist who received the 1969 Nobel Prize in physics for his work on the theory of elementary particles. Until his death, he was the Robert Andrews Millikan Professor of Theoretical Physics Emeritus at the California Institute of Technology, a distinguished fellow and co-founder of the Santa Fe Institute, a professor of physics at the University of New Mexico, and the Presidential Professor of Physics and Medicine at the University of Southern California.

More here.

Graeme Wood in The Atlantic:

Last week, the prime minister of New Zealand and president of France presented the Christchurch Call—a pledge to “eliminate terrorist and violent extremist content online.” Eighteen countries and all major tech companies signed up, but Donald Trump’s administration issued a statement declining to join them. Critics of the administration imputed the darkest of motives: It must oppose the pledge because it wants to make the world safe for violent extremists, perhaps especially the right-wing zealots who applauded the massacre of 51 people in Christchurch, New Zealand, itself two months ago.

You can read the Christchurch Call here. I defy you to find anything objectionable about it. It does not vilify particular religious or political beliefs; it mentions freedom of expression multiple times; it recognizes that terrorists will not disappear just because their Facebook accounts do or because their parents find out that they’ve been up to no good. Even the White House noted that “we support [its] overall goals,” and declined to say why the United States did not sign on. The office that issued the statement, the Office of Science and Technology Policy, referred me to the National Security Council, which did not offer any defense either.

So let me offer a defense for them.

More here.

Jonah Blank at The Atlantic:

The term Hindutva can be (sort of) translated as “Hindu-ness,” and that gets (sort of) at what it’s all about: Hinduism not a theology, but an identity. The movement’s intellectual father, Veer Savarkar, wrote its foundational text (helpfully titled Hindutva) a century ago. At the time, the notion of a unified faith or doctrine, let alone a shared identity, would have left most Hindus simply confused: Identity was determined by a person’s family, village, caste. The very term Hindu is merely a loanword (most likely from Persian), referring to “the people who live across the Indus River.” Until the 20th century, most Hindus had never felt the need to describe themselves in any comprehensive way.

It was the colonial experience that created Hindutva: Why, Savarkar and his comrades wondered, had India been dominated for centuries by a relatively small number of Muslim Mughals and Christian British? Was monotheism simply better suited for ruling? If so, what did that mean for a faith with more deities than days in the year?

more here.

Philip Ball at The New Statesman:

All the same, some of the confusion and apathy in the aftermath of the explosion of Reactor Four was due to an inability to comprehend the enormity of what had happened: that the reactor and the hall housing it had literally been blown apart, its pieces scattered still glowing across the site and the fiery inner core exposed to the atmosphere. There is a sense in these accounts of the truly unearthly: Higginbotham mentions the “shimmering pillar of ethereal blue-white light, reaching straight up into the night sky, disappearing into infinity” as the intense radiation streaming from the reactor ionised the air itself. Senior figures wandered around the site in a daze, muttering about routine malfunctions even as they kicked aside immensely radioactive debris from the reactor core. Radiation levels at the site were so far off the scale that they defied belief and comprehension. Meanwhile, in Pripyat life went on as normal for a day and a half, children playing in the warm spring sunshine. A film taken of those events is marred by ghostly flashes and white streaks: ambient radiation burning itself into the celluloid.

more here.

Christopher de Bellaigue in The Guardian:

In 1534 an Ottoman delegation was in Paris to discuss a plan to unite France and Turkey against their shared enemy, the Habsburg empire. That François I should lavish courtesies on infidel diplomats was bitterly resented by French Lutherans, who were being persecuted after the “affair of the placards”: a scandalous denunciation of the Catholic mass had been discovered pinned to the door of the royal bedchamber; the Turkish visitors were escorted past pyres that would be fed by Protestant heretics. A decade later the Franco-Ottoman alliance was so fixed a part of the European scene that François allowed a Turkish fleet under Hayreddin Pasha to winter in Toulon, the Mediterranean port having been emptied of its Christian inhabitants. The church bells were silenced and cantatas in the cathedral gave way to the call to prayer.“Looking at Toulon,” remarked an eyewitness after the Ottoman sailors had settled in, “you would say that it was Istanbul, with great public order and justice.”

Much of Europe affected to be scandalised by the alliance of France’s “very Christian king” with Sultan Suleyman I, the “Magnificent”, whose aim was to make Muslim Turkey the continent’s superpower. But as Noel Malcolm explains in Useful Enemies, the alliance was only the most overt of the accommodations that Europeans made after the Ottomans first exploded into the Balkans in 1362.

More here.

Jamil Zaki in Nautilus:

You wake up on a bus, surrounded by all your remaining ossessions. A few fellow passengers slump on pale blue seats around you, their heads resting against the windows. You turn and see a father holding his son. Almost everyone is asleep. But one man, with a salt-and-pepper beard and khaki vest, stands near the back of the bus, staring at you. You feel uneasy and glance at the driver, wondering if he would help you if you needed it. When you turn back around, the bearded man has moved toward you and is now just a few feet away. You jolt, fearing for your safety, but then remind yourself there’s nothing to worry about. You take off the Oculus helmet and find yourself back in the real world, in Jeremy Bailenson’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab at Stanford University.

For more and more people in Silicon Valley, a long and dangerous bus ride isn’t a simulation; it’s reality. Santa Clara County—home to Facebook and Google—contains the nation’s second highest concentration of affluence. The soaring cost of living here has displaced all but the wealthiest. In Palo Alto, the nation’s tech epicenter, the number of homeless people has increased by a staggering 26 percent in the past two years, with higher concentrations of children and families among them. They turn to shelters, campers, and, in harder times, bus line 22.

Just a mile from Stanford’s bucolic campus, the 22 departs Palo Alto for San Jose, and shuttles between the two cities all night. Silicon Valley’s homeless have taken to it for safety and shelter so often and in such numbers that it’s been dubbed Hotel 22. Dozens of people shuffle on past midnight, in an orderly, exhausted procession. They take the 90-minute ride from one end of its route to the other, get off, and then get right back on. Drivers on line 22 know the drill. After leaving the first station, one announces over the bus’s intercom, “No lying down, no putting your feet on the seats … Be respectful to the next people getting on because they’re going to work. Let’s have a nice safe ride; let’s do it right. Anybody wants to act up, well, you know the consequences.”

More here.

There is No Word

There isn’t a word for walking out of the grocery store
with a gallon jug of milk in a plastic sack
that should have been bagged in double layers

—so that before you are even out the door
you feel the weight of the jug dragging
the bag down, stretching the thin

plastic handles longer and longer
and you know it’s only a matter of  time until
the bottom suddenly splits.

There is no single, unimpeachable word
for that vague sensation of something
moving away from you

as it exceeds its elastic capacity
—which is too bad, because that is the word
I would like to use to describe standing on the street

chatting with an old friend
as the awareness grows in me that he is
no longer a friend, but only an acquaintance,

a person with whom I never made the effort—
until this moment, when as we say goodbye
I think we share a feeling of relief,

a recognition that we have reached
the end of a pretense,
though to tell the truth

what I already am thinking about
is my gratitude for language—
how it will stretch just so much and no farther;

how there are some holes it will not cover up;
how it will move, if not inside, then
around the circumference of almost anything—

how, over the years, it has given me
back all the hours and days, all the
plodding love and faith, all the

misunderstandings and secrets
I have willingly poured into it.

Tony Hoagland

Michael Hirsh in Foreign Policy:

But now that the backlash against Democratic centrism has made itself felt at the hands of an angry middle class— many of whom voted for Trump—and the party has tacked leftward in his direction, Stiglitz finds himself in the unusual position of urging caution. Stiglitz is worried that if Democrats shift too far left, they’ll be smeared as “socialists” and lose the 2020 presidential election—in which he believes the very institutions of Western civilization hang in the balance. For the famed economist, it is a consummate irony to be defending markets at all, since for years Stiglitz’s critics have faulted him for depending too much on government solutions.

Stiglitz spoke with Foreign Policy on the publication of his latest book, People, Power, and Profits: Progressive Capitalism for an Age of Discontent.

More here.

Philip Ball in Prospect:

Science has hunted in vain for the missing material. Its existence has never been detected directly, only inferred from hints. Yet if the rest of what we know about the way the cosmos is structured is right, it must be about five times more abundant than all the matter we can see in the Universe.

“Dark matter” is truly ghostly stuff. It is hidden far more profoundly than black holes, about which there was much excitement in April when a beautiful image of one was produced, showing a yellow-orange blob with a black void in the middle. Although, virtually by definition, we won’t ever truly “see” light-swallowing black holes, we can see their effects on the surrounding matter and space. More to the point, we are pretty sure we know what they are made from: ordinary matter, the stuff of stars.

Dark matter is something else entirely. And yet most scientists are agreed that this elusive material must exist: without it, they find it hard to see how we could be here at all. The gravitational pull that it exerts—the only impression it leaves on the visible Universe—is an essential ingredient for the formation of galaxies, stars and indeed planets like our own.

More here.

Emily Badger in the New York Times:

It’s true across many industrialized democracies that rural areas lean conservative while cities tend to be more liberal, a pattern partly rooted in the history of workers’ parties that grew up where urban factories did.

But urban-rural polarization has become particularly acute in America: particularly entrenched, particularly hostile, particularly lopsided in its consequences. Urban voters, and the party that has come to represent them, now routinely lose elections and power even when they win more votes.

Democrats have blamed the Senate, the Electoral College and gerrymandering for their disadvantage. But the problem runs deeper, according to Jonathan Rodden, a Stanford political scientist: The American form of government is uniquely structured to exacerbate the urban-rural divide — and to translate it into enduring bias against the Democratic voters, clustered at the left of the accompanying chart.

More here.

Sasha Frere-Jones at Bookforum:

John Berger became a writer you might find on television because of Ways of Seeing, the 1972 BBC series that became a short and very famous book. The show presented observations now common to pop-culture reviews—publicity “proposes to each of us that we transform ourselves, or our lives, by buying something more”—in a place (a box!) that rarely admitted critique beyond yea or nay. The book version of Ways of Seeing, which combined photos and text in a montage format, is now a staple of critical-writing syllabi. Writers like Laura Mulvey and Rosalind Krauss wrote the definitive versions of theories Berger proposed, and dozens of critics have put in decades peeling back the semiotic layers of images. Berger simply made it seem plausible that there would be an audience—possibly a big one—for this kind of thinking. In May of 2017, four months after Berger’s death, feminist media scholar Jane Gaines wrote about Ways of Seeing: “We learned from him to see that basic assumptions about everything—work, play, art, commerce—are hidden in the surrounding culture of images.”

more here.

Ed Simon at The Baffler:

And we abolish the idea of hell at the very moment when it could be the most pertinent to us. An ironic reality in an era where the world becomes seemingly more hellish, when humanity has developed the ability to enact a type of burning punishment upon the earth itself. Journalist David Wallace-Wells in his terrifying new book about climate change The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming writes that “it is much, much worse, than you think.” Wallace-Wells goes onto describe how anthropogenic warming will result in a twenty-first century that sees coastal cities destroyed and refugees forced to migrate for survival, that will see famines across formerly verdant farm lands and the development of new epidemics that will kill millions, which will see wars fought over fresh water and wildfires scorching the wilderness. Climate change implies not just ecological collapse, but societal, political, and moral collapse as well. The science has been clear for over a generation, our reliance on fossil fuels has been hastening an industrial apocalypse of our own invention. Wallace-Wells is critical of what he describes as the “eerily banal language of climatology,” where the purposefully sober, logical, and rational arguments of empirical science have unintentionally helped to obscure the full extent of what some studying climate change now refer to as our coming “century of hell.” Better perhaps to have this discussion using the language of Revelation, where the horseman of pestilence, war, famine, and death are powered by carbon dioxide.

more here.

Gill Partington at the LRB:

I received d.p. houston’s poetry collection Boîte de Vers in the post last week. It’s completely unreadable, but not in the sense that it’s bad. It could well be, but I have no idea because it comes in a sealed box, ‘in sloppy hommage to the spirit of Schrödinger’s Cat’. There are apparently five of these boxes in circulation; mine is lettered A. The precise nature of its contents is indeterminate. I could break the seal of strong black tape and open the box, but doing so would alter it. Not least because I would then be required to fill in the attached label with a cross or tick ‘to indicate whether or not the intrusion comes to be regretted’. It feels like a puzzle, or a personality test: what kind of person would open the box?

‘The books in the box are real and the work within almost entirely unknown in this country,’ the accompanying print-out says, with a tantalising picture of the contents unsealed, but face down.

more here.

River

…….Mother,
…….Why is the river laughing?

Why, because the sun is tickling the river

…….Mother,
…….Why is the river singing?

Because the skylark praised the river’s voice.

…….Mother,
…….Why is the river cold?

It remembers being once loved by the snow.

…….Mother,
…….How old is the river?

It’s the same age as the forever young springtime.

…….Mother,
…….Why does the river never rest?

Well, you see it’s because the mother sea
is waiting for the river to come home.
.

by Shuntaro Tanikawa
from The Vintage Book of Contemporary World Poetry
Vintage Books, 1996
Translated by Harold Wright

Heidi Ledford in Nature:

Minute fossils pulled from remote Arctic Canada could push back the first known appearance of fungi to about one billion years ago — more than 500 million years earlier than scientists had expected. These ur-fungi, described on 22 May in Nature¹, are microscopic and surprisingly intricate, with filament-like structures. Chemical analyses suggest that the fossils contain chitin, a compound found in fungal cell walls. If that analysis holds up, it could reshape understanding of how fungi evolved and whether they might have facilitated the movement of plants onto land. But some researchers are not yet convinced that the finding is truly a fungus. “It looks to me as if there’s reason for believing it’s real at this point,” says Mary Berbee, a mycologist at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. “But more data would be really useful.”

Palaeobiologist Corentin Loron at the University of Liège, Belgium, and his colleagues found the fossils while exploring a region of Arctic Canada called the Grassy Bay Formation. The team had to travel to the study site, nestled amid the area’s dramatic cliffs, by helicopter. Because the rocks there formed without exposure to high temperatures and pressures, the fossils within them are remarkably preserved, says palaeobiologist Emmanuelle Javaux, Loron’s adviser at the University of Liège. From there, the team painstakingly sectioned the fossils into thin sheets that could be analysed with an electron microscope. Those images revealed branched filaments ending in spheres. The filaments were divided into segments by septae, walls that are found in some modern fungi.

The fossils were discovered in billion-year-old rock, and the presence of chitin in the specimens further persuaded the researchers that they were preserved fungi that died a billion years ago. The team named the fungus Ourasphaira giraldae.

More here.

David Sloan Wilson (and Massimo Pigliucci) in Letter:

Dear Massimo,

We go way back and share a love of philosophy in addition to biology. I was proud to be included in the “Altenberg 16” workshop that you organized to explore the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis, a term that you coined.  I have always regarded you as one of the most forward looking evolutionary thinkers.

I was therefore surprised by some of your recent comments on Twitter, which struck me as decidedly backward looking. The topic was ancient Greek history. I commented that it could benefit from a cultural multilevel selection perspective.  Your response—at least as I took it—was that you didn’t see how such an analysis would add to traditional scholarship on the topic. You also noted that the study of genetic evolution is hard and the study of human cultural evolution is harder still. You regarded much of the work on human cultural evolution as speculative adaptationist “just-so” story telling.

Really, Massimo! The study of humanity from an evolutionary perspective—including but not restricted to cultural evolution—lags behind the study of genetic evolution by nearly a century. This is not because the study of our species is more difficult—in many ways it is easier—but for more complicated and nuanced reasons.

More here.

Stephen Wolfram in his blog:

For me personally, the vision that became Wolfram|Alpha has a very long history. I first imagined creating something like it more than 47 years ago, when I was about 12 years old. Over the years, I built some powerful tools—most importantly the core of what’s now Wolfram Language. But it was only after some discoveries I made in basic science in the 1990s that I felt emboldened to actually try building what’s now Wolfram|Alpha.

It was—and still is—a daunting project. To take all areas of systematic knowledge and make them computable. To make it so that any question that can in principle be answered from knowledge accumulated by our civilization can actually be answered, immediately and automatically.

Leibniz had talked about something like this 350 years ago; Turing 70 years ago. But while science fiction (think the Star Trek computer) had imagined it, and AI research had set it as a key goal, 50 years of actual work on question-answering had failed to deliver. And I didn’t know for sure if we were in the right decade—or even the right century—to be able to build what I wanted.

More here.