Noam Chomsky and David Barsamian in The Nation:

David Barsamian: You have spoken about the difference between Trump’s buffoonery, which gets endlessly covered by the media, and the actual policies he is striving to enact, which receive less attention. Do you think he has any coherent economic, political, or international policy goals? What has Trump actually managed to accomplish in his first months in office?

Noam Chomsky: There is a diversionary process under way, perhaps just a natural result of the propensities of the figure at center stage and those doing the work behind the curtains.

At one level, Trump’s antics ensure that attention is focused on him, and it makes little difference how. Who even remembers the charge that millions of illegal immigrants voted for Clinton, depriving the pathetic little man of his Grand Victory? Or the accusation that Obama had wiretapped Trump Tower? The claims themselves don’t really matter. It’s enough that attention is diverted from what is happening in the background. There, out of the spotlight, the most savage fringe of the Republican Party is carefully advancing policies designed to enrich their true constituency: the Constituency of private power and wealth, “the masters of mankind,” to borrow Adam Smith’s phrase.

These policies will harm the irrelevant general population and devastate future generations, but that’s of little concern to the Republicans. They’ve been trying to push through similarly destructive legislation for years. Paul Ryan, for example, has long been advertising his ideal of virtually eliminating the federal government, apart from service to the Constituency—though in the past he’s wrapped his proposals in spreadsheets so they would look wonkish to commentators. Now, while attention is focused on Trump’s latest mad doings, the Ryan gang and the executive branch are ramming through legislation and orders that undermine workers’ rights, cripple consumer protections, and severely harm rural communities. They seek to devastate health programs, revoking the taxes that pay for them in order to further enrich their constituency, and to eviscerate the Dodd-Frank Act, which imposed some much-needed constraints on the predatory financial system that grew during the neoliberal period.

That’s just a sample of how the wrecking ball is being wielded by the newly empowered Republican Party. Indeed, it is no longer a political party in the traditional sense. Conservative political analysts Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein have described it more accurately as a “radical insurgency,” one that has abandoned normal parliamentary politics.

More here.

Louise Aronson at The New England Review:

PubMed is the search engine for the National Library of Medicine’s comprehensive biomedical and life sciences journal article database where doctors go to look up almost everything. Put in the words “violence” and “violent,” and dozens of key phrases pop up. Many refer to subtypes of violence, such as domestic, youth, gun, sexual, and workplace, or to violent things, people, and events, including video games, patients, and crimes. Others focus on screening, prevention, and management strategies. But no key phrase addresses the violence doctors inflict on patients. Even those that seem as if they might, such as “healthcare violence,” yield articles about patient-to-healthcare-personnel violence, with branches for different countries, hospital locations such as emergency department or psychiatric service, and weapons used. Combining these key words with “doctor” or “doctor–patient relationship” doesn’t help. Searching “violence by doctors” yields articles on violence toward or against doctors.

I don’t mean to equate medicine’s violence with these other types in nature, degree, or morality. But at this moment in American history when violence figures daily in the news, when it’s clear that the need for violence is often in the eyes of the beholder and certain people are more likely to be its victims than others, and when police and prosecutors, policymakers and the public are all examining how they contribute, consciously and unintentionally, to our society’s explicit and structural violence, I wonder how it can be that in my profession we are not considering our own violence from new and varied perspectives as well.

more here.

Alison Kinney at Lapham's Quarterly:

Opera fans have their own special ways of abandoning themselves to the objects of their affection. They have been known to hitch themselves to a diva’s carriage and pull it triumphantly through the streets, shower roses onto the stage, sprinkle the ashes of dearly departed fellow fans into orchestra pits. Ludwig’s style was supported by a monarch’s power and magnificence; one of his first acts following his coronation was to summon Wagner to court. “I burn with ardor to behold the creator of the words and music of Lohengrin,” he wrote, sending a ruby ring and a signed photograph of himself as gifts. The king soon funded the premiere of Tristan und Isolde, Wagner’s masterpiece of love, death, and transcendence, which had been composed six years prior and condemned as unstageable. In the days before the premiere, Ludwig suffered from tremors and nervous anticipation; he wept at the dress rehearsal. His mash note to Wagner declared, “You are the world’s miracle; what am I without you?…My love for you, I need not repeat it, will endure forever!” In need of a way to vent his emotions, he pardoned all the participants of the 1848 revolutions that had forced his grandfather Ludwig I to abdicate the Bavarian throne.

In the deepest throes of opera fandom, Ludwig began to build castles as tributes, shrines, refuges, and monuments to his great passion. He envisioned Neuschwanstein during his first year on the throne and began its planning. A few years into his work, he wrote to Wagner, “There will be several cozy, habitable guest rooms with a splendid view of the noble Säuling, the mountains of Tyrol, and far across the plain; you know the revered guest I would like to accommodate there; the location is one of the most beautiful to be found, holy and unapproachable, a worthy temple for the divine friend who has brought salvation and true blessing to the world.”

more here.

Gary Saul Morson at The New Criterion:

In Russia, history is too important to leave to the historians. Great novelists must show how people actually lived through events and reveal their moral significance. As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn explained in his 1970 Nobel Prize lecture, literature transmits “condensed and irrefutable human experience” in a form that “defies distortion and falsehood. Thus literature . . . preserves and protects a nation’s soul.”

The latest Solzhenitsyn book to appear in English, March 1917, focuses on the great turning point of Russian, indeed world, history: the Russian Revolution.1 Just a century ago, that upheaval and the Bolshevik coup eight months later ushered in something entirely new and uniquely horrible. Totalitarianism, as invented by Lenin and developed by Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, and others, aspired to control every aspect of life, to redesign the earth and to remake the human soul. As a result, the environment suffered unequaled devastation and tens of millions of lives were lost in the Soviet Union alone. Solzhenitsyn, who spent the years 1945 to 1953 as a prisoner in the labor camp system known as the Gulag archipelago, devoted his life to showing just what happened so it could not be forgotten. One death is a tragedy but a million is a statistic, Stalin supposedly remarked, but Solzhenitsyn makes us envision life after ruined life. He aimed to shake the conscience of the world, and he succeeded, at least for a time.

more here.

John Cassidy in The New Yorker:

What does it say about the state of America when the most powerful response to another awful gun massacre comes not from a politician or a public commentator but a late-night comic? On a dismal Monday, during which the N.R.A. captives who are running the country had nothing more to offer than bromides and prayers, it was left to Jimmy Kimmel, at a television recording studio on Hollywood Boulevard, to register a cry for humanity, and a protest at the failing U.S. political system. “Well, hello, everyone, in the aftermath of another terrible and inexplicable, shocking and painful tragedy, this time in Las Vegas, which happens to be my home town,” Kimmel said in a shaky voice at the start of his opening monologue. After citing the number of dead and injured, he went on: “We wonder why, although there’s probably no way to ever know why a human being would ever do something like this to other human beings who are at a concert having fun, listening to music . . . It’s the kind of thing that makes you want to throw up, or give up. It’s too much to even process.” Kimmel is paid handsomely to send people to bed with smiles on their faces. On Monday, many of his viewers were probably tuning in to escape the round-the-clock news coverage of the Las Vegas shooting. But, rather than looking for laughs, Kimmel chose to state some harsh truths and name names.

“I’ve been reading comments from people saying this is terrible, but there is nothing we can do about it,” he said. “But I disagree with that intensely, because of course there’s something we can do about it. There are a lot of things we can do about it. But we don’t. Which is interesting, because when someone with a beard attacks us, we tap phones, we invoke travel bans, we build walls—we take every possible precaution to make sure it doesn’t happen again. But when an American buys a gun and kills other Americans, then there’s nothing we can do about that. Second Amendment, I guess. Our forefathers wanted us to have AK-47s is the argument, I assume.” If that was meant to be a joke, Kimmel wasn’t laughing. Noting that President Trump had offered prayers for the victims’ families, and that Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, had said that this wasn’t the time for political debate, he went on: “We have fifty-nine innocent people dead. It wasn’t their time, either. So I think now is the time for political debate.” He reminded his audience that, in February, Trump had signed a bill that made it easier for people with mental illness to buy guns. “The Senate Majority Leader, Mitch McConnell, the Speaker of the House, Paul Ryan, a number of other lawmakers who won’t do anything about this because the N.R.A. has their balls in a money clip, also sent their thoughts and their prayers today. Which is good. They should be praying. They should be praying for God to forgive them for letting the gun lobby run this country.”

More here.

Lorraine Boissoneault in Smithsonian:

John Berger in Literary Hub:

A few days after our return from what was thought of, until recently, as the future state of Palestine, and which is now the world’s largest prison (Gaza) and the world’s largest waiting room (the West Bank), I had a dream.

I was alone, standing, stripped to the waist, in a sandstone desert. Eventually somebody else’s hand scooped up some dusty soil from the ground and threw it at my chest. It was a considerate rather than an aggressive act. The soil or gravel changed, before it touched me, into torn strips of cloth, probably cotton, which wrapped themselves around my torso. Then these tattered rags changed again and became words, phrases. Written not by me but by the place.

Remembering this dream, the invented word landswept came to my mind. Repeatedly. Landswept describes a place or places where everything, both material and immaterial, has been brushed aside, purloined, swept away, blown down, irrigated off, everything except the touchable earth.

There’s a small hill called Al Rabweh on the western outskirts of Ramallah, it’s at the end of Tokyo street. Near the top of this hill the poet Mahmoud Darwish is buried. It’s not a cemetery.

The street is named Tokyo because it leads to the city’s Cultural Centre, which is at the foot of the hill, and was built thanks to Japanese funding.

It was in this Centre that Darwish read some of his poems for the last time—though no one then supposed it would be the last. What does the word last mean in moments of desolation?

More here.

Alvin Powell in the Harvard Gazette:

Three years ago, when Harvard biologist Jonathan Losos settled in at the Geological Lecture Hall for a talk by fellow scientist Richard Lenski, he was toying with the idea of writing a book on evolution. When the lecture was over, he was done toying.

Losos, an evolutionary biologist and the Monique and Philip Lehner Professor for the Study of Latin America, said the work described by Michigan State’s Lenski filled in a picture partly painted by experiments Losos already knew about — some of which he had conducted himself, with lizards from the genus Anolis, commonly called anoles, on islands in the Caribbean.

Lenski’s research approximated what the late Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, who wrote extensively about evolution, might have described as “replaying the tape of life,” Losos said.

“Gould had suggested that if we could somehow replay the tape — start evolution over again from the same starting point, then we get a very different outcome,” Losos said. But Gould also knew that the project he was describing was impossible, strictly “a thought experiment,” as Losos put it.

“But Lenski showed that you can replay the tape, at least in the lab using microorganisms,” he said. “By starting 12 populations of E. coli that were initially identical and subjecting them all to the same natural selection pressures, he was actually replaying the tape, not going back in time, but letting the tape replay side by side in his 12 experimental replicates.

More here.

Katherine Ellen Foley in Quartz:

It’s often said that of all the published scientific research on climate change, 97% of the papers conclude that global warming is real, problematic for the planet, and has been exacerbated by human activity.

But what about those 3% of papers that reach contrary conclusions? Some skeptics have suggested that the authors of studies indicating that climate change is not real, not harmful, or not man-made are bravely standing up for the truth, like maverick thinkers of the past. (Galileo is often invoked, though his fellow scientists mostly agreed with his conclusions—it was church leaders who tried to suppress them.)

Not so, according to a review published in the journal of Theoretical and Applied Climatology. The researchers tried to replicate the results of those 3% of papers—a common way to test scientific studies—and found biased, faulty results.

Katharine Hayhoe, an atmospheric scientist at Texas Tech University, worked with a team of researchers to look at the 38 papers published in peer-reviewed journals in the last decade that denied anthropogenic global warming.

More here.

Sue Hubbard at Artlyst:

We are awash with prizes across the arts. From the Man Booker, to the National Poetry Competition, from the John Moores to the Jerwood Drawing Prize. There are probably also copious music prizes and dance prizes that I know nothing about. And yet does this hunger for X-Factor style winners and losers really make any sense? If there’d been a Turner Prize in late 20th century Paris who would have won? Picasso or Braque? And would the runner up have been seen as an also-ran, one who slipped from view into the murky shallows of art history? It’s worth asking what these prizes are really measuring? It’s like comparing sardines with toffee apples. You wouldn’t want either of them all the time. But each has their value. How can a film be better than a painting, a video than an installation?

But we live in a consumerist age. Competitions provide razzmatazz and bruhaha that have little to do with the winner being the ‘best’. The public (and much of the art world) rely on the seal of approval that a prize bestows to know who to watch, which horse (so to speak) to put their money on. Having said that, it is an improvement that the proceedings now take place in different cities and that the event isn’t so metropolitan centric. And, probably, it’s a good thing that it’s open to older artists. But in the end what’s being judged is never quite clear, even though the official line it that it’s ‘a prize awarded to British artists and artists based in Britain for outstanding exhibitions and projects presented over the past year…[that] bring new developments in contemporary art to a wider public and…encourage debate around art made today’.

more here.

Christian Lorentzen at Literary Review:

The Rub of Time, Martin Amis’s new collection of literary essays and journalism from the past three decades, sits in a broad valley of subject matter, between the Olympus governed by the ghost of Vladimir Nabokov and the chintzy glass and brass of Trump Tower. The word for such a collection is ‘uneven’, though in this case it’s less a matter of the writer’s performance than of the worthiness of his subject. Suitability of writer to subject matter is another question, but celebrity novelists will write about whatever they want, and we’ll follow them as long as the glossies can afford the plane fare.

And I’ll happily follow Amis into lowlife territory – to Las Vegas, where he promptly strikes out at the World Series of Poker, and to Pornoland, where he learns which sex acts require acting and which bring out a performer’s personality naturally. The porn piece, written for Tina Brown’s short-lived Talk in 2000, is now dated, the industry and writing about it having become both wilder and more banal due to online proliferation. Amis’s inhibitions – he doesn’t like seeing pricks on screen – have a retro charm. The poker essay, from 2006, suffers like many of Amis’s post-9/11 writings from gratuitous references to Islam. Las Vegas is ‘un-Islamic’ (he means anti-puritanical) and with so much vice around, the ‘Taliban would have warm work to do’ there (so would the passengers on the Mayflower).

The tic was present in a more amusing form before 9/11. In a 1997 New Yorker essay on adaptations of Austen for the screen, Amis blames Ayatollah Khomeini for the fact that he couldn’t walk out of Four Weddings and a Funeral after twenty minutes: he was sitting next to Salman Rushdie, whose security detail kept them in place for the film’s duration.

more here.

Fiona MacDonald in Science Alert:

It's been 20 years since Australia rolled out nation-wide gun law reform. And now an analysis of more than four decades of data on violence in the country has come up with a conclusion: it worked.

The study found there have been no fatal mass shootings since April 1996 – despite experiencing one every two to three years in the decades leading up to the changes. There's also been an overall drop in the number of people killed by guns.

"If you take away the means of committing a mass killing with firearms, you don't have mass killings for the next 20 years," lead researcher Simon Chapman from the University of Sydney told ABC. "That's been our experience here [in Australia]."

The results come at a time when the US is reeling after its most deadly mass shooting ever, and experts are predicting that around 30,000 people will be killed – or kill themselves – with guns in the country this year.

But last week, the US Senate rejected four proposals to tighten gun laws, amid arguments that gun control takes away personal freedoms, and won't necessarily stop humans from killing each other.

To figure out whether or not that was the case, a team of Australian researchers looked at government stats on gun deaths between 1979 and 2013, as well as media reports of mass shootings – which is classified as an event where five or more people are killed by gunshot wounds.

More here.

James Fallows in The Atlantic:

Here’s the other dark truth about America that today’s shooting reminds us of. The identity of the shooter doesn’t affect how many people are dead or how grievously their families and communities are wounded. But we know that everything about the news coverage and political response would be different, depending on whether killer turns out to be “merely” a white American man with a non-immigrant-sounding name. That’s who most mass-shooters turn out to be, from Charles Whitman at the University of Texas tower back in 1966 onward. And from Whitman onward, killers of this sort are described as “deranged” or “disturbed” or “resentful,” their crimes a reflection of their own torment rather than any larger trend or force. They are “troubled” youths, like the white teenaged boy who shot up classmates in West Paducah, Kentucky, in 1997, or the two white teenaged boys who shot up classmates in Columbine, Colorado, two years later, or the white teenaged boy who carried out the atrocity in Newtown, Connecticut. Or troubled older people, like the white man in his 60s who shot up the congressional baseball game this summer, or (on initial reports) the white man in his 60s who murdered so many people today. A report on the congressional-baseball shooter described his “descent into rage.”

These people are indeed deranged and angry and disturbed, and the full story of today’s killer is not yet known. It is possible that he will prove to have motives or connections beyond whatever was happening in his own mind (as Graeme Wood explains). But we know that if the killers were other than whites with “normal” names, the responsibility for their crime would not be assigned solely to themselves and their tortured psyches.

• If they had Arab-sounding names, this would be a new episode of jihad. How often has Donald Trump invoked “San Bernardino” in his speeches, as shorthand for the terrorist threat in our heartland?
• If they were Mexican, they would demonstrate the perils of immigration, and that Mexico is “not sending its best people.”
• If they had been illegal immigrants, they’d dramatize the need to crack down harder, right now.
• And if they had been black, I shudder to imagine the consequences.

* * *

This is who we are.

More here.

From the Los Angeles Review of Books:

Richard Rorty is considered one of the greatest philosophers of the 20th century. He is credited with reviving the philosophical school of American pragmatism and challenging the accepted pieties of analytic philosophy. He championed “quietism,” which he says attempts “to dissolve, rather than solve” sets of problems that should now be considered obsolete. This November 23, 2005, interview is among his last; he died in 2007.

Rorty came to Stanford as a fellow at the Humanities Center in 1996 and then joined the faculty of the Comparative Literature Department in 1998. Beginning in the 1970s, he challenged the notion of philosophy as a discipline that could discern timeless truths about the world. Such attempts were motivated by western philosophy’s misguided reliance on Platonic metaphysics, the notion that there are underlying structures, realities or truths that stand firm against the vagaries of history and social mores. Rorty insisted that we have only a linguistic and causal relationship with the world, so any attempt to find some kind of transcendent, unmediated knowledge about it is futile. He famously urged that intellectuals shift their focus from “the problems of philosophy” to “the problems of men.”

His Entitled Opinions conversation with Harrison moves to the limits of philosophy in describing the nature of reality, and then whether philosophy should tackle human aspirations for greatness or stick to maximizing human happiness. In an occasionally testy exchange with Harrison, Rorty makes a controversial defense of bourgeois liberal democracy, arguing that the rest of the world should be more like America, and America should be more like Norway. The potential cost for cultural diversity? “That’s the price we pay for history,” he says. He takes a number of provocative positions in the conversation. Does he stand alone? As he notes, loneliness is the lot of mankind: “If you don’t have any sense of loneliness you probably won’t be interested in religion or philosophy; if you do, you will.”

Listen to the full interview here.

Douglas Fox in Aeon:

Leonid Moroz has spent two decades trying to wrap his head around a mind-boggling idea: even as scientists start to look for alien life in other planets, there might already be aliens, with surprisingly different biology and brains, right here on Earth. Those aliens have hidden in plain sight for millennia. They have plenty to teach us about the nature of evolution, and what to expect when we finally discover life on other worlds.

Moroz, a neuroscientist, saw the first hint of his discovery back in the summer of 1995, not long after arriving in the United States from his native Russia. He spent that summer at the Friday Harbor marine laboratory in Washington. The lab sat amid an archipelago of forested islands in Puget Sound – a crossroads of opposing tides and currents that carried hundreds of animal species past the rocky shore: swarms of jellyfish, amphipod crustaceans, undulating sea lilies, nudibranch slugs, flatworms, and the larvae of fish, sea stars and countless other animals. These creatures represented not just the far reaches of Puget Sound, but also the farthest branches of the animal tree of life. Moroz spent hours out on the pier behind the lab, collecting animals so he could study their nerves. He had devoted years to studying nervous systems across the animal kingdom, in hopes of understanding the evolutionary origin of brains and intelligence. But he came to Friday Harbor to find one animal in particular.

He trained his eyes to recognise its bulbous, transparent body in the sunlit water: an iridescent glint and fleeting shards of rainbow light, scattered by the rhythmic beating of thousands of hair-like cilia, propelling it through the water. This type of animal, called a ctenophore (pronounced ‘ten-o-for’ or ‘teen-o-for’), was long considered just another kind of jellyfish. But that summer at Friday Harbor, Moroz made a startling discovery: beneath this animal’s humdrum exterior was a monumental case of mistaken identity. From his very first experiments, he could see that these animals were unrelated to jellyfish. In fact, they were profoundly different from any other animal on Earth.

More here.

Suzanne Moore in The Guardian:

Now that he’s dead, the disgusting old sleaze in the smoking jacket is being spoken of as some kind of liberator of women. Kim Kardashian is honoured to have been involved. Righty ho.

I don’t really know which women were liberated by Hefner’s fantasies. I guess if you aspired to be a living Barbie it was as fabulous as it is to be in Donald Trump’s entourage. Had we gone to court, I would like to have heard some of the former playmates and bunnies speak up in court – because over the years they have.

The accounts of the “privileged few” who made it into the inner sanctum of the 29-room Playboy mansion as wives/girlfriends/bunny rabbits are quite something. In Hefner’s petting zoo/harem/brothel, these interchangeable blondes were put on a curfew. They were not allowed to have friends to visit. And certainly not boyfriends. They were given an “allowance”. The big metal gates on the mansion that everyone claimed were to keep people out of this “nirvana” were described by one-time Hefner “girlfriend no 1” Holly Madison in her autobiography thus: “I grew to feel it was meant to lock me in.”

The fantasy that Hefner sold was not a fantasy of freedom for women, but for men.

More here.