Over at The Hedgehog & the Fox, an interview with Rachel Sherman:

New School sociologist Rachel Sherman interviewed fifty affluent residents of New York (the most unequal city in the United States) to find out their attitudes to wealth. She writes of her sample:

“Most households had incomes of over $500,000 per year, assets of over $3 million, or both. About half earned over $1 million annually and/or had assets of over $8 million. The median household income of the sample was about $625,000, which is twelve times the New York City median of about $52,000. […] They worked or had worked in finance, law, real estate, advertising, academia, nonprofits, the arts, and fashion.”

What she discovered in her interviews is presented in her recent book, Uneasy Street, which is full of fascinating insights into what she calls “the anxieties of affluence”, the ongoing struggles her informants experience over how to combine being wealthy with feeling they possess moral worth. This often leads them to emphasize who they are as opposed to what they have. They also repeatedly highlight virtues normally associated with the middle class: hard work, modest consumption, a commitment to ensuring their children embrace similar attitudes. Sherman writes:

“They want to be in the middle, not in a distributional sense but rather in the affective sense of having the habits and desires of the middle class. As long as the wealthy can distance themselves from images of ‘bad’ rich people, their entitlement is acceptable. In fact, it is almost as if they are not rich.”

More here.

Brian Resnick in Vox:

Starting Monday, the kilogram will be defined by the Planck constant.

The Planck constant is a concept in quantum mechanics (i.e. the study of how the tiniest components of the universe works), which describes how the tiniest bits of matter release energy in discrete steps or chunks (called quanta). Basically, you can think of the Planck constant as the smallest action an electron can take.

What’s important about the Planck constant is that it can never, ever change. And that makes it a worthy concept to anchor the definition of the kilogram to.

But first, to appreciate why the Planck constant can define the kilogram, it’s helpful to look at how the meter — the world’s standard unit of length — was redefined in terms of the speed of light as an example of why this was necessary.

The meter was originally defined as the length of a bar at the International Bureau of Weights and Measures in France. (It was then redefined to be equal to a certain wavelength of radiation.) Again, the problem with this definition was its imprecision. It was not based on unchanging properties of the universe.

Light speed, on the other hand, is unchanging. By 1983, physicists had gotten really good at measuring the speed of light. So they used it to fix the length of the meter forever, to make it permanent.

Here’s how: They redefined the meter to be equal to the distance light travels in a vacuum in 1/299,792,458 of a second. Essentially, the definition of the meter is now baked into the definition of the speed of light.

So let’s get back to the Planck constant.

To understand, let’s take a look at it. Written out, the Planck constant is 6.62607015 × 10^-34 m²kg/s.

More here.

Laura Snapes at The Guardian:

The hoary old legends of rock journalism are seldom those who deserve a place in history. If pioneers such as Ellen Willis and Caroline Coon got half the glory of verbose stylists like Nick Kent and Lester Bangs, modern music criticism would be in healthier shape. Vivien Goldman lives among these overlooked heroes of the inkies era. From the mid-70s, she became Bob Marley’s first UK publicist, critic, musician, music video director and musical writer among other gigs (including occasional writing for the Guardian). Her work for NME, Melody Maker and Sounds in the 1970s and 80s offered sparkling and righteous reportage from a figure who lived cheek-to-cheek with London’s punk and reggae stars and never strayed from her ethos.

This book should restore Goldman’s place in the rock-crit firmament just as she sets out to give punk’s women their long-denied dues. It only takes a glance at the covers of heritage rock mags and bookshop music sections to see how punk – a supposedly egalitarian, no-heroes movement – has made second-class citizens of its most vital agitators: women. “Revenge,” Goldman writes, “means getting the same access as your male peers.”

more here.

Alan Cumming at The NY Times:

That John Waters is a national treasure is a surety. Period. Thank you and good night.

The studies of American film history from the mid-60s onward, and of countercultural ideas and ideals from then up to the very present moment, are infused and imbued with and by his great, weirdo, contrary specter.

His latest book is cleverly entitled “Mr. Know-It-All.” Clever because, duh, the guy is in his 70s, he has done it all, he is as cool as anyone could ever hope to be and he is still rocking: touring with his speeches and books and art shows and generally imparting his pervy yet utterly sensible (mostly) wisdom to generations of people who were not even born when he first shot to fame like some indie, scatological P. T. Barnum who captured on film the indelible cultural phenomenon of an overweight drag queen on the streets of Baltimore eating actual dog feces.

more here.

Maggie Fergusson in MIL:

Tom remembers the day he decided he wanted to be a theoretical astrophysicist. He was deep into research about black holes, and had amassed a box of papers on his theories. In one he speculated about the relationship between black holes and white holes, hypothetical celestial objects that emit colossal amounts of energy. Black holes, he thought, must be linked across space-time with white holes. “I put them together and I thought, oh wow, that works! That’s when I knew I wanted to do this as a job.” Tom didn’t know enough maths to prove his theory, but he had time to learn. He was only five. Tom is now 11. At home, his favourite way to relax is to devise maths exam papers complete with marking sheets. Last year for Christmas he asked his parents for the £125 registration fee to sit maths GCSE, an exam most children in Britain take at 16. He is currently working towards his maths A-level. Tom is an only child, and at first Chrissie, his mother, thought his love of numbers was normal. Gradually she realised it wasn’t. She would take him to lectures about dark matter at the Royal Observatory in London and notice that there were no other children there. His teacher reported that instead of playing outside with other kids at breaks, he wanted to stay indoors and do sums.

One day his parents took him to Milton Keynes to have his intelligence assessed by an organisation called Potential Plus, formerly the National Association for Gifted Children. “We told him it was a day of puzzles,” Chrissie says. “It was my dream world,” Tom says. “Half a day of tests!” His mother waited while he applied his mind to solving problems. When they were shown the results, Tom’s intelligence put him in the top 0.1% in Britain. Precocious children are often dismissed as the product of pushy, middle-class parents. Nurture and environment clearly do play an important role in any child’s intellectual development. Talk to your child about politics over the dinner table and he is likely to develop confident opinions about the way the world should be run. Suggest that your toddler think of slices of cake in terms of angles and she may well display an early aptitude for mathematics. Practice can make perfect. The child with a gift for playing the piano who practises five hours a day is more likely to end up performing at Carnegie Hall than the equally gifted one who plays for just 20 minutes a week.

More here.

Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker:

The work of the AgeLab is shaped by a paradox. Having been established to engineer and promote new products and services specially designed for the expanding market of the aged, the AgeLab swiftly discovered that engineering and promoting new products and services specially designed for the expanding market of the aged is a good way of going out of business. Old people will not buy anything that reminds them that they are old. They are a market that cannot be marketed to. In effect, to accept help in getting out of the suit is to accept that we’re in the suit for life. We would rather suffer because we’re old than accept that we’re old and suffer less.

This paradox is, well, old. Heinz, back in the nineteen-fifties, tried marketing a line of “Senior Foods” that was, essentially, baby food for old people. It not only failed spectacularly but, as Coughlin puts it, poisoned an entire category. The most perverse of these failures is perhaps that of the pers, or personal-emergency-response system, a category of device—best known for the hysterically toned television ad in which an elderly woman calls out, “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up!”—designed as a neck pendant that summons emergency services when pressed. It is simple and effective. “The problem is that no one wants one,” Coughlin says. “The entire penetration in the U.S. of the sixty-five-plus market is less than four per cent. And a German study showed that, when subscribers fell and remained on the floor for longer than five minutes, they failed to use their devices to summon help eighty-three per cent of the time.” In other words, many older people would sooner thrash on the floor in distress than press a button—one that may summon assistance but whose real impact is to admit, I am old.

More here.

Arundhati Roy in The Guardian:

I am truly honored to have been invited by PEN America to deliver this year’s Arthur Miller Freedom to Write Lecture. What better time than this to think together about a place for literature, at this moment when an era that we think we understand – at least vaguely, if not well – is coming to a close.

As the ice caps melt, as oceans heat up, and water tables plunge, as we rip through the delicate web of interdependence that sustains life on earth, as our formidable intelligence leads us to breach the boundaries between humans and machines, and our even more formidable hubris undermines our ability to connect the survival of our planet to our survival as a species, as we replace art with algorithms and stare into a future in which most human beings may not be needed to participate in (or be remunerated for) economic activity – at just such a time we have the steady hands of white supremacists in the White House, new imperialists in China, neo-Nazis once again massing on the streets of Europe, Hindu nationalists in India, and a host of butcher-princes and lesser dictators in other countries to guide us into the Unknown.

While many of us dreamt that “Another world is possible”, these folks were dreaming that too. And it is their dream – our nightmare – that is perilously close to being realized.

More here.

Heather Murphy in the New York Times:

The scent of lily of the valley cannot be easily bottled. For decades companies that make soap, lotions and perfumes have relied on a chemical called bourgeonal to imbue their products with the sweet smell of the little white flowers. A tiny drop can be extraordinarily intense.

If you can smell it at all, that is. For a small percentage of people, it fails to register as anything.

Similarly, the earthy compound 2-ethylfenchol, present in beets, is so powerful for some people that a small chunk of the root vegetable smells like a heap of dirt. For others, that same compound is as undetectable as the scent of bottled water.

These — and dozens of other differences in scent perception — are detailed in a new study, published this week in the journal PNAS.

More here.

Narges Bajoghli in Foreign Policy:

What Americans don’t understand is that the groups that we support in the region are not our mercenaries,” Ali, a high-ranking member of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), said when I recently asked him about one of the stated goals of the Trump administration’s sanctions against Iran: to curtail the country’s ability to financially support militias in the region. He continued, “The Americans think everything is about money. They think we buy loyalty in the region, because that’s how they buy loyalty.”

In the decade that I did research with cultural producers in Iran’s preeminent military force, the IRGC, I saw a steady flow of filmmakers loyal to Hezbollah and Iraqi Shiite and Kurdish groups travel through regime cultural centers in Tehran. (They all agreed to speak with me on the condition of anonymity. The first names used here are pseudonyms.) Mehdi, an Iranian pro-regime filmmaker, had lived in Lebanon to make films with Hezbollah media producers. When they visited him in Tehran, they spoke fluent Persian and navigated the city with familiar ease. Iraqi filmmakers would regularly come to spend time in Tehran at editing studios tied to the paramilitary Basij organization.

More here.

Doreen Carvajal at Tablet:

“La Petite Irène” was plundered from the Chambord castle on orders of Goering, an obsessive collector who was not a fan of Renoir because Nazis considered his impressionist style degenerate. But he still used the valuable art for trading: Goering swapped the portrait in 1942 for a Florentine Tondo with a Paris gallery dealer who was one of his chief art procurers. Some historians contend that the painting was then bought by another Swiss gallery owner who held it along with others for Bührle because of the growing risks of buying plundered art.

After the war, the portrait ended up in a 1945 Munich collection point for spoils of war and then at a 1946 exhibition of plundered masterpieces at l’Orangerie in Paris. It was there that Irène Cahen d’Anvers spotted the tender version of herself, a work that she hunted for after the war, calling it a delightful memory of her youth. She had survived the occupation, cloistered in her Parisian apartment.

more here.

James Carroll at The Atlantic:

The body knows when it’s in love, and the body knows when it’s ensnared in something beyond endurance. My body knew last summer, as the revelations in Ireland provoked a visceral collapse of faith.

Pope Francis, challenged by the disgrace of his close ally, the now-defrocked Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, of Washington; by accusations, like Viganò’s, of his own complicity in the cover-up of sexual abuse; and by the moral wreckage of the Church around the world, responded with silence, denial, and a business-as-usual summoning of crimson-robed men to Rome.

Events in subsequent months only magnified the scale of the Church’s failure. With maddening equilibrium, Pope Francis acknowledged, in response to a reporter’s question early this year, that the rape of nuns by priests and bishops remains a mostly unaddressed Catholic problem. In Africa, once AIDS became common, priests began coercing nuns into becoming sexual servants, because, as virgins, they would likely not carry the HIV virus. It was reportedly common for such priests to sponsor abortions when the nuns became pregnant. “It’s true,” Francis said calmly. “There are priests and bishops who have done that.”

more here.

Rosemary Hill at the LRB:

The mood of the 1850s and 1860s was vigorous. Muscularity, ‘reality’ and ‘go’ were the admired qualities in art, in science and in life. Problems were there to be solved. Railway companies driving cuttings through the landscape split open dramatic rock strata. Geology and fossil-hunting were crazes, seaside holidaymakers collected shells and fished in rock pools. The world was immanent with new realms of knowledge, and as the meaning of ‘evolution’ shifted towards what was soon called Darwinism, the older meaning still haunted it. From his home in Biddulph Grange in Staffordshire, James Bateman corresponded with Darwin in the course of constructing his Geological Gallery, which opened to the public in 1862. In it the phases of biblical creation were illustrated with geological specimens and fossils in bays labelled ‘Day One’, ‘Day Two’ etc. Neither Bateman nor many of his contemporaries believed in the literal truth of Genesis, but this metaphorical account of ‘development’ as the slow unfolding of God’s creation could hold together science and religion. The churches of the High Victorian years glowed and bristled with inset marble and polished minerals.

more here.

Daily Kos in AlterNet:

One of the most influential thinkers of all time, the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle possessed a wide-ranging and insatiable curiosity. Most of his philosophy is what we would now call science: he wrote on biology, astronomy, zoology, physics, and psychology, to name just a few subjects. He also made important contributions to ethics and political theory. Unfortunately, the only works by Aristotle that have survived appear to be his lecture notes. The 17th-century English philosopher John Locke was a pioneering political thinker. He had a major influence on the U.S. Founding Fathers and provided the philosophical justification for the American Revolution.

According to Aristotle, the goal of human life is eudaimonia. The Greek word eudaimonia is often translated as “happiness,” but a better translation might be “success”—not success at a particular activity but success at life. For Aristotle, eudaimonia means putting intellectual and moral excellence into action over a lifetime. For Aristotle, the success of a person’s friends, family, and fellow-citizens is part of the person’s success. I don’t just mean that a person needs help from others to be successful. We might say that Aristotle thinks of society as a team. Just as a person can win at baseball only by winning along with their baseball team, so a person can win at life only by winning along with their society. In fact, in the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle says that even after a person has died, the success or failure of their friends and family continues to affect how successful their life was (though Aristotle adds that this effect will not be enough to make a successful person unsuccessful).

More here.

George Musser in Nautilus:

It’s not just in politics where otherwise smart people consistently talk past one another. People debating whether humans have free will also have this tendency. Neuroscientist and free-will skeptic Sam Harris has dueled philosopher and free-will defender Daniel Dennett for years and once invited him onto his podcast with the express purpose of finally having a meeting of minds. Whoosh! They flew right past each other yet again. Christian List, a philosopher at the London School of Economics who specializes in how humans make decisions, has a new book, Why Free Will Is Real, that tries to bridge the gap. List is one of a youngish generation of thinkers, such as cosmologist Sean Carroll and philosopher Jenann Ismael, who dissolve the old dichotomies on free will and think that a nuanced reading of physics poses no contradiction for it.

List accepts the skeptics’ definition of free will as a genuine openness to our decisions, and he agrees this seems to be at odds with the clockwork universe of fundamental physics and neurobiology. But he argues that fundamental physics and neurobiology are only part of the story of human behavior. You may be a big bunch of atoms governed by the mechanical laws, but you are not just any bunch of atoms. You are an intricately structured bunch of atoms, and your behavior depends not just on the laws that govern the individual atoms but on the way those atoms are assembled. At a higher level of description, your decisions can be truly open. When you walk into a store and choose between Android and Apple, the outcome is not preordained. It really is on you.

Skeptics miss this point, List argues, because they rely on loose intuitions about causation. They look for the causes of our actions in the basic laws of physics, yet the concept of cause does not even exist at that level, according to the broader theory of causation developed by computer scientist Judea Pearl and others. Causation is a higher-level concept. This theory is fully compatible with the view that humans and other agents are causal forces in the world. List’s book may not settle the debate—what could, after thousands of years?—but it will at least force skeptics to get more sophisticated in their own reasoning.

More here.

Siena, age 3 months

I carried my baby down the dark
road between the moon
and pond. She cried as if she wanted
some better balance
of light and water.
………………………… I tried
to sing her what quiet
I could from those places.
But she cried
as if she needed calm
from far below me,
below the search for balance,
……………………………… ……….deep
into rock, down where centers
meet, where I could no more
extract it than she would know
if she saw it. As if she knew
I could grasp at the loss
as ballast against falling
or floating any sudden way.
………………………………….…. Or
that I could hold her close
against both our uneven places
and sway and sway and sway and sway

Mike Chrisman
from 5 Minute Pieces
Arms Library Reading Series
Shelburne Falls, MA, 1998

Sylvia Gindick at Bookforum:

In Lucy Ives’s second novel, Loudermilk, a charismatic dumbass scams his way into a prestigious MFA poetry program by submitting the work of his antisocial companion. The real writer, who hates the sound of his own voice, follows the oversexed, symmetrically featured dumbass to school and continues to write for him. It’s a fun setup, but the book aims for more than just comedy. Ives, who once described herself as “the author of some kind of thinking about writing,” examines the conditions that produce authors and their work while never losing a sense of wonder at the sheer mystery of the written word.

Through canny third-person narration, Ives cycles through the perspectives of five characters as the book progresses: Harry, the “real poet” (whose voice tends to break into an “unintelligible croak”); Loudermilk, the charming but “hollow hero” (whose speech is littered with creative iterations of “dude,” “dick,” and “fuck”); Clare, the brooding early-success who fears she can no longer write (“What I’ve lost is so easy to name as to make it impossible to speak about.”); Anton, the pompous try-hard who always thinks he’s the best writer in the room (“heir apparent to the poem-based sector of the American humanities multiverse”); and Lizzie, the precocious daughter of poetry professors (“I’m just curious, so sue me!”).

more here.

Henry Farrell and Bruce Schneier in the Boston Review:

The Internet was going to set us all free. At least, that is what U.S. policy makers, pundits, and scholars believed in the 2000s. The Internet would undermine authoritarian rulers by reducing the government’s stranglehold on debate, helping oppressed people realize how much they all hated their government, and simply making it easier and cheaper to organize protests.

Today, we live in darker times. Authoritarians are using these same technologies to bolster their rule. Even worse, the Internet seems to be undermining democracy by allowing targeted disinformation, turning public debate into a petri dish for bots and propagandists, and spreading general despair. A new consensus is emerging that democracy is less a resilient political system than a free-fire zone in a broader information war.

This despairing, technologically determinist response is premature. The Arab Spring wasn’t the twilight of dictatorship, yes, but today isn’t the twilight of democracy, either. Still, we agree that to the extent democracy has revealed systemic weaknesses, we should be working overtime to repair them.

More here.