Leila McNeill in Smithsonian:

Thomas E. Ricks in The Atlantic:

I had written five books for Scott Moyers, following him as he moved from editing jobs at Scribner’s to Random House and then to Penguin Press. We worked well together, and in part thanks to his strong editing hand, my last three books had been bestsellers.

So what happened when I finished years of work and sent him the manuscript of my sixth book stunned me. In fact, I was in for a series of surprises.

They began about 18 months ago, after I emailed to him that manuscript, a dual appreciation of Winston Churchill and George Orwell. When I had begun work on it, in 2013, some old friends of mine thought the subject was a bit obscure. Why would anyone care how two long-dead Englishmen, a conservative politician and a socialist journalist who never met, had dealt with the polarized political turmoil of the 1930s and the world war that followed? By 2016, as people on both the American left and right increasingly seemed to favor opinion over fact, the book had become more timely.

But two weeks after I sent him the manuscript, I received a most unhappy e-mail back from him. “I fear that the disconnect over what this book should be might be fundamental,” Scott wrote to me, clearly pained to do so. What I had sent him was exactly the book he had told me not to write. He had warned me, he reminded me, against writing an extended book review that leaned on the weak reed of themes rather than stood on a strong foundation of narrative. I had put the works before the two men, he told me, and that would not do.

There was more. But in short, he pissed all over it. It was not that he disliked it. It was that he fucking hated it.

More here.

Tom Griffiths at Edge.org:

I work on computational models of cognition, which means that I’m interested in understanding how people do the amazing things that we do, like learning from small amounts of data, figuring out causal relationships, identifying languages—things that computers have traditionally found hard to do. The way that I think about motivating that kind of research is in terms of making computers better at solving those kinds of problems.

Recently, I’ve also been thinking about a different way in which that’s a relevant enterprise. With all of the successes of AI over the last few years, we’ve got good models of things like images and text, but what we’re missing are good models of people. If we look at the kinds of AI systems that are being built and the kinds of data that people want to understand, often those data have to do with human behavior. We're trying to understand why people do what they do and what the cognitive processes are that underlie the data we find in the world that are a consequence of human behavior.

This enterprise is important for a couple of reasons. It gives us the tools to make sense of these data that are becoming an increasingly important part of our lives. Also, having good models of how people think and behave is relevant to helping AI systems better understand what people want.

My approach is to try and understand the computational structure of the problems that people have to solve. If we’re trying to understand how people, say, learn a new causal relationship, how do we formalize that? How do we turn that into a math problem? That’s the kind of thing we can imagine getting a computer to solve.

More here.

Daniel Penny in The New Yorker:

On October 4, 1936, tens of thousands of Zionists, Socialists, Irish dockworkers, Communists, anarchists, and various outraged residents of London’s East End gathered to prevent Oswald Mosley and his British Union of Fascists from marching through their neighborhood. This clash would eventually be known as the Battle of Cable Street: protesters formed a blockade and beat back some three thousand Fascist Black Shirts and six thousand police officers. To stop the march, the protesters exploded homemade bombs, threw marbles at the feet of police horses, and turned over a burning lorry. They rained down a fusillade of projectiles on the marchers and the police attempting to protect them: rocks, brickbats, shaken-up lemonade bottles, and the contents of chamber pots. Mosley and his men were forced to retreat.

In “Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook,” published last week by Melville House, the historian Mark Bray presents the Battle of Cable Street as a potent symbol of how to stop Fascism: a strong, unified coalition outnumbered and humiliated Fascists to such an extent that their movement fizzled. For many members of contemporary anti-Fascist groups, the incident remains central to their mythology, a kind of North Star in the fight against Fascism and white supremacy across Europe and, increasingly, the United States. According to Bray, antifa (pronounced an-tee-fah) “can variously be described as a kind of ideology, an identity, a tendency or milieu, or an activity of self-defense.” It’s a leaderless, horizontal movement whose roots lie in various leftist causes—Communism, anarchism, Socialism, anti-racism. The movement’s profile has surged since antifa activists engaged in a wave of property destruction during Donald Trump’s Inauguration—when one masked figure famously punched the white supremacist Richard Spencer in the face—and ahead of a planned appearance, in February, by Milo Yiannopoulos at the University of California, Berkeley, which was cancelled. At the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, a number of antifa activists, carrying sticks, blocked entrances to Emancipation Park, where white supremacists planned to gather. Fights broke out; some antifa activists reportedly sprayed chemicals and threw paint-filled balloons. Multiple clergy members credited activists with saving their lives. Fox News reported that a White House petition urging that antifa be labelled a terrorist organization had received more than a hundred thousand signatures.

More here.

Jordana Cepelewicz in Quanta:

In 1944, a Columbia University doctoral student in genetics named Evelyn Witkin made a fortuitous mistake. During her first experiment in a laboratory at Cold Spring Harbor, in New York, she accidentally irradiated millions of E. coli with a lethal dose of ultraviolet light. When she returned the following day to check on the samples, they were all dead — except for one, in which four bacterial cells had survived and continued to grow. Somehow, those cells were resistant to UV radiation. To Witkin, it seemed like a remarkably lucky coincidence that any cells in the culture had emerged with precisely the mutation they needed to survive — so much so that she questioned whether it was a coincidence at all.

For the next two decades, Witkin sought to understand how and why these mutants had emerged. Her research led her to what is now known as the SOS response, a DNA repair mechanism that bacteria employ when their genomes are damaged, during which dozens of genes become active and the rate of mutation goes up. Those extra mutations are more often detrimental than beneficial, but they enable adaptations, such as the development of resistance to UV or antibiotics.

The question that has tormented some evolutionary biologists ever since is whether nature favored this arrangement. Is the upsurge in mutations merely a secondary consequence of a repair process inherently prone to error?

More here.

Over at Brain Pickings:

[I]f the great humanistic philosopher and psychologist Erich Fromm was correct, as I believe he was, in asserting that self-love is the foundation of a sane society, our responsibility to ourselves — and to our selves — is really a responsibility to one another: to know our interiority intimately and hold our darkest sides up to the light of awareness. But part of our human folly is that we do this far less readily than we shine the scorching beam of blameful attention on the darknesses of others.

That is what James Baldwin (August 2, 1924–December 1, 1987) explores in a magnificent 1964 piece titled “Nothing Personal,” found in The Price of the Ticket: Collected Nonfiction (public library) — the indispensable volume that gave us Baldwin on the creative process and his definition of love.

A year after he contemplated “the doom and glory of knowing who you are and what you are,” Baldwin writes:

It has always been much easier (because it has always seemed much safer) to give a name to the evil without than to locate the terror within. And yet, the terror within is far truer and far more powerful than any of our labels: the labels change, the terror is constant. And this terror has something to do with that irreducible gap between the self one invents — the self one takes oneself as being, which is, however, and by definition, a provisional self — and the undiscoverable self which always has the power to blow the provisional self to bits.

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Jennifer Wilson in the NYT:

Moscow had not joined Paris and Berlin as havens for black American artists and writers seeking opportunities unimpeded by the color line. It had one advantage, however, over those other European capitals: In the Soviet Union, racial equality was not merely incidental but a state project. Vladimir Lenin, the founder of the Soviet state, saw in the development of a black proletarian consciousness the greatest potential for revolution in America. And at that point, consciousness-raising in Soviet Russia was still — before Joseph Stalin’s rise to power — a matter left to artists.

Perhaps it’s not surprising, then, that when the Soviets invited two representatives to speak on “the Negro question” years earlier (to mark the fifth anniversary of the Russian Revolution), one was a poet. The Jamaican-born Claude McKay had just published “Harlem Shadows,” a book of verses many considered the literary spark that had ignited the Harlem Renaissance. In Soviet Russia, McKay traveled to Red Army camps to read poetry from the volume, including his famous sonnet “If We Must Die.” McKay, though there as a political representative, devoted much of his speech, which he titled “Soviet Russia and the Negro,” to the role of the arts in racial progress. He talked about what he considered tired white expectations for black art, writing that Europeans were only familiar with “the Negro minstrel and vaudevillian, the boxer, the black mammy and butler of the cinematograph, the caricatures of the romances and the lynched savage who has violated a beautiful white girl.”

More here.

A report by Robert Faris, Hal Roberts, Bruce Etling, Nikki Bourassa, Ethan Zuckerman and Yochai Benkler over at the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard:

In this study, we analyze both mainstream and social media coverage of the 2016 United States presidential election. We document that the majority of mainstream media coverage was negative for both candidates, but largely followed Donald Trump’s agenda: when reporting on Hillary Clinton, coverage primarily focused on the various scandals related to the Clinton Foundation and emails. When focused on Trump, major substantive issues, primarily immigration, were prominent. Indeed, immigration emerged as a central issue in the campaign and served as a defining issue for the Trump campaign.

We find that the structure and composition of media on the right and left are quite different. The leading media on the right and left are rooted in different traditions and journalistic practices. On the conservative side, more attention was paid to pro-Trump, highly partisan media outlets. On the liberal side, by contrast, the center of gravity was made up largely of long-standing media organizations steeped in the traditions and practices of objective journalism.

Our data supports lines of research on polarization in American politics that focus on the asymmetric patterns between the left and the right, rather than studies that see polarization as a general historical phenomenon, driven by technology or other mechanisms that apply across the partisan divide. The analysis includes the evaluation and mapping of the media landscape from several perspectives and is based on large-scale data collection of media stories published on the web and shared on Twitter.

More here.

Marina Bolotnikova in Harvard Magazine:

Decades of research have shown that calorie restriction extends lifespan and delays morbidity in many small, short-lived species: yeast, spiders, and various fish and rodents. In humans, though, the benefits of calorie restriction are still unproven, and probably less straightforward. And how calorie restriction slows the aging process is still not well understood. “The interesting thing about calorie restriction is that we used to think the body was in some way slowing down, maybe in the number of heartbeats or production of free radicals,” says professor of genetics David Sinclair. “But it turns out that’s wrong….When we’re calorie restricting, what we’re really doing is telling the body that now is not the time to go forth and multiply. It’s time to conserve your resources, repair things better, fight free radicals, and repair broken DNA.”

Sinclair believes that a compound found in all living cells, nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide (NAD), could be used to mimic these effects in humans without the starvation or decreased reproductive capacity associated with calorie restriction; his human trials of a therapy that could increase NAD levels are due to begin this month. Meanwhile, a similar compound is already being marketed as a supplement by a health start-up with several distinguished scientists (including three Harvard faculty members) on its advisory board—even though there’s still no evidence that the substance works. Sinclair’s approach is based on a broad view that links diseases of age such as cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer’s, and heart failure to common cellular processes. His lab aims to understand these processes and then use that understanding to develop medical therapies. Underlying the wide-ranging benefits of calorie restriction, Sinclair explains, are sirtuins—a group of seven genes that appear to be very important in regulating the aging process. “These longevity-gene pathways are turned on by changes in lifestyle” such as exercise and calorie restriction, he says.

More here.

Ray Kurzweil in KurzweilAI:

Dear readers,

As you might have seen in the news, entrepreneur and renowned Facebook founder & CEO Mark Zuckerberg gave a commencement speech at Harvard University. He said in his talk:

“To keep our society moving forward, we have a generational challenge — to create new jobs, a renewed sense of purpose, and to take on big meaningful projects. Our generation will have to deal with tens of millions of jobs replaced by automation like self-driving cars & trucks. But we have the potential to do so much more together. More than 300,000 people worked to put a man on the moon — including that janitor. Millions of volunteers immunized children around the world against polio. Millions of people built the Hoover dam and other great projects. We should have a society that measures progress not just by economic metrics, but by how many of us have a role we find meaningful. We should explore ideas like universal basic income — to give everyone a cushion to try new things. We’re going to change jobs many times, so we need affordable child care — to get to work and health care that aren’t tied to one company. We’re all going to make mistakes, so we need a society that focuses less on locking us up or stigmatizing us. And as tech keeps changing, we need to focus more on continuous education throughout our lives. Giving everyone the freedom to pursue purpose isn’t free. People like me should pay for it. Many of you will do well and you should too. That’s why my wife Priscilla Chan and I started the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and committed our wealth to promoting equal opportunity. These are the values of our generation.“

A universal basic income is a form of security for a society’s citizens in which all residents of a country regularly unconditionally receive a sum of money, either from a government or public institution, in addition to any income received from elsewhere. I support something along these lines. We want to do it in a way that doesn’t destroy incentives to contribute to society. So the question is how we get there. We already have a muddle approximating UBI * in the form of food stamps, social security, Medicaid, Medicare, emergency rooms and other programs.

More here.

Justin Taylor in the Los Angeles Times:

Criticism is parasitic literature,” writes Michael Robbins, the poet and critic, in his new book, “Equipment for Living: On Poetry and Pop Music,” a collection of his recent criticism, which I in turn have been tasked with criticizing. Where to start?

Maybe best to begin with Robbins himself. An English PhD who mostly eschews traditional academic scholarship, he’s the author of two collections of poems, “Alien vs. Predator” and “The Second Sex.” You may have noticed that both titles are borrowed. The original “Alien vs. Predator” was a movie, the first installment in what became a very bad and successful franchise, though the word “original” is a bit fraught here since the film is itself a mash-up of two older sci-fi franchises that each started strong then devolved into badness. Before “The Second Sex” was Robbins’ book of cantankerous, hilarious and densely allusive poems (with titles cadged from Warren Zevon and the Grateful Dead), it was a foundational piece of feminist criticism published by Simone de Beauvoir in 1949.

This should give you a sense of the sweep of Robbins’ interests and of his investment in sampling, mash-up and parody — all parasitic creative forms — as central elements of his practice. “Originality, fetish object of the young and naive, is no virtue in itself,” he writes in an essay called “Rhyme Is a Drug.” “If it were, every free jazz collective, no matter how inept, would be superior to the Rolling Stones.”

More here.

Ed Yong in The Atlantic:

Around 717 million years ago, the Earth turned into a snowball. Most of the ocean, if not all of it, was frozen at its surface. The land, which was aggregated into one big supercontinent, was also covered in mile-thick ice. And then, everything changed. Volcanoes released enough carbon dioxide into the atmosphere to trap the sun’s heat and trigger global warming. The ice melted, and the surface of the sea reached temperatures of 120 to 140 degrees Fahrenheit. By 659 million years ago, the world had transformed from snowball to greenhouse. And just 14 million years later, the ice returned and the planet became a snowball for the second time.

This song of ice and fire was a momentous period for life on Earth. According to Jochen Brocks from the Australian National University, it liberated a flood of nutrients that permanently transformed the oceans, from a world that was dominated by bacteria to one where algae were ascendant. The algae, in turn, revolutionized the food webs in the sea, paving the way for the evolution of larger and increasingly complex organisms—like the first animals. If the Age of Algae had never dawned, we wouldn’t be here.

More here.

Scott Atran in The Guardian:

The values of liberal and open democracy increasingly appear to be losing ground around the world to those of narrow, xenophobic ethno-nationalisms and radical Islam. This is not a “clash of civilisations”, but a collapse of communities, for ethno-nationalist violent extremism and transnational jihadi terrorism represent not the resurgence of traditional cultures, but their unravelling.

This is the dark side of globalisation. The western nation-state and relatively open markets that dominate the global political and economic order have largely supplanted age-old forms of governance and social life. People across the planet have been transformed into competitive players seeking fulfilment through material accumulation and its symbols. But the forced participation and gamble in the rush of market-driven change often fails, especially among communities that have had little time to adapt. When it does, redemptive violence is prone to erupt.

The quest for elimination of uncertainty, coupled with what social psychologist Arie Kruglanski deems “the search for significance”, are the personal sentiments most readily elicited in my research team’s interviews with violent jihadists and militant supporters of populist ethno-nationalist movements.

More here.

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Corey Robin in The Guardian:

Buckley and his allies opposed the “well-fed right” and the Eisenhower administration and favored the more radical and revanchist elements orbiting around McCarthyism and the burgeoning conservative movement. Then, 25 years later, well into maturity and middle age, the movement Buckley helped birth sent Ronald Reagan to the White House.

The proverbial ink on Bannon’s resignation was barely dry when the media began reporting his plans to mount an insurrection against the “Republican establishment” in Congress and the “globalists” in the White House.

Bannon has now decamped to Breitbart to wage “war” – his words – on the forces in Washington that have prevented Trump from turning the Republican party into a populist movement of economic nationalism, and even on Trump if he strays from the path. A source close to Bannon analogized the coming struggle to the French Revolution.

Since Charlottesville, pundits and historians have wondered whether we’re headed for a civil war. With Bannon’s exit, it’s clear that we are. Only it won’t be between North and South or right and left. It will be within the Republican party itself.

The question is: will it be like the war Buckley launched, a purgative struggle as a prelude to a new era of conservative power and rule? Or will it mark the end of the Reagan regime, unveiling a conservative movement in terminal crisis as it strives to reconcile the irreconcilable?

More here.

Derek Matravers in the TLS:

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78) is, perhaps more than any other philosopher, a contradictory figure. He is a predecessor of liberalism and a theorist of fascism; a champion of the Enlightenment and its most severe critic; a Classicist critic of Romanticism and vice versa; and an advocate of humane, child-centred education, despite giving up his own five children to an orphanage and almost certain death. His reputation these days rests primarily on his political philosophy (in particular, On the Social Contract), his autobiography (The Confessions), and a part novel, part philosophical treatise, and part syllabus for progressive education (Émile).

Rousseau is very quotable – never more so than at the beginning of Book One, Chapter One of the Social Contract: “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains”. This appears to capture the view with which he is most famously associated: that man is born naturally good only to be corrupted by society. Another quotable opening sentence, this time from Émile, seems to support this: “God makes all things good; man meddles with them and they become evil”. This phrase is misleading on two accounts. First, Rousseau is clear that the situation of humankind in its pre-societal state is not to be envied. Second, he did not think it our inevitable fate to be corrupted by society; indeed, the point of the Social Contract is to provide a blueprint for a society in which people are able to flourish.

It was fairly standard in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to compare humankind before societies formed (the “state of nature”) to our condition in society. This was not an attempt to write history from the armchair, but rather a thought experiment; a comparison between things then with how they are now, to shine a light on the advantages of states. Rousseau had a weakness for the rhetorical flourish – and his powers of eloquence sometimes served to highlight the notion that leaving the state of nature had been a catastrophe.

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Derek Black in the NYT:

We have all observed the administration’s decisions over the past several months that aligned with the white nationalist agenda, such as limiting or completely cutting off legal and illegal immigration, especially of Hispanics and Muslims; denigrating black communities as criminal and poor, threatening to unleash an even greater police force on them; and going after affirmative action as antiwhite discrimination. But I had never believed Trump’s administration would have trouble distancing itself from the actual white nationalist movement.

Yet President Trump stepped in to salvage the message that the rally organizers had originally hoped to project: “George Washington was a slave owner,” he said, and asked, “So will George Washington now lose his status?” Then: “How about Thomas Jefferson?” he asked. “Because he was a major slave owner. Now are we going to take down his statue?” He added: “You’re changing history. You’re changing culture.”

Until Trump’s comments, few critics seemed to identify the larger relationship the alt-right sees between its beliefs and the ideals of the American founders. Charlottesville is synonymous with Jefferson. The city lies at the foot of Monticello and is the home of the University of Virginia, the school he founded. Over the years I’ve made several pilgrimages to Charlottesville, both when I was a white nationalist and since I renounced the ideology. While we all know that Jefferson was the author of the Declaration of Independence, which declared that “all men are created equal,” his writings also offer room for explicitly white nationalist interpretation.

My father observed many times that the quotation from Jefferson’s autobiography embedded on the Jefferson Memorial is deceptive because it reads, “Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these [the Negro] people are to be free.” It does not include the second half of the sentence: “Nor is it less certain that the two races, equally free, cannot live in the same government. Nature, habit, opinion has drawn indelible lines of distinction between them.”

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Philip Goff in Philosophy Now:

Panpsychism is sometimes caricatured as the view that fundamental physical entities such as electrons have thoughts; that electrons are, say, driven by existential angst. However, panpsychism as defended in contemporary philosophy is the view that consciousness is fundamental and ubiquitous, where to be conscious is simply to have subjective experience of some kind. This doesn’t necessarily imply anything as sophisticated as thoughts.

Of course in human beings consciousness is a sophisticated thing, involving subtle and complex emotions, thoughts and sensory experiences. But there seems nothing incoherent with the idea that consciousness might exist in some extremely basic forms. We have good reason to think that the conscious experiences a horse has are much less complex than those of a human being, and the experiences a chicken has are much less complex than those of a horse. As organisms become simpler perhaps at some point the light of consciousness suddenly switches off, with simpler organisms having no subjective experience at all. But it is also possible that the light of consciousness never switches off entirely, but rather fades as organic complexity reduces, through flies, insects, plants, amoeba, and bacteria. For the panpsychist, this fading-whilst-never-turning-off continuum further extends into inorganic matter, with fundamental physical entities – perhaps electrons and quarks – possessing extremely rudimentary forms of consciousness, which reflects their extremely simple nature…

Panpsychism offers the hope of an extremely elegant and unified picture of the world. In contrast to substance dualism (the view that the universe consists of two kinds of substance, matter and mind), panpsychism does not involve minds popping into existence as certain forms of complex life emerge, or else a soul descending from an immaterial realm at the moment of conception. Rather, it claims that human beings are nothing more than complex arrangements of components that are already present in basic matter.

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Debbie Chachra in Nature:

Late in the afternoon of 6 December 1989, a man walked into the École Polytechnique in Montreal, Canada, carrying a hunting rifle, a knife, ammunition and a grudge against women in non-traditional roles — in this case, engineering. He went from class to class, targeting female students. Fourteen women died. It remains the worst mass murder in modern Canadian history. At the time, I was an 18-year-old studying engineering at the University of Toronto. The shooting was a harsh lesson that some men don’t think women belong in science and technology. As I persisted in the field and became a faculty member, I heard this message again and again, albeit expressed less violently.

The latest instance comes in a ten-page memo written by James Damore, a Google employee who has now been fired by the company. He argues that women are biologically less suited for technical roles than men are, and that Google’s diversity efforts are therefore misguided. The flaws in his arguments (mainly cherrypicking and over-extrapolation) have been much discussed, but his biggest lapse was in not questioning his own assumptions and motivations. I have lost patience with arguments from people who think they are saying ‘what everyone is too afraid to say’ without recognizing that they are simply repeating what women like me have heard throughout our lives. When my colleagues and I do outreach to support women in engineering, we start with two arguments. The first cites social justice: women deserve the same opportunity to work and succeed as men do. The second is utilitarian: diverse teams of engineers do better engineering. After all, harnessing science and technology for the benefit of everyone demands an array of perspectives. These alone are solid reasons to reshape educational and professional environments in engineering to make them more welcoming. But there is a third argument that I make for people with scientific and technical backgrounds: if you value rationality and objectivity, you need to engage with gender bias. That’s because bias is part of us: we live in a world steeped in conventional gender roles. To borrow a metaphor from computing, biases have root privileges in our brains.

More here.