Robert Scheer in TruthDig:

It is nearly impossible to live in today’s world without having come across mention of the legendary Noam Chomsky. His work as a linguist, historian, political activist and philosopher, which spans nearly a century, has had an immeasurable impact on contemporary world views. Not only have his more than a hundred books become the basis for a vast milieu of modern thought, but he himself has become a widely admired public figure whose thoughtful take on current events is as crucial as ever in our increasingly hostile, chaotic sociopolitical climate.

While he and Robert Scheer, the renowned left-wing thinker and Truthdig’s award-winning editor in chief, are both well known in progressive circles for their lifelong work challenging systems of oppression and false narratives about American exceptionalism, until now, the two had never had a public conversation. In a remarkable two-part interview, Chomsky and Scheer meet to discuss topics ranging from the type of dystopian future we face to the unfortunate, brutal success of the U.S. empire.

More here.

Blame

Where no question possibly remains—someone crying, someone dead
…………… —blame asks: whose fault?
It’s the counterpart, the day-to-day, the real life, of those higher faculties
…………… we posit,
logic, reason, the inductions and deductions we yearningly trace the lines
…………… of with our finger.
It also has to do with nothing but itself, a tendency, a habit, like smoking
…………… or depression:
the unaccountable life quirks forecast in neither the sour milk nor the
…………… parent’s roaring bead.
Relationship’s theodicy: as the ever-generous deity leaves the difficult
…………… door of faith ajar
in a gesture of just-fathomable irony, so our beloved other, in the pain
…………… of partial mutuality,
moves us with its querulous “Look what you made me do!” towards the
…………… first glimpse of terrible self.

by C.K. Williams
from C.K. Williams Selected Poems
Noonday Press, 1994

Roger Scruton in City Journal (Winter 2009):

Wherever the Western vision of political order has gained a foothold, we find freedom of expression: not merely the freedom to disagree with others publicly about matters of faith and morality but also the freedom to satirize solemnity and to ridicule nonsense, including solemnity and nonsense of the sacred kind. This freedom of conscience requires secular government. But what makes secular government legitimate?

That question is the starting point of Western political philosophy, the consensus among modern thinkers being that sovereignty and law are made legitimate by the consent of those who must obey them. They show this consent in two ways: by a real or implied “social contract,” whereby each person agrees with every other to the principles of government; and by a political process through which each person participates in the making and enacting of the law. The right and duty of participation is what we mean, or ought to mean, by “citizenship,” and the distinction between political and religious communities can be summed up in the view that political communities are composed of citizens and religious communities of subjects—of those who have “submitted.” If we want a simple definition of the West as it is today, the concept of citizenship is a good starting point. That is what millions of migrants are roaming the world in search of: an order that confers security and freedom in exchange for consent.

That is what people want; it does not, however, make them happy. Something is missing from a life based purely on consent and polite accommodation with your neighbors—something of which Muslims retain a powerful image through the words of the Koran. This missing thing goes by many names: sense, meaning, purpose, faith, brotherhood, submission. People need freedom; but they also need the goal for which they can renounce it. That is the thought contained in the word “Islam”: the willing submission, from which there is no return.

More here.

Robert Service in Science:

Hit certain crystalline materials with a jolt of electricity and they will change shape. Squeeze them and they will jolt you right back. Scientists have used these so-called piezoelectrics for decades in ultrasound medical imaging; the materials are so sensitive that they can pick up the motion of sound waves moving through tissue. Now, researchers have come up with a simple new way to make potent transparent piezoelectrics, which could lead to improved medical imagers, invisible robots, and touch screens that power themselves.

Piezoelectrics are made up of either myriad tiny crystallites or single crystals of a variety of materials including ceramics and polymers. In both cases, a mix of atoms arrange themselves into a simple crystalline unit—typically the size of a handful of atoms—that’s repeated over and over. Inside each of these building blocks, the atoms are arranged in a so-called electric dipole, with more positive charges on one side and more negative charges on the other.

…That improved performance could lead to more sensitive photoacoustic imaging devices, which could aid doctors in everything from breast cancer and melanoma detection to the tracking of blood flow for the treatment of vascular diseases, Kothapalli says. Chen and his colleagues report that the advance could also inspire transparent actuators for invisible robotics and screens that power themselves when touched.

More here.

Kent Anhari in The New Atlantis:

According to the best-known telling of the tale, Hippasus, a Pythagorean of the fifth century b.c., was drowned in the sea by his fellow philosophers while on a fishing voyage. Hippasus had disclosed a secret that, if made public, risked destroying the credibility of his school’s commitment to a cosmos governed by perfect mathematical harmony: The relationship between a diagonal of a square and its side cannot be represented as a ratio — it is “irrational.” This legend sets the stage in Irrationality: A History of the Dark Side of Reason, Justin E. H. Smith’s urgent missive to a Brahmin class wracked with anxieties about a world that seems to have lost its grip on reason.

Smith, a philosopher of science at Paris Diderot University, is motivated by an urgent sense that a milestone reassessment of the Enlightenment’s legacy, and of the role of reason in public life, is underway in the United States and elsewhere. The emergence of prominent public voices with open counter-Enlightenment sympathies — such as Steve Bannon and Peter Thiel — and the resurgence of jingoistic populism are good reasons to take notice. So too is the fierce battle being fought between self-styled defenders of the open society, such as Steven Pinker and Jordan Peterson (however tenuous their grasp of the philosophies they claim to champion), and heirs to the left-wing critical tradition that views Enlightenment ideals as instruments for the powerful to oppress the marginal.

More here.

Ian Sample in The Guardian:

Be warned. If the rise of the robots comes to pass, the apocalypse may be a more squelchy affair than science fiction writers have prepared us for.

Researchers in the US have created the first living machines by assembling cells from African clawed frogs into tiny robots that move around under their own steam.

One of the most successful creations has two stumpy legs that propel it along on its “chest”. Another has a hole in the middle that researchers turned into a pouch so it could shimmy around with miniature payloads.

“These are entirely new lifeforms. They have never before existed on Earth,” said Michael Levin, the director of the Allen Discovery Center at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts. “They are living, programmable organisms.”

Roboticists tend to favour metal and plastic for their strength and durability, but Levin and his colleagues see benefits in making robots from biological tissues. When damaged, living robots can heal their wounds, and once their task is done they fall apart, just as natural organisms decay when they die.

More here, including amazing video.

Hal Foster at Artforum:

IMAGINE THAT ANDY WARHOL and Eva Hesse had a secret tryst in 1966 and Rachel Harrison was the love child that resulted. With its canny use of both Pop signs and funky materials, her rambunctious sculpture points to such an unlikely lineage. Smartly curated by Elisabeth Sussman and David Joselit, “Rachel Harrison Life Hack,” the midcareer survey of her work at the Whitney Museum of American Art, is roughly chronological: It guides us easily from an installation improvised out of cheap paneling, casual photographs, and canned peas in the mid-1990s to a large circle of totemic sculptures gathered for this show, with a few intense series of figure drawings and C-prints along the way. Despite the fact that Harrison is often taken to be a devil-may-care assemblage artist, the exhibition is almost spare, and this relative restraint has two welcome effects: We can learn the language of her work as it developed, and we can consider her image-object hybrids as sculptures, which also lets us reflect on the contemporary status of that medium vis-à-vis the other media sampled here. Early on, Harrison compressed the littered space of her initial installations into the tight juxtapositions of her composite objects, and thereby heightened the cultural contradictions that her pointed riffs on postwar art, mass media, and US politics call out.

more here.

Clive Barnett and many others at nonsite:

The Ascent of Affect turns on the contention that what is most at stake across various intellectual debates, from the humanities to neurosciences, is the conceptual status and normative value of the idea of intentionality, that is, of the idea that there is a relationship between “the mind” and things, or properties, or states of affairs of some sort. The question of how to understand the “aboutness” of mental states the long-standing theme of philosophical debates about intentionality.6 Leys structures her discussion around a conundrum which is, she suggests, pivotal to a whole series of contemporary debates in the philosophy of mind, neuroscience, psychology, as well as traditions of critical social thought. The conundrum, she proposes, arises from the conflict between two equally compelling observations. On the one hand, there is the long-standing concern with making sense of the intentionality of the emotions, understood in terms of “the fact or idea that emotions are directed at cognitively apprehended objects and are sensitive to ‘reasons.’”7 On the other hand, emotions also appear to be common to both humans and non-human animals. Often enough, the latter observation is used to refute any sense of the intentionality of emotions, as if the idea of intentionality necessitated a highly rational, linguistic, cognitive view of reasonable action. The apparent incompatibility between holding to the intentionality of emotions and acknowledging the continuities between human and non-human rationality underwrites the divide between cognitivists–who remain keen to investigate intentionality but find it difficult to acknowledge emotions in nonhuman animals–and noncognitivists–who emphasise “the importance of bodily changes and subpersonal processes in the emotions but are seen to have difficulty explaining how it is that emotions have meaning.”

more here.

Margaret Wertheim at Cabinet Magazine:

The frescos in Assisi heralded a revolution both in representation and in metaphysical leaning whose consequences for Western art, philosophy, and science can hardly be underestimated. It is here, too, that we may locate the seed of the video gaming industry. Bacon was giving voice to an emerging view that the God of Judeo-Christianity had created the world according to geometric laws and that Truth was thus to be found in geometrical representation. This Christian mathematicism would culminate in the scientific achievements of Galileo and Newton four centuries later and continues to resonate in contemporary physicists’ quest for a hyper-dimensional “Theory of Everything.” In The Heritage of Giotto’s Geometry, Edgerton argues that the idea that the world exists as a geometric void—which is the foundation on which Galileo and Newton built the new physics and cosmology—was patterned into Western consciousness by three centuries of perspectival representation beginning with Bacon’s missive to Clement. Thus the scientific revolution was birthed in the visual revolution of geometric figuring.

more here.

Now We Will Say “ Happy New Year”

We are always on the right side of history
like a civilized traffic that waits for the green
signal and moves smugly while pedestrians
around central stations of Cairo and Nairobi
and tourists at Trafalgar feed pigeons of many
creeds without any tiff in language, neither
in shaking hands skins flake but after a smile
a thought passes why we have lived so long
under these beaming lighthouses of empires
there is a transgression poetic in intent which
cares to plunder our souls muffled under snows
herding factories of passions and meager labor
marveling fireworks at Sydney Harbor Bridge, the
starved dogs of Mumbai snarl at passing vehicles
where Gothic cathedrals chime colonial bells
even a gleeful atheist strikes a sacred chord after
watching an award winning photography of Syrian
children bombed and borderless carrying ghastly
bowls of food— a historian remains detached.

by Rizwan Akhtar

Ian Leslie in New Statesman America:

The night before I met Malcolm Gladwell, I went to see him speak at the Royal Festival Hall on London’s South Bank. The gig was sold out: as the young and diverse crowd filtered in, and the Specials played over the PA, I reflected on how unusual it is for a writer to fill so many seats, especially one with no creed to preach or secret to sell. People were not coming to sit at the feet of a guru. They were here to enjoy themselves. Gladwell, a strip of a man in jeans and sneakers, sauntered on stage, took his place behind a lectern and began telling a story from his new book, Talking To Strangers. Within two minutes he swerved off into a story about how he got the story, which involved him mistaking a call from a legendary CIA agent for one from Barack Obama. It doesn’t always come across in his writing, but Gladwell is funny. At the South Bank his words flowed and fizzed with vocal energy; he used his voice like an instrument, at times lowering it suggestively (“I mean I can’t tell you what Barack and I talked about…”), at others leaping high up in his range to register incredulity (“I’ve been at dinner parties with the super-rich. All they talk about is tax!”). His pauses and pay-offs were perfectly judged.

He was interviewed on stage by the journalist Afua Hirsch. It transpired that they both have a white father and a black mother. Gladwell had a theory about this, based on his observation that until recently, it was unusual for the female half of a mixed-race couple to be white. But then, Gladwell had a theory about everything. Over the course of the evening he expounded on policing, schools, sport, prison, why rich people don’t know how to enjoy being rich, and much more. Some theories were carefully weighed, others were riffs intended to elicit a gasp or a laugh. Even as Hirsch was wrapping up the Q&A, Gladwell interjected to ask why it always seems necessary to take questions from every part of the auditorium. “When you walked in here you had this identity,” he said, addressing the hall: “Say, British, white, female. But in the last 45 minutes, you’ve acquired this new one: stalls left. And suddenly it seems like a monstrous injustice that nobody from your side has been picked.”

For nearly 20 years, Gladwell has been America’s most important public intellectual. If the label seems incongruous, that might be because we think of public intellectuals as those such as Steven Pinker or Niall Ferguson: hommes sérieux who enjoy crushing those who disagree with them. Gladwell does not cultivate gravitas and doesn’t much mind if you disagree with him. He is an intellectual hedonist: his big idea is that ideas should be pleasurable. Rather than trying to persuade, he seeks to infect readers with his enthusiasms: isn’t this interesting? This ethos has birthed a whole publishing industry. It’s only a slight exaggeration to say that, without Gladwell, there would no Freakonomics, no Nudge, no TED Talks, no “Smart Thinking” section in Waterstones. For those who find the whole genre unbearably superficial, Gladwell is to blame.

More here.

Carrie Arnold in Nautilus:

The human genome contains billions of pieces of information and around 22,000 genes, but not all of it is, strictly speaking, human. Eight percent of our DNA consists of remnants of ancient viruses, and another 40 percent is made up of repetitive strings of genetic letters that is also thought to have a viral origin. Those extensive viral regions are much more than evolutionary relics: They may be deeply involved with a wide range of diseases including multiple sclerosis, hemophilia, and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), along with certain types of dementia and cancer. For many years, biologists had little understanding of how that connection worked—so little that they came to refer to the viral part of our DNA as dark matter within the genome. “They just meant they didn’t know what it was or what it did,” explains Molly Gale Hammell, an associate professor at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. It became evident that the virus-related sections of the genetic code do not participate in the normal construction and regulation of the body. But in that case, how do they contribute to disease?

An early clue came from the pioneering geneticist Barbara McClintock, who spent much of her career at CSHL. In the 1940s, long before the decoding of the human genome, she realized that some stretches of our DNA behave like infectious invaders. These DNA chunks can move around through the genome, copying and pasting themselves wherever they see fit, which inspired McClintock to call them “jumping genes.” Her once-controversial idea earned her a Nobel Prize in 1983.

More here.

Robin Varghese and Sarah Pray in The Economist:

People who have lost their jobs lose not only an income but also a sense of place, of purpose and of solidarity. Community dislocation, absence of social belonging, loss of identity, lack of political control and self-determination—these things are extremely hard to measure in dollars and cents or pounds and pence.

Responding to this is urgent. Unless people get a more substantial voice and sense of agency over their lives, it is hard to see how the backlash against global trade can be quelled, and that threatens the global economy and democratic institutions.

So how might confidence and agency be restored to those facing the sharp end of globalisation? Our work at the Open Society Foundations (OSF) sheds light on how giving people a “path to participation” can help tamp the anxiety that drives people to embrace protectionism and populism. We have looked specifically at three contentious areas: refugee settlement, worker participation and trade policy.

More here.

Jasmin Darznik in Literary Hub:

I grew up in a house with very few books, but there was one that came with my family from Iran and never let me go: a slender, battered book of poetry my mother displayed on the mantle, next to photographs of our family and the country we’d been forced to flee. The cover showed a woman with kohl-lined eyes and bobbed hair, and the Persian script slanted upwards, as if in flight from the page. That book wasn’t an object or even an artifact but an atmosphere. Parting the pages released a sharp, acrid scent that was the very scent of Iran, which was also the scent of time, love, and loss.

I wouldn’t know this for a long time, but Forugh Farrokhzad, the author of that book, died in a car crash eleven years before my family left Iran for America. She was just 32 and when she died she was the country’s most notorious woman. Her poems were revolutionary: a radical bid for self-expression and democracy written in a time and place which showed little tolerance for either, particularly when women voiced the desire for them.

More here.

Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe:

We are all alive, but “life” is something we struggle to understand. How do we distinguish a “living organism” from an emergent dynamical system like a hurricane, or a resource-consuming chemical reaction like a forest fire, or an information-processing system like a laptop computer? There is probably no one crisp set of criteria that delineates life from non-life, but it’s worth the exercise to think about what we really mean, especially as the quest to find life outside the confines of the Earth picks up steam. Sara Imari Walker planned to become a cosmologist before shifting her focus to astrobiology, and is now a leading researcher on the origin and nature of life. We talk about what life is and how to find it, with a special focus on the role played by information and computation in living beings.

More here.

Robert Talisse at IAI:

Democracy can be frustrating; our hard-won right to participate in the task of collective self-government often results in disappointment and exasperation. What’s more, in the wake of a political defeat, democracy’s sole consolation is ‘continue working’; if you lose at the polls, you mustn’t resign or withdraw, but instead turn to the next election and begin anew. Citizenship takes persistence. And in both emotional and practical terms, that’s asking a lot.

Yet democracy is demanding in another way as well. It requires a certain ethos, a moral stance towards our fellow citizen. We must acknowledge that they are entitled to an equal political say even if they hold views that we regard as unconscionable. What’s more, if our opponent prevails at the polls, we must hold that it is right for democracy to enact the policies they favor.

The democratic ethos hence appears tragically fraught. How can we stand both for what’s right and acquiesce in an arrangement that gives ‘error’ an equal say? Is it even possible to maintain so conflicted a posture?

An additional difficulty lurks. When it comes to high stakes decisions, we tend to regard our political opponent as being not merely on the wrong side of the issues, but on the unjust side. And once we start seeing our rival as not merely wrongheaded, but opposed to justice itself, then it may follow that we grow contemptuous of our opposition, to regard them as irredeemably failed, benighted, even depraved.

More here.

Excellent article about this John Mulaney story here.

A Nice Voice

When my daughter whines I tell her to say what you want in a nice voice.

My nice voice is reserved for meetings with a view, my palm outstretched saying here. Are our problems. Legacies rolling out like multicolored marbles. Don’t focus so much on the ‘doom and gloom’ they keep saying. We don’t want to depress. Everyone. This is only our survival. We rely heavily on foreign aid I am instructed to say. I am instructed to point out the need for funds to build islands, move families from weto after weto, my mouth a shovel to spade the concrete with but I am just pointing out neediness. So needy. These small. Underdeveloped countries. I feel myself shrinking in the back of the taxi when a diplomat compliments me. How brave for admitting it so openly. The allure of global negotiations dulls. Like the back of a worn spoon.

I lose myself easily in a kemem. Kemem defined as feast. As celebration. A baby’s breath endures their first year so we pack hundreds of close bodies under tents, lined up for plates I pass to my cousin, assembly line style. Our gloved hands pluck out barbeque chicken, fried fish, scoop potato salad, dew-like droplets of bōb and mā. Someone yells for another container of jajimi. The speaker warbles a keyboarded song. A child inevitably cries. Mine dances in the middle of the party. A pair elbow each other to rip hanging beach balls from their strings. The MC shouts Boke ajiri ne nejim jen maan. The children are obstructing our view. Someone wheels a grandma onto the dance floor. The dances begin here

is a nice
celebration
of survival.

by Kathy Jetnil-Kijner
from the Academy of American Poets