Emma Brockes in The Guardian:

The image that came to Salman Rushdie, around which he would build his new novel, was an enclosed garden in downtown Manhattan. It is a space that exists in real life (although, as one of the characters in The Golden House observes, real life is a category from which it is increasingly hard to distinguish less reliable entities) and with which Rushdie is familiar; old friends inhabit one of the houses backing on to the garden. “The idea of there being a secret space inside this noisy public space,” he says. “I had this lightbulb moment that it was like a theatre – with a Greek tragedy, amphitheatre quality – where the characters could enact their stories. It also had a Rear Window quality, of being able to spy on everybody else’s lives. At that point, the Golden family decided they wanted to move in.” We are in the offices of Andrew Wylie, Rushdie’s agent of 30 years – “my longest relationship!” he says gleefully – a mile north of Rushdie’s apartment in lower Manhattan. He is looking particularly Rushdie-esque today: part rumpled intellectual, part something less sober. At 70, Rushdie has had more public incarnations than most writers of literary fiction – brilliant novelist, man on the run, subject of tabloid scorn and government dismay, social butterfly, and, in that singularly British designation, man lambasted for being altogether too Up Himself – but it is often overlooked what good company he is. His humour this morning is not caustic, nor ironised, nor filtered through any of the more protected modes of engagement, but is a kind of jolliness – a giggly delight – that simply makes him a good laugh to hang out with.

The Golden family are transplants to New York from Mumbai (or “Bombay” as the author continues to call it in conversation, with what feels like particularly Rushdian obstinacy), an outlandishly wealthy father and his three dysfunctional sons in flight from a personal tragedy; the loss of their mother during the 2008 Mumbai terror attacks. We never discover their “real” names; on arriving in the US, the patriarch renames himself Nero Golden – Rushdie, anticipating a collective eye-roll perhaps, points out in the novel this is no more ridiculous a name than Huckleberry Finn or Ichabod Crane – and tests the principle that the US is a place where one can leave one’s past at the door. It is an issue with which Rushdie is intimately familiar; the split in identity, the ability to shed one’s skin after a trauma and potentially skip off scot-free, and he explores both the impossibility and, ultimately, the undesirability of this. That the novel opens with the inauguration of Barack Obama and closes with the election of President Trump, “the Joker” as Rushdie brands him, is the novelist’s reminder there is no progress in history that can’t be undone.

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Patrick Lee Miller in Quillette:

Most of the debate about James Damore’s memo has focused on its claims about gender, diversity, and affirmative action. Those themes were indeed central to the purpose of the memo. But also important were themes that often got overlooked: reason, open discussion, and classical liberalism. In a way, Damore got some of what he wanted—more discussion about the first set of themes—although he no doubt wished he could keep his job too. Now that there has been so much discussion of those themes, now that the dust has settled after “Googlegate,” it’s a good time to reason through the best arguments on each side of the controversy. Who was right? What can we learn? How can we do better next time there appears to be a clash between the competing values of equality, science, and freedom of speech?

Many of the best arguments on Damore’s side can be found in his own memo.

This may come as a surprise to those who developed their opinion about it, not by reading the memo itself but by absorbing accounts of it in the popular press. The misrepresentation began as soon as the story broke. First to publishing the memo, but without its bibliographic links, Gizmodo’s influential account led to widespread criticism of it for being nothing more than unsourced prejudice. Ignoring not only its research, but also Damore’s many assurances that he values diversity and wishes only to criticize the ways in which it has been pursued at Google, Gizmodo began the tradition of calling his memo an “anti-diversity screed.” It was all downhill from there.

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Olivia Goldhill in Quartz:

A meta-analyses of 15 studies, published in this month’s volume of Administration and Policy in Mental Health and Mental Health Services Research, found no significant difference in the treatment outcomes for patients who saw a therapist and those who followed a self-help book or online program.

The researchers, led by Robert King, psychology professor at Queensland University of Technology in Australia, evaluated the outcomes of 723 patients who were treated for a variety of mental health conditions, including anxiety, PTSD, OCD, and depression.

All 15 studies involved a form of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) treatment, and patient outcomes were evaluated by various mental health diagnostic scales, rather than self-assessment.

Contrary to the researchers’ hypothesis that therapists would provide stronger results (though with greater variability), the results showed that therapists were neither more effective nor more variable than self-help options.

They write:

“We found no difference in treatment completion rate and broad equivalence of treatment outcomes for participants treated through self-help and participants treated through a therapist. Also, contrary to our expectations, we found that the variability of outcomes was broadly equivalent, suggesting that differences in efficacy of individual therapists were not sufficient to make therapy outcomes more variable when a therapist was involved.”

The results suggest that therapists don’t play such a significant role in improving the treatment of therapy. “An effect size of the magnitude found here means that the best estimate of the effect of the presence or absence of a therapist suggests that this variable accounts for <1% of outcome variance,” the researchers write.

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Elizabeth Woyke in the MIT Technology Review:

Vibrant, witty writing set Zork apart. It had no graphics, but lines like “Phosphorescent mosses, fed by a trickle of water from some unseen source above, make [the crystal grotto] glow and sparkle with every color of the rainbow” helped players envision the “Great Underground Empire” they were exploring as they brandished such weapons as glowing “Elvish swords.” “We played with language just like we played with computers,” says Daniels. Wordplay also cropped up in irreverent character names such as “Lord Dimwit Flathead the Excessive” and “The Wizard of Frobozz.”

Within weeks of its creation, Zork’s clever writing and inventive puzzles attracted players from across the U.S. and England. “The MIT machines were a nerd magnet for kids who had access to the ARPANET,” says Anderson. “They would see someone running something called Zork, rummage around in the MIT file system, find and play the game, and tell their friends.” The MIT mainframe operating system (called ITS) let Zork’s creators remotely watch users type in real time, which revealed common mistakes. “If we found a lot of people using a word the game didn’t support, we would add it as a synonym,” says Daniels.

The four kept refining and expanding Zork until February 1979. A few months later, three of them, plus seven other Dynamic Modeling Group members, founded the software company Infocom. Its first product: a modified version of Zork, split into three parts, released over three years, to fit PCs’ limited memory size and processing power.

Nearly 40 years later, those PC games, which ran on everything from the Apple II to the Commodore 64 in their 1980s heyday, are available online—and still inspire technologists.

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Barry Schwabsky at The Nation:

No artist invented more than Robert Rauschenberg. This remark, attributed to his friend Jasper Johns, is probably true (his exception was Picasso)—at least as long as you understand “invention” in its etymological sense, where it doesn’t mean making things up, creating things that didn’t exist before, but literally to “come into” things, in the sense of finding them. In the art of rhetoric, inventio is the systematic gathering of materials out of which a persuasive discourse can be constructed. Looking back over Rauschenberg’s career from its beginnings around the middle of the last century through his death in 2008, as the current retrospective of his work at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (on view through September 17) invites us to do, it becomes clear that Rauschenberg was above all a restless and resourceful gatherer of materials, cultural as well as physical.

The show has been curated by MoMA’s Leah Dickerman and Achim Borchardt-Hume of the Tate Modern in London, where the exhibition was first mounted. (After New York, it will travel to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, where it will be on view from November 18 to March 25, 2018.) Oddly, while the exhibition in London was simply titled “Robert Rauschenberg,” in New York it’s called “Robert Rauschenberg: Among Friends.” Here, his works are interspersed with those of associates like Johns, Rauschenberg’s life partner from the mid-1950s through 1961; Susan Weil, to whom he was married in the early 1950s; Cy Twombly, Niki de Saint Phalle, Andy Warhol, Öyvind Fahlström, and others; as well as copious documentation of his work with the nonprofit Experiments in Art and Technology.

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Amit Chaudhuri at n+1:

THE IMPORTANT EUROPEAN NOVELIST makes innovations in the form; the important Indian novelist writes about India. This is a generalization, and not one that I believe. But it represents an unexpressed attitude that governs some of the ways we think of literature today. The first half of the sentence can be changed in response to developments in the new millennium to include “American”; in fact, to allow “American” to replace “European.” The second half should accommodate, along with India, Africa and even Australia. We arguably go to an Australian novel because it asserts Australian characteristics, and Australian characteristics are analogous to what we already know from the newly discovered worlds and continents of the last two hundred years. If an Australian novel is formally innovative, the innovations will exemplify its New World or postcolonial or vivid non-metropolitan features. The innovations of a European novel, on the other hand, are not an assertion of Europe, but deal directly and exclusively with the form of the novel itself. The sequence of deduction moves here in the opposite direction—a major European novelist makes formal innovations; pure formal innovation is a characteristic of European culture (rather than a political expression of Europeanness). If we find formal innovations in a non-European novelist, modulations on form unrelated to, say, identity, difference, or colonial history, we might say, “This novelist has a European air.” We could say the same about the more formally ambitious of the recent American writers, whose innovations are unrelated to Americana: that they are, in some ways, Europeans from, say, Brooklyn. At the moment, though, because of the centrality in the Anglophone world of the USA and of New York, we don’t think of innovations in fiction emerging from these locations as being primarily connected to what it means to be a New Yorker, or an American—we think of them as formal innovations in themselves. The American writer has succeeded the European writer. The rest of us write of where we come from.

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Felipe Fernandez-Armesto at Literary Review:

It took four thousand years for what the author calls ‘the two faces of peninsular Western Europe’ to come together. The evidence for how it happened forms mazes and deserts – sometimes bafflingly dense and convoluted, sometimes maddeningly barren and desolate. Cunliffe finds his way through these with skill. Like a searchlight operator, he switches focus continually, highlighting each sea alternately in vivid flashes or, at times, in sustained glare. He starts in the remotest period of antiquity about which speculation is worthwhile and is surely right to say that ‘seafaring was a fact of life’ in the Palaeolithic era. He shows how, from the sixth to the second millennium BC, there was more cultural traffic from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean than the other way round, plotting distributions of megaliths and bell beakers to demonstrate this. He welcomes us aboard with the merchants of Samos and Byblos who sailed to Tartessos – the El Dorado of antiquity – in the first millennium BC. He evokes the doggedness with which Roman generals overcame their men’s distaste for the sea to conquer Carthage and dominate the Atlantic littoral. He turns the comings and goings of medieval shipping into a coherent story. Finally, when his narrative reaches the end of what we conventionally call the Middle Ages, when Latin Christendom was functioning, albeit imperfectly, on both sides of the European watershed, Cunliffe points us towards Europe’s transatlantic expansion and the creation of an Atlantic world.

Along the way, he chronicles the transformation of Europeans’ perceptions of the Atlantic. Among early explorers it was a ‘journey’ or ‘a place for forgetting’. To peregrinatory Irish anchorites of the early Middle Ages, ‘the Western Sea was their desert’. By the end of the story, after Columbus had demonstrated the viability of commercially exploitable routes to and fro across the ocean, the Atlantic had become a ‘destination’. The space available for monsters and mythopoeia shifted westward to the New World.

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Chelsea Ennen in Avidly:

On a cold, snowy night in January of 2016, I sat curled up in front of a crackling fire at my childhood home in rural Ohio. Fresh from finishing graduate school in London, I’d only been back in the country for a week. Feeling heartbroken over leaving London, I was clinging to my fundamental desire to work that sometimes substitutes for a deeper sense of identity or purpose. This was around the time the new BBC adaptation of War and Peace was airing on American TV. Watching the lush series and struggling to recall the half of the novel I’d managed to find time to read as an undergrad, I had an idea that merged my newfound time for pleasure reading with my desire for a long-term writing project: I’d read War and Peace over the space of a year, and blog about it weekly. I’d experience the passage of time along with the characters, observing them and myself as specks underneath Tolstoy’s vast expanses of sky and history. 2016 was already looking to be an eventful year both for myself as an individual and America as a whole: I was poised on the edge of something new, and, it seemed, somewhat dauntingly, so was the nation. I’d be the Pierre to the United States’ Imperial Russia. What could go wrong?

If you’ve never felt a desire to slog through one of the heavier cornerstones of the Western canon, I regret to inform you that even the substantial and fully-formed, nearly three-hour-long musical adaptation of the novel—Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812—only covers about 70 out of War and Peace‘s 1,000+ pages. The wider picture is part philosophy, part wartime epic, and part soap opera. The soap opera part, which is considered the plot proper by most, follows several aristocratic families as they navigate the Napoleonic wars and changing ideas of what it means to be Russian. There is much talk about Napoleon, who eventually appears as a character. His rise from cocktail conversation topic to looming tyrant is so gratingly relevant it puts a certain production of Julius Caesar to shame. Oafish Pierre, his father’s favorite of many bastard children, becomes Count Bezuhov when his father dies, inheriting a massive fortune and all the duplicitous leeches that come with it. Pierre is the stand-in for Tolstoy himself, and his journey to enlightenment embodies Tolstoy’s beliefs on religion, morality, and happiness.

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Giorgia Guglielmi in Science:

The saying “you are what you eat” is particularly true for female honey bees, which grow up to be either small, sterile workers or large, fertile queens depending on their diet. Previously, many researchers thought that something in the food fed to young queens—a secretion called royal jelly—was what made the difference. Now, a new study suggests it’s signaling molecules in the grub of young worker bees that keeps their sexual development in check. That diet, a mixture of pollen and honey called “beebread,” is shot through with a special kind of microRNA (miRNA), noncoding RNA molecules that help regulate gene expression. To find out whether these miRNAs were the culprit, scientists added them to the diet of larvae raised in the lab. These larvae developed more slowly, with smaller bodies and smaller ovaries than larvae fed food without the supplement, the team reports today in PLOS Genetics.

The researchers also found that one common, plant-derived miRNA in beebread switches off a gene that helps larvae turn into queens. After being eaten with food, the miRNAs might enter the bee’s gut and spread throughout the rest of the body, where they could help regulate key genes, the scientists say. Although plant miRNAs alone aren’t likely to turn queens into workers, queens-to-be probably don’t want to eat the commoners’ bread.

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Natalie Wolchover in Quanta:

What’s a physicist doing studying terrorist networks, financial markets and all these other systems?

In all these complex systems, the pieces of the system interact with each other and they evolve over time. And there’s something that a collection of objects like that can do which a handful of coins cannot do. I can throw up a set of coins and it would always come down pretty much 50-50 heads and tails, and there will be a little bit of variance around that — it obeys something called a bell curve. We base so much science on the bell curve. Bell-curve distributions arise when you deal with coins, or any collection where the pieces aren’t connected, like heights of people in a room. However, in most of the systems we’re interested in — the hard problems, be they of science or society — those distributions look very different than bell curves; they’re so-called fat-tail distributions.

Thinking about heights, instead of everybody being 5 feet 10 inches, on average, and maybe down to 4 feet and up to 7 feet, but certainly not 70 feet, with the distributions you get in these complex systems, you can get the 70-foot person. In fact, you can get the 700-foot person. There’s something about the way the pieces interact with each other that makes these extreme events happen: the 700-foot person, the stock market crash, the 9/11. So the interesting question is, is there a general science that can govern and tell us about these extreme behaviors? And if we can understand that for one system, can we transfer that understanding over to another one and therefore do something about it?

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Veronica Duma and Hanna Lichtenberger in Jacobin:

The combination of social forces in Vienna at the end of and just after World War I created the necessary conditions for the project. Strong labor, feminist, and council movements emerged from the widespread hunger, unemployment, and homelessness that characterized the war years. These culminated in a wave of demonstrations and strikes toward the war’s end. Throughout Vienna, workers and residents organized councils modeled on the Russian Revolution and the Council Republics in Germany and Hungary.

After the Austro-Hungarian monarchy collapsed, space for social transformation opened. In November 1918, the newly formed Austrian republic extended the vote to both women and men. This allowed the Social Democratic Worker’s Party (SDAPÖ) to win the most votes in the first elections. The coalition government, consisting of the Social Democrats and the Christian Social Party (CS), which governed until 1920, introduced a series of progressive reforms that immediately improved workers’ living conditions, such as the eight-hour day, paid vacation, the Works Council Act, the establishment of the Chamber of Labor, and rent-control legislation.

The nature of the SDAPÖ — which rested on the organizational integration of various radical and revolutionary currents — facilitated these programs. While some sections of the party negotiated with the opposition, they were able to use the pressure imposed by social movements to win additional concessions. This history helps explain why the party still emphasizes unity. Unlike in Germany, Austria’s SDAPÖ witnessed few major splits, and the Communist Party never — except during periods of illegality under the Austrofascists and the Nazis — established itself as a serious rival.

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Maanvi Singh in NPR:

In medieval Europe, those who could afford to do so would generously season their stews with saffron, cinnamon, cloves and ginger. Sugar was ubiquitous in savory dishes. And haute European cuisine, until the mid-1600s, was defined by its use of complex, contrasting flavors.

"The real question, then, is why the wealthy, powerful West — with unprecedented access to spices from its colonies — became so fixated on this singular understanding of flavor," Srinivas says.

The answer, it turns out, has just as much to do with economics, politics and religion as it does taste.

Back in the Middle Ages, spices were really expensive, which meant that only the upper class could afford them. But things started to change as Europeans began colonizing parts of India and the Americas.

"Spices begin to pour into Europe," explains Krishnendu Ray, an associate professor of food studies at New York University. "What used to be expensive and exclusive became common."

Serving richly spiced stews was no longer a status symbol for Europe's wealthiest families — even the middle classes could afford to spice up their grub. "So the elite recoiled from the increasing popularity of spices," Ray says. "They moved on to an aesthetic theory of taste. Rather than infusing food with spice, they said things should taste like themselves. Meat should taste like meat, and anything you add only serves to intensify the existing flavors."

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Margaret Drabble at the TLS:

The forty-eight large volumes of the Yale edition of Horace Walpole’s correspondence march along three open shelves in the Rare Books and Music Room of the British Library. They occupy a lot of space. Their indexes and footnotes are formidable. This monumental undertaking by W. S. Lewis, the great, wealthy and obsessed scholar and collector, was launched in 1937 and brought to completion after his death in 1979. Volume One contains correspondence between the Revd William Cole, an antiquarian, and Walpole. (The opening salvo from Cole is engagingly and somewhat informally described by Lewis as “incredibly dull”). Lewis justifies his decision to publish not chronologically, but by correspondent, by arguing that the vast collection of some thousands of letters fell naturally into divisions by subject matter, as Walpole “selected his correspondents with a subject more or less in mind”. So each individual correspondence, according to Lewis, tended to have its own theme – the social, the literary, the Gothic, the antiquarian, the political, the historical. When a correspondent died or “cooled off”, he or she would be replaced by another with similar interests, so a kind of coherence continued. On this principle Lewis gives us separate volumes dedicated to letters to and from such figures as the Florence-based diplomat Sir Horace Mann (eleven whole volumes to himself, in Lewis’s phrase a “great Andean range”), the Parisian hostess Madame du Deffand (six volumes, in French), the Countess of Upper Ossory (three volumes), while others, less attentive, less long-lived or less prolific (including the poet Thomas Gray and the writer-philanthropist Hannah More), are obliged to rub shoulders and share space.

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Marnin Young at nonsite:

In early 1995, Michael Fried delivered the Una’s Lectures at the University of California, Berkeley. The Alumni Hall was packed for “Some Thoughts on Caravaggio” and “Caillebotte’s Impressionism,” and the spillover audience carried into the panel discussion with T. J. Clark and Richard Wollheim some days later on March 15. For many of us at the time, the appeal of Fried’s writing and lectures was primarily, as Clark put it, his “remarkable descriptions.”1 And remarkable they were. No one, I think, could ever look at Caravaggio or Gustave Caillebotte the same way after encountering his close reading of them (to say nothing of Chardin, Courbet, Eakins, Manet, or Menzel). But equally, there was a sense of engaged curiosity about Fried’s status as a by-then legendary art critic. Or at least, the possible link between the art historian and the art critic prompted what, for me, has remained the most interesting question posed at the panel discussion. How, Anne Wagner asked from the audience, might we understand the relation between these new accounts of Caravaggio and Caillebotte on the one hand and on the other hand the analysis of Minimalism in “Art and Objecthood”?

In part, Wagner’s question flowed from her work on the introduction to the 1995 edition of Gregory Battcock’s Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology.2 Taking its title from an essay by Wollheim, the book had long offered the most widely available, unexpurgated reprinting of “Art and Objecthood” since its original publication in the June 1967 issue of Artforum.3 The succinct editorial summary of the argument probably did as much as anything to determine the contours of its later reception.

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Jane Stern at The Paris Review:

There is one tangential remnant of the circus that thrills me to the bone, and that is the low-grade confectionary candy called Circus Peanuts. Circus Peanuts, as far as I can tell, have literally nothing to do with circuses, or even with peanuts. They are usually found on the bottom candy shelf at gas-station convenience marts or at some chain drug stores.

A Circus Peanut is a about two inches long, it is the anemic orange color of the astronauts’ favorite drink, Tang, and it has been machine stamped to vaguely resemble a shelled peanut. The most amazing thing about Circus Peanuts is they are always stale. Not rock-hard but weirdly deflated and tough. It is hard to make a marshmallow go stale. In my kitchen pantry, I have a bag of them that has seen me through four years of holiday yam casseroles, and they are still squishy and fresh. Therefore one can’t blame the problem with Circus Peanuts on the general pillowy constitution of the marshmallow. Maybe even more mysterious then the ubiquitous staleness is that, for no logical reason, Circus Peanuts are banana flavored. Real peanuts are none of these things.

I have a few theories.

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Fran Blandy in Phys.Org:

In the developing world, basic healthcare is often a challenge—let alone expensive medical screening or tests for easily treatable, preventable illnesses. TEDGlobal, an annual conference devoted to "ideas worth spreading" taking place in Tanzania this week, heard of new technologies that could revolutionise healthcare for the poor. Infectious diseases are fast being overtaken by afflictions such as cancer as the biggest health problem in Africa, where some countries have only one pathologist per one million people.

Sierra Leonean roboticist David Sengeh believes training more specialists is not enough, and is working with his team at IBM Africa on artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms that can predict a cancer's progression. AI software can be trained with a database of images to detect colour changes inside the cervix that point to patients at high risk for cervical cancer, which can be treated if caught in time, but which kills 60,000 women in Africa a year. Addressing a similar problem, Pratik Shah of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has developed a system to use simple cellphone or camera pictures—instead of expensive MRI or CT scans—to identify biomarkers that point to oral cancer. He told AFP that while AI systems typically need tens of thousands of data points to function, he has found a way to use only 50 images to train algorithms to identify a specific disease. "We believe our approach could be used to massively reduce the amount of data an AI algorithm currently consumes, and empower physicians to diagnose patients using simple images," he said. In the developing world, basic healthcare is often a challenge—let alone expensive medical screening or tests for easily treatable, preventable illnesses.

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Raphael Minder in The New York Times:

MADRID — Jaime Colsa owns a transport company that delivers ordinary consumer goods — computers, food, drinks. The contents of his trucks aren’t eye-catching, but his vehicles certainly are, adorned with paintings showing cartoonlike faces, dogs, brightly colored geometric patterns, spirals and landscapes. These trucks that crisscross Spain have been painted by artists as part of the Truck Art Project. Financed by Mr. Colsa, the project aims in part to bring street art back to its roots. “Thanks to people like Banksy, this kind of art has made its way into the gallery,” Mr. Colsa, 45, said here recently. “But I thought it would be interesting and challenging to do the opposite — to get artists out of the gallery or the museum and actually back on the street.”

Banksy is not among the participants, but many of Mr. Colsa’s truck painters, most of whom are Spanish, started out as street artists, though by now they have also exhibited in major galleries and museums. Abraham Lacalle, whose work has been shown at the Reina Sofía Museum here, painted what he called a truck’s “explosion,” inspired by thoughts of what could happen to the merchandise transported inside. Two years after completing his painting, Mr. Lacalle said in a phone interview that it was strange to see how trucks and vans had more recently also become associated with terrorism, after attacks in Nice, Berlin, London and, earlier this month, Barcelona. “I painted with some sense of humor, imagining what could happen to the content of a truck in movement,” he said. “Nobody was then thinking about trucks as a tool of terrorism, so a work that was meant to be fun could now unintentionally appear pretty provocative.”

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Peter Singer in Project Syndicate:

Let’s grant that the antifa activists are right about the irrationality of hard-core racist fanatics. It remains true that in the United States, and other countries where elections are the path to power, the far right can achieve its goals only by winning over middle-of-the-road voters. Even if many of these voters are also not completely rational – few people are – they are not likely to be won over to the anti-racist cause by seeing footage of anti-racists hitting racists with clubs or throwing urine-filled water bottles.

Such images convey, more than anything else, the idea that anti-racists are hooligans looking for a fight. Dignified nonviolent resistance and disciplined civil disobedience are more conducive to demonstrating a sincere ethical commitment to a better, non-racist society than clubbing people and hurling piss at them.

Violent resistance is particularly dangerous in the US because some states allow anyone to carry a firearm. In Charlottesville, a large number of white supremacists paraded through the streets dressed in camouflage and carrying semi-automatic assault rifles. If the antifa activists are going to match the racists in violence, will it be possible to hold the line at clubs? How long will it be before the deadly weapons now openly on display are also used?

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