Encountering Thomas Sowell

Thomas Chatterton Williams in Law & Liberty:

The first time I heard the name Thomas Sowell was during that bitterly partisan—though in retrospect, comparatively tame—transition period from George W. Bush to Barack Obama. My mother’s younger sister, a gun-owning, born-again evangelical Christian and staunchly Republican voter from Southern California had by then become an active and vocal Facebook user. In those days, I was half a decade out of undergrad, living in New York City, making my first forays into the world of professional opinion-having. I felt my first (and, it would turn out, my last) stirrings of political romanticism in my exuberance over the candidacy and election of the first black president. Suffice it to say we locked digital horns on a regular basis. “It’s not about color for me,” my aunt said while railing against Obama. “For example, I love Thomas Sowell.”

To that side of my extended family, I became the stereotype of a coastal liberal, writing for the New York Times and wholly out of touch with the real America. In fact, I’ve always prided and defined myself as an anti-tribal thinker, and sometime contrarian, working firmly within a left-of-center black tradition—a tradition populated by brave and brilliant minds from Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray to Harold Cruse, Stanley Crouch, Orlando Patterson, at times even Zadie Smith and James Baldwin.

More here.

The Art of Joan Mitchell

Elise Archias at Artforum:

JOAN MITCHELL’S PAINTINGS from the late 1950s have space in them. They are big surfaces covered with marks, like most Abstract Expressionist paintings made in New York in the same decade, and so they look much flatter than a carefully measured perspectival scene from the 1940s by, for example, Edward Hopper. But compared with almost everything her most productive and now famous peers were doing at the same time, Mitchell’s paintings are practically voluminous.

Consider her George Went Swimming at Barnes Hole, but It Got Too Cold, 1957, for example, alongside Helen Frankenthaler’s Round Trip, 1957. Both pictures invite us to reflect on their dialogue with the landscape-painting tradition, Frankenthaler’s via green triangular “mountains” and a blue “lake” in the foreground, Mitchell’s with the suggestion of a horizon line in the upper right corner and the titular swimming hole. Round Trip showcases a variety of painterly techniques. It is as if Frankenthaler chose each one for its capacity to oppose one of the others: dripping counters drawing; staining denies outlining; Lascaux-like ochre smudges must make room for academic cliché.

more here.

Thursday Poem

A Mysterious Love

I have borne the anguish love, which ask me not to describe:
I have tasted the poison of absence, which ask me not to relate.

Far through the world have I roved, and at length I have chosen
A sweet creature (a ravisher of hearts), whose name ask me not to disclose.

The flowing of my tears bedews her footsteps
In such a manner as ask me not to utter.

On yesternight from her own mouth with my own ears I heard
Such words as pray ask me not to repeat.

Why dost thou bite thy lip at me? What dost thou not hint
I have devoured a lip like a ruby: but whose, ask me not to mention.

Absent from thee, and the sole tenant of my cottage,
I have endured such tortures, as ask me not to enumerate.

Thus am I, HAFIZ, arrived at extremity in the ways of Love,
Which, alas! ask me not to explain.

by Hafez (c. 1325-1389)
translated by John Hindley

What’s a Novel Good For?

Andrew Koenig at the LARB:

“EVERYBODY BEHAVES BADLY,” says Hemingway’s Jake Barnes. “Give them the proper chance.” Why read novels about people behaving badly? Can a novel about bad people do readers good? These questions about the real-world effects of fictional characters — not just their “reality effects” — have come to the fore in recent years with the ascendancy of autofiction, on the one hand, and the persistence of the stoutly character-driven novel, on the other: the kind where characters, and, by extension, readers, get to know, and accept, social others who are nothing like them. Whereas autofiction asserts a kind of apolitical license — it’s my life, so it doesn’t matter if my problems seem trivial and if everyone I know is exactly like me — it’s incumbent on the latter kind of novelist to make social difference legible, rather than erasing or tokenizing it. It’s a tall order, and between the demands of professional and lay critics, on and off Twitter, the bar for ethical fiction, in which characterization is the vehicle for moral instruction, keeps getting raised ever higher.

Enter Dorothy J. Hale’s The Novel and the New Ethics.

more here.

Advanced Cancers Are Emerging, Doctors Warn, Citing Pandemic Drop in Screenings

Reed Abelson in The New York Times:

Months of lockdowns and waves of surging Covid cases throughout last year shuttered clinics and testing labs, or reduced hours at other places, resulting in steep declines in the number of screenings, including for breast and colorectal cancers, experts have said. Numerous studies showed that the number of patients screened or given a diagnosis of cancer fell during the early months of the pandemic. By mid-June, the rate of screenings for breast, colon and cervical cancers were still 29 percent to 36 percent lower than their prepandemic levels, according to an analysis of data by the Epic Health Research Network. Hundreds of thousands fewer screenings were performed last year than in 2019, according to the network data.

“We still haven’t caught up,” said Dr. Chris Mast, vice president of clinical informatics for Epic, which develops electronic health records for hospitals and clinics. Another analysis of Medicare data suggested that as Covid cases spiked during certain periods in 2020, cancer screenings fell. The analysis — conducted by Avalere Health, a consulting firm, for Community Oncology Alliance, which represents independent cancer specialists — found that testing levels in November were about 25 percent lower than in 2019. The number of biopsies, used to diagnose cancer, decreased by about one-third.

More here.

Plastic bags recycled into fabric to fight pollution

Helen Briggs in BBC:

Scientists have made fabrics from polythene in a move they say could reduce plastic pollution and make the fashion industry more sustainable. Polythene is a ubiquitous plastic, found in everything from plastic bags to food packaging. The new textiles have potential uses in sports wear, and even high-end fashion, according to US researchers. The plastic “cloth” is more environmentally-friendly than natural fibres, and can be recycled, they say. Dr Svetlana Boriskina, from the department of engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, US, said plastic bags that nobody wants can be turned into high-performance fabrics with a low environmental footprint. “There’s no reason why the simple plastic bag cannot be made into fibre and used as a high-end garment,” she told BBC News. “You can go literally from trash to a high-performance garment that provides comfort and can be recycled multiple times back into a new garment.”

The fabric is made from fibres of polythene woven on industrial looms into textiles that are designed to be comfortable to wear. Crucially, the fibres are designed to allow water to escape, rather than repelling water like conventional polythene. The researchers say the fabric is less damaging to the environment than the likes of wool, cotton, linen, silk, nylon and polyester, and can be washed in cold water, further reducing the environmental footprint. The plastic can be dyed in different colours before being woven into fabric. Because it is made up of only one type of plastic – polythene – it can be recycled into new garments time and time again. The fabric has potential for use in sportswear, such as trainers, vests and leggings, they say. In the long-term, it could also have applications as a high-performance space suit, engineered to be protect against cosmic radiation.

More here.

A Dinner in France, 1973: Josephine Baker, James Baldwin, and a Very Young Henry Louis Gates, Jr

Harmony Holiday in Literary Hub:

In the summer of 1973 Time magazine decided not to run a piece that it had commissioned, a conversation between James Baldwin and Josephine Baker about the African American experience of expatriate life. Time claimed the pair was “passé,” a couple of relics. Henry Louis Gates Jr., then 22, having just graduated from Yale and been hired as summer correspondent for Time, had conducted the interview in France as part of a longer series on Black expatriates, investigating why they’d remained in self-imposed exile even after the civil rights gains of the 1960s. And Time helped answer Gates’s question for him, making blatant then what remains clear today: America doesn’t respect Black people. Gates would take the dismissal of his piece and its subjects as further evidence that he could accomplish more as a critic than a reporter to help shape the public’s sense of Black culture outside and beyond the media’s preoccupation with fads and bottom lines.

The transcription we are left with feels abridged, but it blooms with a sense of intimacy as we accompany Gates on his assignment, first to Josephine’s favorite restaurant in Monte Carlo—where she lives with her 12 children—and then to Baldwin’s residence in St. Paul de Vence, where the three of them share a long night of wine, food, and discussion that begins with Gates moved to tears at just being in his hero Jimmy’s presence.

More here.

Pioneers Linking Math and Computer Science Win the Abel Prize

Kevin Hartnett in Quanta:

When Avi Wigderson and László Lovász began their careers in the 1970s, theoretical computer science and pure mathematics were almost entirely separate disciplines. Today, they’ve grown so close it’s hard to find the line between them. For their many fundamental contributions to both fields, and for their work drawing them together, today Lovász and Wigderson were awarded the Abel Prize, an honor given out by the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters and regarded as one of the highest honors in mathematics.

“In many ways their work is complementary. Avi is on the computer science side and Lovász is on the mathematics side, but a lot of the issues they work on are related,” said Russell Impagliazzo, a computer scientist at the University of California, San Diego who has collaborated with both researchers.

The opportunity for this pairing to occur at all was a result of the unique period in scientific history in which they both grew up.

More here.

Can Game Theory Combat Discrimination?

S. M. Amadae in Public Books:

When and why do people cooperate or compete? Researchers at the RAND Corporation studied this question in the 1950s using what was then a new decision science called game theory. Game theory was developed during World War II by the Hungarian mathematical physicist and leading Manhattan Project contributor John von Neumann and the Austrian economist Oskar Morgenstern. It was immediately used by operations researchers for military logistics, and to develop a science of military decision making. By the late 1950s it was applied to nuclear deterrence, with the future Nobel laureate economist Thomas Schelling publishing The Strategy of Conflict in 1960.

RAND Corporation researchers developed one particular game called the Prisoner’s Dilemma. In this scenario, two coconspirators have been jailed by a clever district attorney who offers them each a choice of confessing their crime or remaining silent. If both remain silent, they will both go free. If both confess, they will both receive five-year sentences. However, if one confesses and the other stays silent, then the confessor will go free and receive a handsome reward while the other receives a 10-year sentence. For those not schooled in strategic logic, it may seem obvious that both should stay silent. And yet, according to game theory, it is rational for each to confess. Hence both end up with a worse outcome than if the two had cooperated.

RAND researchers were fascinated with the Prisoner’s Dilemma game, which social scientists would subsequently apply to everything from nuclear deterrence and international-relations anarchy to the social contract, free riding, and public-goods distribution.

More here.

Wednesday Poem

A Happy Thought

Assuming this is the last day of my life
(which might mean it is almost the first)
I’m struck blind but my blindness is bright.

Prepare for what’s known here as death;
have no fear of that strange word forever.
Even I can see there’s nothing there

to be afraid of: having already been
to forever I’m unable to recall
anything that scared me, there, or hurt.

What frightened me, apparently, and hurt
was being born. But I got over that
with no hard feelings. Dying, I imagine,

it will be the same deal, lonesomer maybe,
but surely no more shocking or prolonged-
It’s dark as I recall, then bright, so bright.

by Franz Wright
from The Best American Poetry 2006
Scribner Poetry

Neurobiologists take an unexpected detour to decode decision-making

Anastasia Gorelova in Phys.Org:

In a paper published in Nature Neuroscience last week, University of Pittsburgh researchers described how reward signals in the brain are modulated by uncertainty. Dopamine signals are intertwined with reward learning; they teach the brain which cues or actions predict the best rewards. New findings from the Stauffer lab at Pitt School of Medicine indicate that dopamine signals also reflect the certainty surrounding reward predictions. In short, dopamine signals might teach the brain about the likelihood of getting a reward.

Briefly, what is the background for this study?

KR: We were studying ambiguity—a complex environmental factor that makes it hard for humans and animals to know what to predict—and this project was a cool detour that arose organically from our preliminary data. We found something interesting that we were not expecting, and we saw it to completion.

WS: Dopamine neurons are crucial for reward learning. Dopamine neurons are activated by rewards that are better than predicted and suppressed by rewards that are worse than predicted. This pattern of activity is reminiscent of “reward prediction errors,” the differences between received and predicted rewards. Reward prediction errors are crucial to animal and machine learning. However, in classical animal and machine learning theories, ‘predicted rewards’ are simply the average value of past outcomes. Although these predictions are useful, it would be much more useful to predict average values as well as more complex statistics that reflect uncertainty. Therefore, we wanted to know whether dopamine teaching signals reflect those more complex statistics, and whether they could be used to teach the brain about real-world incentives.

More here.

Why the ‘nice guy’ penalty disadvantages all workers

Christine Ro in BBC:

David Wyatt has worked in public relations for more than 20 years, having worked his way up to become a senior vice-president at an Austin, Texas-based firm. He recognises his privileges as a straight white man whose education was paid for. Yet even with all of his advantages, he believes his career has been impacted by a subtle bias: one against men who shun macho stereotypes, even in a field largely made up of women. His work style is gentle; he believes the adage about catching more flies with honey. And although he’s never been formally reprimanded or punished for his way of working, he believes that it’s meant he’s climbed the ladder more slowly than more traditionally masculine colleagues.

“I’ve had a lower profile than many of my other male colleagues who portray a sort of sportsman-like sharkiness in the business world. Many of them act more cutthroat in going after the big accounts whereas I have been more of an observer and a server,” reflects Wyatt. “For my entire career, the alpha-male types who make fun of co-workers as a matter of course, goof off but largely deliver, use denigrating terms for women and junior staffers and generally behave in a cocky manner have been advanced more quickly, been recognised more vocally.” 

Wyatt is among others who believe men’s career trajectories can depend on how well they fit gendered preconceptions. How this plays out depends enormously on class and sector, of course – a surgeon will face different expectations than an oil worker – but, overall, there’s a great deal of research suggesting that men are disliked, distrusted and passed over when they exhibit qualities stereotypically assigned to women. As the pandemic has shifted so much of working life into homes and private spaces, it’s also important to consider how rigid gender norms hurt men, and how everyone can benefit from easing them. 

More here.

The Baddest Man in Town

Eric McHenry at The American Scholar:

Mississippi John Hurt, Cab Calloway, Woody Guthrie, James Brown, Wilson Pickett, Tina Turner, Bob Dylan, and Beck are among the hundreds who have sung a version of Stagolee’s story. Lloyd Price took a rollicking rendition of “Stagger Lee” to the top of the pop charts in 1959. Such brushes with mainstream success never compromised Stag’s street cred, though. In bars, barbershops, and prisons, he remained “the baddest n—– who ever lived,” the antihero of profane epics and rhyming “toasts” whose exploits offered a fantasy of freedom from life’s indignities. Stagolee haunts the prose of Richard Wright and Toni Morrison; James Baldwin worked on a novel about the character and late in his life published a long poem called “Staggerlee Wonders.”

Scholars of African-American studies generally agree that both the pimp protagonists of  ’70s blaxploitation films and the self-mythologists of gangsta rap are Stagolee’s direct descendants: mononymous, fearless, and fastidious about their name-brand apparel.

more here.

The Album of Unwritten Work

Nat Trotman at Cabinet Magazine:

In 1843, the Independent Order of Odd Fellowship was established in Baltimore following a wave of reforms within the Grand Lodge of Odd Fellows of the United States. In the years since the Odd Fellows first arrived from England in 1819, the fraternal organization had gained a reputation for boisterous carousing while garnering membership as a working-class alternative to Freemasonry. The Antimasonic movement of the 1830s introduced a massive wave of upper-middle-class initiates to the Odd Fellows, who brought with them a new emphasis on moral uprightness. Initiation fees increased, a newly formed judicial system expelled disreputable members, and alcohol was banned from all lodges, which began to save and invest their funds, no longer assisting members in times of need. In this new spirit of exclusivity and high principles, the I.O.O.F. instituted a body of rituals to accompany a streamlined and regulated order of degrees. The keys to these rituals were a set of books owned by each Grand Lodge, the “Albums of Written and Unwritten Work.”

more here.

Daniel Dennett’s lifelong quest to understand the making of the mind

Joshua Rothman in The New Yorker:

Four billion years ago, Earth was a lifeless place. Nothing struggled, thought, or wanted. Slowly, that changed. Seawater leached chemicals from rocks; near thermal vents, those chemicals jostled and combined. Some hit upon the trick of making copies of themselves that, in turn, made more copies. The replicating chains were caught in oily bubbles, which protected them and made replication easier; eventually, they began to venture out into the open sea. A new level of order had been achieved on Earth. Life had begun.

The tree of life grew, its branches stretching toward complexity. Organisms developed systems, subsystems, and sub-subsystems, layered in ever-deepening regression. They used these systems to anticipate their future and to change it. When they looked within, some found that they had selves—constellations of memories, ideas, and purposes that emerged from the systems inside. They experienced being alive and had thoughts about that experience. They developed language and used it to know themselves; they began to ask how they had been made.

This, to a first approximation, is the secular story of our creation. It has no single author; it’s been written collaboratively by scientists over the past few centuries. If, however, it could be said to belong to any single person, that person might be Daniel Dennett, a seventy-four-year-old philosopher who teaches at Tufts. In the course of forty years, and more than a dozen books, Dennett has endeavored to explain how a soulless world could have given rise to a soulful one. His special focus is the creation of the human mind.

More here.

Sean Carroll’s Mindscape Podcast: Daryl Morey on Analytics, Psychology, and Basketball

Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe:

You might think that human beings, exhausted by competing for resources and rewards in the real world, would take it easy and stick to cooperation in their spare time. But no; we are fascinated by competition, and invent games and sports to create artificial competition just for fun. These competitions turn out to be wonderful laboratories for exploring concepts like optimization, resource allocation, strategy, and human psychology. Today’s guest, Daryl Morey, is a world leader in thinking analytically about sports, as well as the relationship between impersonal data and the vagaries of human behavior. He’s currently an executive in charge of the Philadelphia 76ers, but I promise you don’t need to be a fan of the Sixers or of basketball or of sports in general to enjoy this wide-ranging conversation.

More here.