Tim Parks at the London Review of Books:

Histories of the Risorgimento find it difficult to present Garibaldi without a patina of condescension. The modern intellectual’s suspicion of the folk hero – pursued by drooling ladies of the British aristocracy, believed by Sicilian peasants to have been sent by God – is everywhere evident. In his otherwise excellent biography of 1958, Denis Mack Smith frequently referred to Garibaldi as ‘simplistic’ and ‘ingenuous’, made fun of his habit of wearing a poncho, and saw his decision to set up home on the barren island of Caprera as merely idiosyncratic. Pick takes a similar position. His Garibaldi has huge personal charisma and is a brilliant military adventurer (though almost no space is given to reminding the reader quite how brilliant), but he is also ingenuous, gullible when it comes to dealing with money and endearingly ignorant of the ways of the world. In short, he is the genius simpleton.

Pick continues a tradition that began with Garibaldi’s contemporaries and is still alive in Italy today, whereby he is to be exalted as a national hero and simultaneously never mentioned in serious public debate (Italian schoolchildren are kept well away from his incendiary, anti-clerical memoirs). So at one point, having noted Garibaldi’s lack of appetite for official honours and his tendency to live in a single, bare room even when a palace was at his disposal, Pick continues: ‘Yet he was an appealingly inconsistent ascetic, with his own touching foibles and predilections for the good things in life, and for display: thus he would occasionally don a rather gaudy embroidered cap.’

more here.

John Gray at the New Statesman:

The Second World War was not just another event – it changed everything.” Even more than the Great War of 1914-18, Keith Lowe argues, the Second World War altered human experience fundamentally. In one way or another it affected more human beings than any other violent conflict in history. Over a hundred million men and women were mobilised, and yet the number of civilians killed was greater than the number of soldiers by tens of millions. Four times as many people were killed as during the First World War. But the effects ranged far beyond the numbers of dead. For everyone who died, dozens of others found their lives changed irrevocably. Whether as refugees and exiles in the great displacement of people that followed the war, or else as factory workers, slave labourers or targets for the protagonists in the conflict, uncountable human beings were caught up in the devastation wreaked by this unprecedented upheaval.

Terrible as it was, the impact of the war was not entirely negative. In much of the world the postwar era was energised by an idea of freedom and a feeling of hope. The generation of leaders that emerged was old enough to remember the Great Depression, and determined that nothing like it would happen again. Ideas of social reconstruction through government planning were applied on a large scale, producing welfare states and managed economies in which living standards were improved for much of the population. The global scale of the conflict produced new international institutions, such as the United Nations, in which the nations of the world could co-operate on free and equal terms. In Africa and Asia, the end of the war gave anti-colonial movements increased ambition and vitality. Scientists were gripped by dreams of using the technologies that the war had spawned to enhance human life everywhere.

more here.

Rowan Williams at Literary Review:

Pedeir Ceinc y Mabinogi is a set of four loosely connected prose tales preserved in a couple of late medieval Welsh manuscripts, though they must have reached their present form by about 1200. The conventional title translates as ‘The Four Branches of the Mabinogi’, mabinogi being a word meaning very roughly ‘youthful exploits’, or the early achievements of a hero. But this title tells us almost nothing about the stories. Instead of narratives about a hero’s youth, we find complex, grotesque, sometimes dreamlike stories about magical shape-shifting, curses and taboos, blood feuds, love, abuse, incest and betrayal. Some of the characters recur from story to story, though each of the ‘branches’ can be read more or less independently of the others. The stories move bewilderingly from realistic, even humorous, evocations of life in the small Welsh courts of the Middle Ages to moments of bizarre and extreme violence; they contain intense lyrical and elegiac emotion and incomprehensible survivals of what seems to be pre-Christian, pre-Roman mythical themes. The names of many of the leading figures tantalisingly echo names given to the gods in Irish and even Gallic paganism. These stories are an archaeological site in themselves, a many-layered mound of tradition, in the depths of which lie some of the most basic imaginative tools of Indo-European religion and storytelling.

But they are also completely compelling in their own right as stories. They are told with vivid visual detail, irony and wit, realistic dialogue and sheer energy. Since the 19th century, when they were translated by the aristocratic and erudite English wife of a Welsh ironmaster, there have been many good versions of the text; more recently – as Matthew Francis notes in a brief but insightful introduction – there has been a project involving the reworking of the stories as modern novellas by a group of distinguished Welsh writers. Francis has taken a quite different route and produced an extraordinary new rendering in the shape of four long poems that ruminate over the narrative detail, both compressing the stories and allowing their imagery to unfold and flower.

more here.

Josefina Alvarez in Plus Magazine:

[H]ow is this mathematical beauty similar to, or different from, the beauty we ascribe to a work of art? There are frequent references to mathematics as an art. In an article published in The Mathematical Intelligencer with the title “Mathematics: art and science”, the mathematician Armand Borel has this to say: "“… mathematics is an extremely complex creation which displays so many essential traits in common with art and experimental and theoretical sciences that it has to be regarded as all three at the same time, and thus must be differentiated from all three as well.”"

So, as to how and why mathematics is connected to art or to other endeavours, the answer is typically ambiguous. It seems that questions of this nature are destined to remain a part of the mathematical folklore. Still, perhaps unknown to most mathematicians, something has been happening somewhere else.

A brain revolution

As early as 1909, an anatomist, Korbinian Brodmann, divided the cortex of the human brain into 47 areas, now called Brodmann areas, according to the structure and organisation of the cells. Later, as researchers began to understand the functions of different cells in the cortex, they were astounded by the fairly close relation emerging between certain Brodmann areas and the location of specific cell functions. Today, much is known about a wide range of these functions, showing the prodigious complexity of our brain. For instance, there seem to be about three thousand interconnected neurons, controlling most of our breathing and involving about 65 types of neurons!

Besides what we might call the physical functions, researchers are understanding the locations of what we might call intellectual functions. For example, an articlepublished in 2011 in the journal NeuroImage, discussed the findings of a study locating the brain areas needed for numbers and calculations. Coincidentally, a study published the same year in the journal PLoS ONE, presented evidence towards a brain-based theory of beauty. Several studies had already shown how beauty, as related to visual, auditory and moral experience, was connected to activity observed in a specific region of what researchers call the emotional brain.

Based on all these findings, a team of two neurobiologists, Semir Zeki and John Paul Romaya, a physicist, Dionigi M. T. Benincasa, and the mathematician Michael F. Atiyah conjectured that the perception of mathematical beauty should excite the same parts of the emotional brain, roughly described by a collection of Brodmann areas. Their study, published in the journal Frontiers of human neuroscience in 2014, seems to confirm their conjecture, indeed placing mathematical beauty, as perceived by trained mathematicians, in the same areas previously identified with other manifestations of beauty.

More here.

Stephanie McCrummen in The Washington Post:

The doctor was getting ready. Must look respectable, he told himself. Must be calm. He changed into a dark suit, blue shirt and tie and came down the wooden staircase of the stately Victorian house at Seventh and Pine that had always been occupied by the town’s most prominent citizens.

That was him: prominent citizen, town doctor, 42-year-old father of three, and as far as anyone knew, the first Muslim to ever live in Dawson, a farming town of 1,400 people in the rural western part of the state.

“Does this look okay?” Ayaz Virji asked his wife, Musarrat, 36.

In two hours, he was supposed to give his third lecture on Islam, and he was sure it would be his last. A local Lutheran pastor had talked him into giving the first one in Dawson three months before, when people had asked questions such as whether Muslims who kill in the name of the prophet Muhammad are rewarded in death with virgins, which had bothered him a bit. Two months later, he gave a second talk in a neighboring town, which had ended with several men calling him the antichrist.

Now a librarian had asked him to speak in Granite Falls, a town half an hour away, and he wasn’t sure at all what might happen. So many of the comforting certainties of his life had fallen away since the presidential election, when the people who had welcomed his family to Dawson had voted for Donald Trump, who had proposed banning Muslims from entering the United States, toyed with the idea of a Muslim registry and said among other things, “Islam hates us.”

Trump had won Lac qui Parle County, where Dawson was the second-largest town, with nearly 60 percent of the vote. He had won neighboring Yellow Medicine County, where Granite Falls was the county seat, with 64 percent. Nearly all of Minnesota outside the Twin Cities had voted for Trump, a surprising turn in a state known for producing some of the Democratic Party’s most progressive leaders, including the nation’s first Muslim congressman.

Now Trump was in the White House, and Dawson’s first Muslim resident was sitting in his living room, strumming his fingers on the arm of a chair. The pastor had called to say two police officers would be there tonight, just in case.

More here.

James Duesterberg in The Point:

Like every virtual world, there is something seductive about the online realm of the new reactionary politics. Wading in, one finds oneself quickly immersed, and soon unmoored. All of the values that have guided the center-left, postwar consensus—the equal dignity of every individual, the guiding role of knowledge, government’s positive role in shaping civil society, a general sense that we’re moving towards a better world—are inverted. The moral landmarks by which we were accustomed to get our bearings aren’t gone: they’re on fire.

Trying to regain their footing, the mainstays of consensus thought have focused on domesticating the threat. Who are these Tea Partiers and internet recluses, these paleoconservatives and tech futurists, and what could they possibly want? The Atlantic mapped the coordinates of the “rebranded” white nationalism or the “internet’s anti-democracy movement” in the previously uncharted waters of 4chan and meme culture. In Strangers in Their Own Land, Berkeley sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild peers over the “empathy wall” between her and her rural Louisiana Tea Party contacts, while in Hillbilly Elegy, Ohio-born lawyer J. D. Vance casts a melancholic look back—from the other side of the aisle, but, tellingly, from the same side of the wall—on the Appalachian culture he left behind for Yale Law and a career in Silicon Valley.

These efforts follow a line of center-left thought that begins with Thomas Frank’s 2004 book What’s the Matter with Kansas? Its guiding assumption is that those who balk at its vision are fundamentally mistaken: victims of an unfortunate illusion, perpetuated by big businesses or small prejudices, lack of education or surplus of religion. But now the balance of power has shifted, radically. And as reactionary ideology has grown—seemingly overnight—from a vague and diffuse resistance to a concerted political force, the veneer of objective interest and pastoral concern has started to crack.

More here.

From Phys.org:

For the first time ever, astronomers at The University of New Mexico say they've been able to observe and measure the orbital motion between two supermassive black holes hundreds of millions of light years from Earth – a discovery more than a decade in the making.

UNM Department of Physics & Astronomy graduate student Karishma Bansal is the first-author on the paper, 'Constraining the Orbit of the Supermassive Black Hole Binary 0402+379', recently published in The Astrophysical Journal. She, along with UNM Professor Greg Taylor and colleagues at Stanford, the U.S. Naval Observatory and the Gemini Observatory, have been studying the interaction between these black holes for 12 years.

"For a long time, we've been looking into space to try and find a pair of these supermassive black holes orbiting as a result of two galaxies merging," said Taylor. "Even though we've theorized that this should be happening, nobody had ever seen it until now."

In early 2016, an international team of researchers, including a UNM alumnus, working on the LIGO project detected the existence of gravitational waves, confirming Albert Einstein's 100-year-old prediction and astonishing the scientific community. These gravitational waves were the result two stellar mass black holes (~30 solar mass) colliding in space within the Hubble time. Now, thanks to this latest research, scientists will be able to start to understand what leads up to the merger of supermassive black holes that creates ripples in the fabric of space-time and begin to learn more about the evolution of galaxies and the role these black holes play in it.

More here.

This clock at Amsterdam Schiphol Airport was created by renowned Dutch designer Maarten Baas. It features video of a man in a work uniform painstakingly painting the time minute by minute.

Baas was inspired by “the many faceless men who sweep, clean and work at an airport in their blue overalls.”

Video length: 0:51

Chris Baraniuk in New Scientist:

An artificial intelligence has been developed that produces images in unconventional styles – and much of its output has already been given the thumbs up by members of the public.

The idea is to make art that is “novel, but not too novel”, says Marian Mazzone, an art historian at the College of Charleston in South Carolina who worked on the system.

The team – which also included researchers at Rutgers University in New Jersey and Facebook’s AI lab in California – modified a type of algorithm known as a generative adversarial network (GAN), in which two neural nets play off against each other to get better and better results. One creates a solution, the other judges it – and the algorithm loops back and forth until the desired result is reached.

In the art AI, one of these roles is played by a generator network, which creates images. The other is played by a discriminator network, which was trained on 81,500 paintings to tell the difference between images we would class as artworks and those we wouldn’t – such as a photo or diagram, say.

The discriminator was also trained to distinguish different styles of art, such as rococo or cubism.

The clever twist is that the generator is primed to produce an image that the discriminator recognises as art, but which does not fall into any of the existing styles.

More here.

Lynn Parramore interviews Chanos over at INET:

LP: Much has been made of the tech companies, the celebrated “disrupters,” as drivers of American prosperity. What’s your view of these firms, the Facebooks and Ubers and Netflixes?

JC: With the exception of Facebook, the disrupters — Netflix, Uber, etc.— don’t seem to be scaling. The Harvard Business Review has a great story out which concludes that unlike dotcom 1.0 when Amazon and Facebook were inventing whole new markets and were relatively cash-flow positive right away, companies like Uber and Tesla are more personal fiefdoms of their CEOs.

Uber is going to be an interesting story. We’ve heard a lot about how they have manipulated workers and consumers, and the governance disasters. Lost in the story of corporate governance is the story of an unprofitable model. They haven’t figured out how to operate a sustainable business.

LP: What about Trump’s infrastructure proposals? Could they help the economy?

JC: That’s just another sort of fake fiscal news, if you will. It’s going to be public-private partnerships. I have a long experience with those: I was short Macquarie Bank, which was the originator of these sorts of things in ’05-’06.

Macquarie started the idea of infrastructure as an asset class idea. But it always revolved around things like parking structures and toll roads — anything where you can have clearly definable cash flow and where you can get an immediate cash payment for use. It’s not water culverts or county service roads. Macquarie did a famous deal on the Indiana toll road (which filed for bankruptcy in 2014, collapsing in debt). It’s things like that.

Because private investors need high rates of return, these deals generally haven’t been good deals for anybody. They haven’t generated the cash investors anticipated.

More here.

Martin Jay in The Nation:

First, take a deep breath. Close your eyes to the appalling spectacle of American democracy collapsing all around us. Stop your ears to the cacophony of voices cheering on or lamenting its imminent demise. Instead, try to achieve enough inner calm to recall something that was once a source of solace: the idea of an alternative political and economic system—indeed, a whole new way of life—known as socialism. It may not be easy, because the din outside is deafening and the memory of socialism has faded for many. But only if you can summon the concentration and strength will you be in the proper frame of mind to consider Axel Honneth’s The Idea of Socialism.

Honneth is best known as the leading representative of the Frankfurt School’s “third generation.” He is an advocate of many of the lessons and ideas of its first two generations, but over the years, he has also broken with his forebears in a variety of ways. Moving beyond Jürgen Habermas’s theory of communicative reasoning, Honneth has stressed the important role that our struggle for recognition—as manifested in the pursuit of love, esteem, and respect—can and should play in egalitarian politics. He has also tried to renew the Frankfurt School’s mode of social criticism and analysis by mining a wide variety of sources—Michel Foucault, the American pragmatists George Herbert Mead and John Dewey, the British psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott—that he believes helps us better understand the pathologies of modern life, and he isn’t afraid to get into debates with fellow social theorists, including with Nancy Fraser over whether recognition or redistribution should be a key to radical politics.

More here.

John S. Kiernan in WalletHub:

Fireworks and freedom: That’s what America does on the Fourth of July to celebrate the nation’s birthday, which was established with the pen strokes of 56 founding fathers on the Declaration of Independence in 1776. Plus, we eat a whole lot of hotdogs: 150 million in total. We make a toast or two to good old Uncle Sam, shelling out more than $1.6 billion on July Fourth beer and wine. And we travel, with a record 44 million of us planning to venture 50+ miles from home this year.

While 2017 marks America’s 242nd birthday, there’s still a lot that we all can learn about Independence Day. To help fill you in and pump up your patriotism, we put together an awesome infographic filled with fun facts about this red, white and blue anniversary. We also polled a panel of leading American-studies experts for some added insight. You can check it out below.

More here.

Sharon Begley in StatNews:

For all the promises of genomics ushering in a new era in medicine, with scientists regularly urging people¹ to get their DNA sequenced, it appears that the revolution will be postponed: A first-of-its-kind study² published Monday found that most of the adults who underwent genome sequencing and were told they had a disease-causing DNA variant did not in fact have that disease. And few of them got information that improved their health. The pilot study, in the Annals of Internal Medicine, found that 11 out of 50 volunteers (aged 41 to 68) who had their genome sequenced were told they had a mutation that definitely or possibly causes a particular disease, ranging from pituitary thyroid insufficiency to the rare cardiovascular disorder Romano-Ward syndrome. Yet only 2 of the 11 actually had the disease, which in every case should have appeared by adulthood. “We were surprised” by the high incidence of disease-causing mutations, said Dr. Jason Vassy, of Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, the study’s lead author. “But we were surprised even more” by how few people with “disease-causing mutations” had the disease.

Whole genome sequencing³ reads the nearly 3 billion chemical “letters” — the A’s, T’s, C’s, and Gs — that constitute an individual’s DNA. Some geneticists envision genome sequencing as a way to identify everything from what drugs an individual should avoid (if he has the DNA variant that makes statins dangerous to him) to what diseases her doctor should screen for and possibly treat early. The MedSeq study put that hope to the test in the first-ever randomized trial of whole genome sequencing in adults. Volunteers were assigned, essentially by the flip of a coin, to either have their genome sequenced (and analyzed for the presence of DNA variants in 4,631 genes) or to have their family medical history analyzed. The 4,631 genes the researchers analyzed were those that, if mutated, are supposedly sufficient to cause a usually rare disease, such as ankyrin-B-related cardiac arrhythmia (caused by mutations in the gene ANK2). Such single-gene disorders are called Mendelian. The study did not include the thousands of genes that merely raise the chance of developing a disease to which many other genes contribute, such as the vast majority of cancers, heart disease, and psychiatric disorders. That should have stacked the odds so that an unearthed mutation really did cause disease.

The key finding — that few people with “disease-causing” mutations actually had a genetic disease — therefore raises questions about whether genome sequencing in generally healthy adults can be medically justified.

More here.

Emmet Penney in Paste Magazine:

In 1996, the recently deceased elephantine orb of Elmer’s Glue, friend of Rachel Maddow, and former Fox News CEO Roger Ailes took over the network. He cultivated an incredible propaganda machine dedicated to scaremongering senior citizens into thinking gender neutral bathrooms are the first step towards sharia law. Ailes’ monstrosity has been disastrous for modern life. It is hard to name anyone else so successful in polarizing the country, especially given that he started off at a time notable for its political blandness. His network also created a backlash in the liberal media. In response, the liberal media catered to the dumbest, pettiest, most self-congratulatory parts of their viewership. They created a culture of smug narcissists, and narcissists fiend on two compulsions: short term ego boosts, and shitting on other people. More clinically, ingratiation and aggression. That’s called narcissistic supply. And it’s not just a habit. It is a need.

To get their fix liberals tuned into The Daily Show, MSNBC, or the Aristotelian quaalude that is Aaron Sorkin’s The Newsroom. Each monologue, each snide quip about NASCARnation was meant to affirm the viewers’ sense that they felt the right feelings, saw the world the right way, and, most importantly, weren’t hateful slobs who refused to floss their only tooth while singin’ the songs of that old time religion. Never mind that most liberal policies are now built around marshalling state violence to immiserate and discipline minorities and working class whites, or marshalling state violence to needlessly carpet-bomb the Middle East or go Zero Dark Thirty on some children (remember: consensus!). This largely took the aesthetic form of lectureporn. It is the apex of narcissistic supply delivery.

So what is lectureporn? It is the media spectacle of a lecture whose audience is the opponent of the lecture’s intended target. Jon Stewart, Trevor Noah, Samantha Bee, Keith Olberman, Rachel Maddow (again, friend of Roger Ailes), Aaron Sorkin, and a whole host of others have built their careers on this form. Lectureporn pulls off an amazing trick: it simultaneously delivers both elements of narcissistic supply. You sit and watch someone ingratiate themselves to you while they eviscerate someone you don’t like who is, in turn, unlikely to watch said lecture.

More here.

Martin Sandbu in the FT's Alphaville:

The effects of raising minimum wages is one of the most contested battlefields in economic policy analysis. All sides can claim to care about the poor: those against higher minimum wages warn that they hurt the poor by putting them out of work while those for them assert that the employment effects are negligible. And so anyone who can marshal facts for their side can almost automatically accuse the other side of callousness.

This week, minimum wage sceptics have embraced new evidence from Seattle, which is pushing through one of the most aggressive increases anywhere. The city’s wage floor increased from the state minimum of $9.47 an hour to $11/hour in 2015, to $13/hour in 2016, and headed towards $15/hour by the end of the process. There are impartial summaries of the research from FiveThirtyEight and the Wall Street Journal, which report the study’s conclusion that, on average, the lost jobs and hours due to the minimum wage increase meant low-wage workers earned $125 a month less than they would have without the minimum wage increase.

Megan McArdle expresses well the vindication felt by reasonable sceptics of wage floors. “If the minimum wage increases by a penny an hour, probably even most rock-ribbed conservatives would not predict mass firings. On the other hand, if the wage was arbitrarily set to $100 an hour, even ardent labor activists would presumably expect widespread unemployment to follow . . . The size of the increase, and the level of the resulting wage, obviously matter at some margin. Seattle may have discovered that margin.”

The problem is that the study’s methodology does not support this conclusion.

More here.

Adam Tooze in his own website:

Adults in the Room is a book that anyone interested in modern European politics should read. To say it is the best memoir of the Eurozone crisis is an understatement. It is a devastating indictment of current state of Europe and a fascinating inside account of the logic of reformist politics and its limits and why it keeps going anyway.

It’s a truly complex document for a variety of reasons:

It’s a highly personal even confessional memoir of recent history.

Varoufakis is an intensely self-conscious historical subject.

He has a pronounced aesthetic and writerly self-consciousness. One may argue as to taste.

He has an outsized ego and this was seized on by the world’s media, who made his persona into the target for vast amounts of public comment and criticism. He has reason to feel victimized.

He is also an academic and an intellectual with wide-ranging interests: political theory, social theory and economics.

And he is a political activist with a cause, DiEM25, to promote.

All of these interests and concerns inflect the text. All of them would be worth expanding on at some length. But I’ll focus on three of the more “substantive” aspects of his memoir.

More here.

Kevin D. Williamson in the National Review:

One of those people is Donald Trump.

Trump has shown himself intellectually and emotionally incapable of making the transition from minor entertainment figure to major political figure. He is in the strange position of being a B-list celebrity who is also the most famous man in the world. His recent Twitter attack on Mika Brzezinski of MSNBC’s Morning Joe exemplifies that as much as it does the president’s other by-now-familiar pathologies, notably his strange psychological need to verbally abuse women in physical terms.

Trump may have his problems with women, but it is his unrequited love of the media that is undoing him.

“I always tell the president, ‘You don’t need them,’” says Sean Hannity, the self-abasing monkey-butler of the Trump regime. The president, Hannity says, can reach more Americans via Twitter than he could through the conventional media. That isn’t true, of course: Only about one in five Americans uses Twitter. Hannity might be forgiven for not knowing this, a consequence of his much more general habit of not knowing things. But he actually does know the president. How could he possibly believe that this man — this man — does not need them?

He needs them the way a junkie needs his junk.

Donald Trump cares more about how he is perceived in the media than he cares about anything else in the world, including money.

More here.