David Lehman at The American Scholar:

John Ashbery, who died in the early morning hours on Sunday of Labor Day weekend, was doubtlessly the best known and most influential poet of his generation, a mentor to me, and a good friend. I went to readings he gave in my sophomore year at Columbia and was, like many of my classmates, blown away by his long poem “The Skaters,” which many of my buddies on the Columbia Review, committed as we were to the aesthetic of the New York School, thought was the single finest long poem in English since “The Waste Land.” He very quickly became my favorite poet.

Some of his friends called him Ashes. I favored JA in part because of his brilliant early poem “The Picture of Little JA in a Prospect of Flowers,” the title of which was itself a lift from a poem by Andrew Marvell. We—those of us privileged enough to get close to the man—would entertain one another with anecdotes about him, clever things he said, or just news of a great new poem, such as “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,” which knocked our socks off when it appeared in Poetry magazine in 1974. A year later it was the title poem of a poetry collection that captured the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award, an unprecedented triple crown.

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Noah Smith in Bloomberg:

The New Heterodox Explosion rose in large part out of strongly left-leaning intellectual circles, particularly sociology, the humanities and other disciplines outside economics. It has also found a home in some economics departments in other countries (most notably the U.K.). Recently, it has started to permeate blogs and the media.

The new website Evonomics, for example, is heavily devoted to strongly worded critiques of the entire edifice of modern economics and it’s where the work of many of the most outspoken champions of the New Heterodox Explosion appears. These include evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson, activist and venture capitalist Nick Hanauer, speechwriter Eric Liu and Eric Beinhocker of the Institute for New Economic Thinking. In a spate of recent blog posts and editorials, these thinkers have advocated replacing mainstream economic theory with thinking based on evolution, and/or on complexity theory.

Though it’s difficult to boil down these critiques to a few sentences, one basic theme of Wilson, Hanauer, et al.’s thinking is that modern economics is based on selfishness. Mainstream theories model human beings as atomistic individuals pursuing their own wants. But, say these Evonomics writers, people are social beings who care a lot about their fellow humans, and are also deeply embedded in larger social structures and organizations like communities, nations and cultures.

I’m sympathetic to this point of view. I’m not at all sure that economies can be completely understood by looking at individual decisions, any more than I’m certain the growth of a tree can be understood simply by looking at the motions of the particles in the leaves and roots. And I do wish that economists dedicated a lot more thought and attention to the phenomena they call “externalities” and “social preferences.”

But I’m also very wary of applying the Evonomics ideas to policy-making without a lot more work. First, the connection to evolution and complexity theory often seems less than solid. Nobody really knows if economies evolve the way organisms do. And efforts to connect complexity theory to economics, led by the Santa Fe Institute, have been going on for quite some time without any dramatic breakthroughs.

George Dvorsky in io9:

In a nutshell, the Technological Singularity is a term used to describe the theoretical moment in time when artificial intelligence matches and then exceeds human intelligence. The term was popularized by scifi writer Vernor Vinge, but full credit goes to the mathematician John von Neumann, who spoke of [in the words of Stanislaw Ulam] “ever accelerating progress of technology and changes in the mode of human life, which gives the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not continue.”

By “not continue” von Neumann was referring to the potential for humanity to lose control and fall outside the context of its technologies. Today, this technology is assumed to be artificial intelligence, or more accurately, recursively-improving artificial intelligence (RIAI), leading to artificial superintelligence (ASI).

Because we cannot predict the nature and intentions of an artificial superintelligence, we have come to refer to this sociological event horizon the Technological Singularity — a concept that’s open to wide interpretation, and by consequence, gross misunderstanding. Here are the worst:

“The Singularity Is Not Going to Happen"

Oh, I wouldn’t bet against it. The onslaught of Moore’s Law appears to be unhindered, while breakthroughs in brainmapping and artificial intelligencecontinue apace. There are no insurmountable conceptual or technological hurdles awaiting us.

And what most ASI skeptics fail to understand is that we have yet to even enter the AI era, a time when powerful — but narrow — systems subsume many domains currently occupied by humans. There will be tremendous incentive to develop these systems, both for economics and security. Superintelligence will eventually appear, likely the product of megacorporations and the military.

Chris McGreal in The Guardian:

At 18, Olivia Katbi was answering the phones and emails in a Republican state senator’s office in Ohio. Then the legislator threw his weight behind a particularly contentious anti-abortion law. “I realised that the party I’m working for is evil. After that I identified as a Democrat but I wasn’t really happy with their policies either,” said Katbi, now 25.

Back then, she couldn’t articulate her reservations about President Barack Obama. There were the drone strikes, and the limitations of his healthcare reforms. But mostly it was a frustrating sense he wasn’t serving her interests so much as those of a monied elite. So in the 2012 presidential election, Katbi voted for Jill Stein, the Green party candidate. But that didn’t change the world.

It was only last year, when Bernie Sanders made his run under the banner of democratic socialism, that it all started to fall into place.

“My politics were to the left of the Democratic party but I didn’t realise there was an entire ideology, an entire movement that was there. It had never occurred to me,” said Katbi. “Bernie was my introduction to the concept of democratic socialism. It’s not like I associated it with the cold war. It was a new concept to me completely. That was the case for a lot of millennials, which is why the movement has grown so much.”

Katbi, who works at an organization helping to settle immigrants and refugees in Portland, Oregon, became “socialist curious”. She joined the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), a rapidly growing big-tent movement that has drawn in former communists and fired up millennials. The DSA is now the largest socialist organization in the US as surging membership, which has quadrupled since the election to around 25,000, has breathed new life into a once dormant group.

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Tim Smith-Laing in The Telegraph:

With all the political focus on immigration to these shores, it is easy to forget that anyone ever leaves Britain. But they do. Last year the Office for National Statistics recorded the emigration of 128,000 British citizens. Of course, that needs to be seen in context: out of a total population of 65 million, 128,000 is not even a fifth of a per cent. Which goes some way to showing how much of a decision it is to leave one’s country and live elsewhere; even in the 21st century it tends to take a certain kind of person and a certain kind of impetus to do so. The International Passenger Survey records reasons for leaving the UK under the four bland categories of “work-related” (50 per cent), “accompanying others” (just under 10 per cent), “formal study” (just under 5 per cent), and “other/not stated” (everyone else). A more imaginative officialdom might rename the same categories as “money”, “love”, “knowledge” and “mystery”. That would hardly fly as a set of boarding-card labels, but – having been in the first and third categories, and as a beneficiary of the second category – I think it gets closer to the truth of things. We are talking about human motives, after all.

It is worth bearing in mind what it takes to emigrate nowadays when reading Emigrants, James Evans’s engaging account of English emigration to America in the 17th century. If so few people are willing to leave Britain when most of the world is a few hours’ flight away, what possessed them to risk it when a transatlantic voyage could take anything from five weeks up to eternity? They did leave, though, and in droves. As Evans points out, figures are harder to come by for the 17th century, as no one was keeping track, especially not of those who counted among “the offals of our people”, as one writer put it. But historians estimate that across the century an average of 38,000 people left England for America each year, from a population of around five and a half million. That is a smaller percentage than today’s figures, but it is, Evans notes, “a colossal number” in a European context. The so-called “swarming of the English” was twice as large as contemporary emigration from Spain, and 40 times that from France. In an era when England had no significant means of competing on the imperial front with France or Spain, we became instead “the pioneer of mass migration” – a move that cemented the “Anglo-Saxon” character of North America.

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Ban Panko in Smithsonian:

With their small furry bodies and large inquisitive eyes, gray mouse lemurs can seem like a cross between a pug and an alien. In fact, these Madagascar primates share much in common with us. For one, they feel mounting stress as their forest habitat is destroyed—and new research shows how living under constant pressure can hurt their survival. Mouse lemurs are a subgroup of lemurs that boast the title of smallest primates on Earth. The gray mouse lemur (Microcebus murinus), which measures in at just under a foot from nose to tail and weighs around two ounces, is the largest species within that group. It's currently considered to be a species of "Least Concern" by the International Union for Conservation of Nature's "Red List," but the organization does note that the population of gray mouse lemurs is declining due largely to habitat loss.

Overall, Madagascar's dozens of lemur species have long faced threats from deforestation and hunting by humans. "It's well known that this species is under very high pressure from anthropogenic activities and habitat loss," Josué Rakotoniaina, an ecologist at Germany's Georg-August University of Göttingen, says of his choice to scrutinize these petite primates in particular. "But there was no study of how those human activities can affect these animals ecologically." Mouse lemurs are proving surprisingly useful to scientists studying human diseases, thanks to their conveniently small size (about double the size of a mouse, with a tail up to twice the length of their body) and genetic similarity to us (they’re primates, like us and unlike mice). In recent years, scientists have found that they make the perfect model for looking at obesity, eye disease and even neurological disorders like Alzheimer’s disease and dementia.

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Erin Keane in Salon:

Much has been written in the wake of the 2016 elections about our polarized political climate and the growing inequality that has contributed to the electoral stakes feeling higher — and collective fuses running shorter — than they have in decades. Along with the election postmortems comes a dynamic new literary anthology, “Tales of Two Americas: Stories of Inequality in a Divided Nation” (Sept. 5, Penguin).

Edited by John Freeman, who created a similar collection focused on New York in 2015, “Tales of Two Americas” includes short fiction, essays, narrative journalism and poetry from a powerhouse stable of acclaimed authors including Roxane Gay, Richard Russo, Ann Patchett, Kevin Young, Anthony Doerr, Sandra Cisneros, Rebecca Solnit, Edwidge Danticat, Clair Vaye Watkins and recent U.S. poet laureate Juan Felipe Herrera, among others. Its pages cover a lot of ground in space and time, from Mexican immigrant agricultural workers in mid-century California to the plasma centers of today, from the complex love life of a Haitian immigrant home health aide in Miami to the secret yearnings of a waitress in a decaying northern Michigan town.

There’s neither glossy escapism nor gritty dystopian metaphor here. “Tales of Two Americas” is instead committed to a realistic portrayal of the differences between those with easy access to America’s opportunities and those without. In a time when for many Americans — as “Swamplandia!” author and Pulitzer finalist Karen Russell writes in her essay on the homeless population of Portland, Oregon — “the difference between living indoors and living on the street is an injury, an accident, a family emergency, a bad season, a month’s salary,” this clear-eyed collection of truths about inequality feels more urgent than ever.

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David V. Johnson in The Baffler:

I would like to coin a phrase, the complacent intellectual class, to describe the overwhelming number of pundits, thought leaders, and policy wonks who accept, welcome, or even enforce slovenly scholarship. These people might, in the abstract, like research that maintains the highest standards, they might even consider themselves academics or bona fide researchers, when in fact they have lost the capacity of maintaining even the most basic standards of rigor.

I am motivated to do so after reading Tyler Cowen’s new book The Complacent Class: The Self-Defeating Quest for the American Dream. I propose the term with some trepidation. Cowen—a George Mason University economist, libertarian theorist, and “legendary blogger” (to quote the book’s inset)—is often a smart commentator who puts his finger on a lot of interesting social phenomena, introduces novel ideas, and proves worth reading from time to time.

But books are different from blog posts and op-eds. And this book fails so glaringly that it makes me despair for this country’s literary culture and intellectual life in general. So let me use Cowen’s latest venture to illustrate what we should all demand from the work of our intellectual class, lest our nation continue to vegetate in the pretend-thinking of #AspenIdeas pseudo-academia.

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Matt Lebovic in the Boston Herald:

You won’t find it mentioned along the city’s “Freedom Trail” route, but Boston was once home to a thriving network of Nazi supporters. Not only did the Cradle of Liberty’s anti-Semitic activists receive funds and direction from Berlin, they also helped incite “small pogroms” against Jews well into the war.

During the same years as the Holocaust, “marauding anti-Semitic bands severely restricted the physical movement of many Jews in [Boston and New York], rendering it difficult for them to carry on normal religious, business, or social activities,” wrote Stephen H. Norwood, a history professor at the University of Oklahoma.

In Boston and elsewhere, anti-Jewish incitement was fueled by Father Charles Coughlin, the “founder of hate radio.” Although he was based in Michigan, Coughlin’s largest following was in Boston, where members of his Christian Front heeded the priest’s calls to organize boycotts and mass mailings against Jews.

“When we get through with the Jews in America, they’ll think the treatment they received in Germany was nothing,” said Coughlin during a tirade in the Bronx. The hate-monger also published “Social Justice,” a newspaper that reprinted “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” in 1938, just as the persecution of German Jews reached a fever pitch.

Coughlin’s largely Irish American adherents earned Boston the moniker, “the poisonous city.”

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Peter Brannen in The Atlantic:

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Peter Mandler in Aeon:

The humanities are in crisis. It’s become orthodoxy. In fact, so much attention has been paid to the ‘crisis of the humanities’ that few have stopped to ask if there actually is such a crisis. Over just the past few generations, enormous changes have transformed higher education. These changes have brought a greater proportion of 18-year-olds to university. In the case of most countries apart from the United States, this brings a huge increase, from a low base – and thus tremendous changes in the composition of that student body in terms of class, gender, ethnicity and other key markers. In each generation, commentators have predicted (and policymakers have demanded) that the humanities would suffer from a more utilitarian, career-oriented, tech-savvy influx. But it hasn’t happened.

In the English-speaking world, over the past half-century, the proportion of students studying humanities at university has hardly changed. True, as one might expect, in the US, the United Kingdom and Australia, there have been fluctuations and important changes in educational demographics, most importantly more women going to college. The crude picture is this: in 1971, humanities students outnumbered business students; now it’s the other way around. But in 1971 there were also about 50 per cent more business majors than science majors; now there are about 250 per cent more.

So relative to business, both the sciences and the humanities have fallen behind since 1971, and the sciences much further. Since the 1980s, however, the gap between the humanities and business has, in fact, shrunk, while the gap between the sciences and business continued to grow. And, very importantly, the rapid expansion of higher education in the world over the past couple of generations means that, in absolute numbers, more people are studying the humanities than ever before.

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Brandon Taylor at Literary Hub:

If Serena were a white man, people would say that she is her own greatest critic. But Serena is a black woman, and there isn’t anything this country hates more than a black woman.

Once, a coworker said to me that he didn’t like Serena because she seemed arrogant. He said that people always have a difficult time with arrogance, and then he mentioned Tiger Woods and LeBron James as notable examples. Why is it that people have such a difficult time with black people who love themselves? Or, I guess, more directly, I wonder why it is that this country can only justify compensating black people when there remains a sense that the white money paying them feels like a favor which of course is impossible if the black person in question takes what they are due with a sense of self-awareness.

Serena is expected to remain estranged from herself. She is expected to deny herself the knowledge of her miracles, her accomplishments in the face of a world that would rather her apologize for existing. She is expected to suffer graciously, with immense and eternal gratitude. She is called graceless, arrogant, manly, masculine, brutish, an ape, thuggish, ugly, and all manner of other things. Her womanhood is held against her even while it is simultaneously denied to her.

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Sam Kriss and Ellie Mae O'Hagan at The Baffler:

Many of the climate scientists and activists we’ve spoken with casually talk of their work with a sense of mounting despair and hopelessness, a feeling we call political depression. We’re used to considering and treating depression as an internal, medical condition, something that can be put right with a few chemicals to keep the brain swimming in serotonin; in conceptualizing our more morose turns of mind, modern medicine hasn’t come too far from the ancient idea that a melancholy disposition arises from too much black bile in the body. But when depressives talk about their experiences, they describe depression in terms of a lost relationship to the world. The author Tim Lott writes that depression “is commonly described as being like viewing the world through a sheet of plate glass; it would be more accurate to say a sheet of thick, semi-opaque ice.” A woman going by the pseudonym of Marie-Ange, one of Julia Kristeva’s analysands, describes a world hollowed out and replaced by “a nothingness . . . like invisible, cosmic, crushing antimatter.” In other words, the inward condition of depression is nothing less than a psychic event horizon; the act of staring at a vast gaping absence—of hope, of a future, of the possibility of human life. The depressive peeks into the future that climate change generates. Walter Benjamin, trying to lay out the contours of melancholic experience, saw it there. “Something new emerged,” he wrote: “an empty world.”

Freud diagnoses melancholia as the result of a lost object—a thing, a person, a world—and the fracture of that loss repeats itself within the psyche. It’s the loss that comes first. We do not think of political depression as a personal disorder, the state of being depressed because of political events; rather it’s the interiorization of our objective powerlessness in the world.

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Arnia Srinivasan at the London Review of Books:

Octopuses do not have any stable colour or texture, changing at will to match their surroundings: a camouflaged octopus can be invisible from just a few feet away. Like humans, they have centralised nervous systems, but in their case there is no clear distinction between brain and body. An octopus’s neurons are dispersed throughout its body, and two-thirds of them are in its arms: each arm can act intelligently on its own, grasping, manipulating and hunting. (Octopuses have arms, not tentacles: tentacles have suckers only at their tips. Squid and cuttlefish have a combination of arms and tentacles.) In evolutionary terms, the intelligence of octopuses is an anomaly. The last common ancestor between octopuses on the one hand, and humans and other intelligent animals (monkeys, dolphins, dogs, crows) on the other, was probably a primitive, blind worm-like creature that existed six hundred million years ago. Other creatures that are so evolutionarily distant from humans – lobsters, snails, slugs, clams – rate pretty low on the cognitive scale. But octopuses – and to some extent their cephalopod cousins, cuttlefish and squid – frustrate the neat evolutionary division between clever vertebrates and simple-minded invertebrates. They are sophisticated problem solvers; they learn, and can use tools; and they show a capacity for mimicry, deception and, some think, humour. Just how refined their abilities are is a matter of scientific debate: their very strangeness makes octopuses hard to study. Their intelligence is like ours, and utterly unlike ours. Octopuses are the closest we can come, on earth, to knowing what it might be like to encounter intelligent aliens.

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Aravindan Neelakandan in Swarajya:

The book is a collection of 42 essays, written on various occasions and issues, spanning over three decades, with one connecting thread running through them all – taking a scientific approach that’s central to the question in hand.

Consider for example the case of eugenics. It is reprehensible by human value system if a commercial venture or a state (like that of the Nazis) tries to breed people for a particular mental trait or physical ability. Such a eugenic policy would be politically and morally wrong, proclaims Dawkins, but cautions us not to get our moral compass decide the truth and thus declare it to be impossible. Because Dawkins says, “Nature, fortunately or unfortunately, is indifferent to anything so parochial as human values.” The caution Dawkins exercises is very important given the critical history of the brief but intense romance the British science establishment, particularly the biologists like JBS Haldane, had with Marxism (until they were rudely awakened by the Lysenko-pseudoscience affair). The ideological attack on science was carried forward well after the Lysenko affair too – there continued a vibrant lineage of British scientists wedded to the theory, or rather ‘The Theory’.

Dawkins criticises the eminent geneticist Richard Lewontin. A biologist of Marxist persuasion, Lewontin proudly declared himself ‘the dialectical biologist’. Lewontin, and a group of scientists led by him, accused Dawkins of Cartesian reductionism and worse.

Things did get worse when white supremacists tried to use the works of Dawkins and another evolutionary biologist E O Wilson. Both the scientists categorically distanced themselves from the perverted misuse of science by white supremacists. Yet, the campus left started a demonising campaign against both. It was sort of a Marxist revenge for Lysenko. When Wilson spoke about the biological basis for human nature, students picketed his lectures and dowsed him with water. The battle which ensued was bitter, and in a way, loaded against sociobiology of Dawkins and Wilson in public perception.

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Neil Irwin in the New York Times:

Gail Evans and Marta Ramos have one thing in common: They have each cleaned offices for one of the most innovative, profitable and all-around successful companies in the United States.

For Ms. Evans, that meant being a janitor in Building 326 at Eastman Kodak’s campus in Rochester in the early 1980s. For Ms. Ramos, that means cleaning at Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino, Calif., in the present day.

In the 35 years between their jobs as janitors, corporations across America have flocked to a new management theory: Focus on core competence and outsource the rest. The approach has made companies more nimble and more productive, and delivered huge profits for shareholders. It has also fueled inequality and helps explain why many working-class Americans are struggling even in an ostensibly healthy economy.

The $16.60 per hour Ms. Ramos earns as a janitor at Apple works out to about the same in inflation-adjusted terms as what Ms. Evans earned 35 years ago. But that’s where the similarities end.

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Rana Dasgupta in Granta:

Until the 1960s – when the new world turned resentfully on the old – the river-wrinkled region to the south of Paris was dotted with handsome country towns made modern by the railways.

Many of the brave stations and postal depots from that era have since fallen into decrepitude, but they still hold the memory of the erstwhile alchemy. Twin rails conducted industrial vigour into the most rustic of locales: the espresso (for it was the Italians who expressed it, collapsing caffeine and locomotives into one steam-powered word) of economic expansion and minute-precision time. Suddenly, provincial farmers could send perishable produce to Paris, where, a mere two hours out of the ground, it would sell for metropolitan prices in the crammed stalls of Les Halles. But they were simultaneously engulfed by the greater force of the city moving out to them: for industrialists, too, could propel products far afield on the railways, so why not manufacture them outside the capital, where land and labour were cheap?

There was the town of Arpajon, for instance, whose fruit and vegetables were so urgently needed in Les Halles that a thirty-seven-kilometre railway was built to link them door-to-door. But the town’s population was also swelling with the influx of new enterprises: breweries and tanneries, and especially the shoe factory, set up in 1859. All this created a new bourgeoisie who built large homes in a self-sufficiently regional style: coated with rough-hewn stone, colourfully painted on the lintels, stretching unnaturally thin and tall. There were parks laid out, and pretty streets of shops, and a grandiose city hall. The railway station – source of everything – was appropriately imposing.

The same rule is shown by its exceptions: take the nearby village of Grigny, which the railway lines did not touch, and which maintained, therefore, an older sense of time. It became bucolic: horse-drawn
carts took Parisian day trippers from the nearest station to sit in Grigny’s tourist pavilions, where they could breathe invigorating country air and draw nourishment from the prospect of gently rolling hills. The pastoral eternity of this view was made poignant, all the same, by a modern frisson: sweeping past the distant peasants labouring in the grain fields was the stern line of the Vanne aqueduct – erected as part of Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann’s re-engineering of the capital in the 1860s – which filled greedy Parisian reservoirs with pure water captured 200 kilometres away.

Today, Grigny is a grimy assemblage of 1970s housing blocks. New facades on the schools fly the flags of France and the European Union, and are painted with edifying quotations from great white men, but they are masks for falling-down classrooms.

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Gavin Jacobson in the NY Review of Books:

Ma Soe Yein is the largest Buddhist monastery in Mandalay, Myanmar. A dreary sprawl of dormitories and classrooms, it is located in the western half of the city, and accommodates some 2,500 monks. The atmosphere inside is one of quiet industry. Young men, clad in orange and maroon robes, sit on the floors and study the Dharma or memorize ritual texts. There is little noise except for the endless scraping of straw brooms on wooden floors, or the dissonant hum of people in collective prayer. Outside, the scene is livelier. Monks hurriedly douse themselves with cold water, and chat politics over a table of newspapers. They do so in the shadow of a large wall covered with gruesome images depicting the alleged bloodlust of Islam. Photographs, displayed without any explanation or evidence of their origins, show beaten faces, hacked bodies, and severed limbs—brutalities apparently committed by Muslims against Myanmar Buddhists.

The contrast between the monastery’s inner calm and this exterior display of violence is a fitting inversion of Ma Soe Yein’s most infamous resident, Ashin Wirathu, the subject of Barbet Schroeder’s new documentary, The Venerable W. On the outside, Wirathu is composed and polite, with large brown eyes and a sweet, impish grin. His voice is smooth and its cadence measured. Yet beneath this civil disguise seethes an interminable hatred toward the 4 percent of Myanmar’s population that is Muslim (the wall of carnage stands outside his residence). Wirathu is responsible for inciting some of the worst acts of ethnic violence in the country’s recent history, and was described by Time as “The Face of Buddhist Terror.”

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