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Sigmar Gabriel, Jürgen Habermas, and Emmanuel Macron at Eurozine:

Jürgen Habermas: I have been entrusted with the honour of saying a few introductory words about the subject of our conversation between our distinguished guest Emmanuel Macron and Sigmar Gabriel, our foreign minister who recently rose like the proverbial phoenix from the ashes. Both names are associated with courageous reactions to challenging situations. Emmanuel Macron has dared to cross a red line hitherto untouched since 1789. He has broken apart the entrenched configuration of the two political camps of right and left. Given that it is impossible in a democracy for any individual to stand above the parties, we are curious to see how the political spectrum will be reconfigured if, as expected, he is victorious in the French election.

In Germany we can observe a similar impulse, albeit under different auspices. Here too, Sigmar Gabriel has chosen his friend Martin Schulz for an unorthodox role. Schulz has been welcomed by the public as a largely independent candidate for the chanchellorship and is expected to lead his party in a new direction. Although the political, economic and social situations in our two countries are very different, the fundamental mentality of citizens seems to me to reflect a similar feeling of irritation– irritation about the inertia of governments that, despite the palpably increasing pressure of the problems we face continue to muddle along without any prospect of restructuring. We feel that the lack of political will to act is paralysing, particularly given the problems that can only be resolved collectively, on a European level.

more here.

Yo Zushi at The New Statesman:

Carrington later documented the decline of her mental health in Down Below, an extraordinary account of her life in a sanatorium in Madrid, to which she was committed after suffering paranoid delusions on her way to Portugal. Insanity, for her, took the form of a powerful “identification with the external world”, which somehow involved the hypnotic control of Europe by a Dutchman called Van Ghent (who was also “my father, my enemy, and the enemy of mankind”). In her introduction, Marina Warner notes that Carrington “had realised one of the most desirable ambitions of surrealism, the voyage down into madness”; yet, stripped of the playful intellectualism of the art movement, the “absolute disorientation” that Breton idealised is difficult to experience as a reader with much pleasure.

Carrington regained her freedom after reacquainting herself with Renato Leduc, who offered to marry her to facilitate her escape to New York: travel was easy for him because he was an embassy employee. In Lisbon, her mind slowly recovered and she prepared for a new life in the US. But, in that hub of the Western universe, it was hard to leave the past behind. One day, she glanced across a market and saw Max Ernst, who had been released by the French at last.

more here.

Wendy Lesser at Bookforum:

It was not just the suddenness of his death that made it hard to realize Louis Kahn was gone. Something about the way he disappeared from the world—irregularly, mysteriously, with that strange two-day gap when nobody he knew could find him—left many people unable to take in the facts of his death.

For the California relatives, who learned about Lou’s death through a series of relayed phone calls, there was a persistent confusion about where and how he had died. Decades later, Kahn’s niece, nephew, grandnephew, and two grandnieces all thought he had suffered a heart attack on the way back from Bangladesh; their memories, that is, selected his much-celebrated Dhaka project over the rarely discussed Ahmedabad campus. They knew he had died in a train station, but at least two of them remembered it as Grand Central—again, a more appropriately monumental choice. (These erroneous details proved to be so persuasive that they even entered the historical record, for in a 1993 Toledo Blade article listing the highlights of Louis Kahn’s life, the Ohio newspaper included the line: “1974 – Dies of heart attack in Grand Central Station, New York City, en route from Bangladesh to Philadelphia.”) The West Coast Kahns believed, moreover, that Lou’s body, with its characteristically messy hair and rumpled clothing, had been taken for that of a transient for two days, until somebody finally realized who it was. Part of their distress had to do with this idea of unrecognizability: they could hardly credit that someone as famous as Louis I. Kahn could go unidentified for two days.

more here.

India Stoughton in The Economist:

The boxy red-brick buildings of Cairo’s Manshiyat Naser district are uniform in colour but slightly different in size and shape. Tightly packed together with a ramshackle appearance, they stand along narrow alleyways, where green and white sacks stuffed with rubbish lie in malodorous heaps. More bulging bags spill over balcony rails or pile up on rooftops beside dusty satellite dishes. One of Cairo’s poorest neighbourhoods and home to the city’s rubbish collectors, Manshiyat Naser is the unlikely canvas on which French-Tunisian artist eL Seed chose to paint “Perception”, a sprawling mural spanning more than 50 buildings. Odd corners and asymmetrical patches of brickwork have been daubed with blue, orange and white paint, startlingly bright amid the adhesive dust and dirt. On a flat, earth-covered rooftop on which a herd of sheep mills calmly several storeys above the ground, two segments of the low wall have been whitewashed and covered with uneven orange triangles fringed with black. They seem abstract and random. But stand in the cafeteria on top of Mokattam, a nearby hill, and all these mismatched patches of paint suddenly come together, forming a single phrase written in Arabic calligraphy and thus transforming a collection of ugly buildings into a poem that celebrates the neighbourhood’s history and culture.

Manshiyat Naser is home to the Zaraeeb, a Coptic Christian community known to the people of Cairo as zabaleen – “rubbish people”. “I thought these people were living in the garbage, when actually they were living from the garbage,” says eL Seed. “I got this switch of perception and realised that I was wrong…Sometimes when you want to see someone’s real face you just have to change the angle.” The phrase eL Seed chose is an aphorism attributed to St Athanasius of Alexandria, a third-century Coptic bishop: “He who wants to see the light of the sun must first wipe his eyes.” To the artist, it means that “if you want to judge anybody, you must first wipe away the dirt from your eyes, all the misconceptions that you have about somebody, or about a community. For me, the sunlight is the idea of truth.”

More here.

Barbara Fraser in Nature:

Torrential rains pummelled Peru’s northern coastal desert in February and March, triggering floods that killed at least 113 people and destroyed some 40,000 homes. As families grapple with their losses and government officials tally the cost of repair and reconstruction, scientists are gearing up for an unusual opportunity to study ecosystems that go decades without much rain. The rains were spurred by an unusual ‘coastal’ El Niño climate pattern, in which warm water pooled off the coast of southern Ecuador and northern Peru — more so than during the much larger 2015–16 El Niño. Rains fell in both countries, but the human toll was highest in Peru’s normally parched northern desert.

In the now-greening land, plants are growing, bird populations are shifting and rivers are moving sediments and pollution in ways they haven’t done for two decades. What scientists learn as they descend on the region could aid conservation efforts and help people and government officials to prepare for severe weather events. “Except for the impacts on the people,” says biologist Juan Torres of La Molina National Agrarian University in Lima, “this is a meteoro­logically enchanting moment.” Once roads are passable, Torres will visit field sites that he studied after the powerful 1997–98 El Niño, which also soaked the region. At that time, Torres found wild relatives of domesticated crops — including tomatoes, peppers, potatoes and squash — that had sprouted from dormant seeds. This year, he will again catalogue wild plants, along with the crops that farmers choose to grow on lands made fertile by the flooding. Part of the northern desert is irrigated farmland, but there are also patches of a dry forest that has been devastated in recent years by industrial agriculture, urban sprawl and the charcoal trade. Oliver Whaley at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, in London, has studied Peru’s dry forests for 25 years, and hopes that the rain will bring respite to the ecosystem.

More here.

Chloe Farand in The Independent:

America is regressing to have the economic and political structure of a developing nation, an MIT economist has warned.

Peter Temin says the world's’ largest economy has roads and bridges that look more like those in Thailand and Venezuela than those in parts of Europe.

In his new book, “The Vanishing Middle Class", reviewed by the Institute for New Economic Thinking, Mr Temin says the fracture of US society is leading the middle class to disappear.

The economist describes a two-track economy with on the one hand 20 per cent of the population that is educated and enjoys good jobs and supportive social networks.

On the other hand, the remaining 80 per cent, he said, are part of the US’ low-wage sector, where the world of possibility has shrunk and people are burdened with debts and anxious about job security.

Mr Temin used a model, which was created by Nobel Prize winner Arthur Lewis and designed to understand developing nations, to describe how far inequalities have progressed in the US.

When applied to the US, Mr Temin said that “the Lewis model actually works”.

More here.

Tim Urban in Wait But Why:

Okay maybe that’s not exactly how it happened, and maybe those weren’t his exact words. But after learning about the new company Elon Musk was starting, I’ve come to realize that that’s exactly what he’s trying to do.

When I wrote about Tesla and SpaceX, I learned that you can only fully wrap your head around certain companies by zooming both way, way in and way, way out. In, on the technical challenges facing the engineers, out on the existential challenges facing our species. In on a snapshot of the world right now, out on the big story of how we got to this moment and what our far future could look like.

Not only is Elon’s new venture—Neuralink—the same type of deal, but six weeks after first learning about the company, I’m convinced that it somehow manages to eclipse Tesla and SpaceX in both the boldness of its engineering undertaking and the grandeur of its mission. The other two companies aim to redefine what future humans will do—Neuralink wants to redefine what future humans will be.

The mind-bending bigness of Neuralink’s mission, combined with the labyrinth of impossible complexity that is the human brain, made this the hardest set of concepts yet to fully wrap my head around—but it also made it the most exhilarating when, with enough time spent zoomed on both ends, it all finally clicked. I feel like I took a time machine to the future, and I’m here to tell you that it’s even weirder than we expect.

More here.

John A. Byrne in Poets & Quants:

From the very beginning, the Harvard Business School treated Duff McDonald as a barbarian at the gate. A veteran journalist and author, McDonald first approached the school about cooperating with him on a book in late February of 2013. But the guardians of HBS’ history, myths and truths quickly slammed the door shut, preventing access to all administrators, staff and faculty, even the school’s own historical archives.

The school, says McDonald, rebuffed at least a half dozen requests for cooperation, though the author was able to visit the Harvard Business School campus on four occasions. Now, more than three years later, McDonald’s The Golden Passport: Harvard Business School, the Limits of Capitalism, and the Moral Failure of the MBA Elite will be published by Harper Business on April 25. As the lengthy title suggests, HBS stakeholders aren’t likely to enjoy what they will read in the book’s formidable 672 pages.

McDonald’s conclusion is that the Harvard Business School has abysmally failed the goal of its founders who sought “the multiplication of men who will handle their current business problems in socially constructive ways.” While HBS graduates tend to be very good at whatever they do, McDonald claims, that is rarely the doing of good.

More here. [Thanks to Andreas Ramos.]

Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei at berfrois:

For seven years now I have lived in Albania. I have seen ambassadors and foreign representatives come and go. And they all, so they say, share this same ideal: to make Albania a better place. Or rather, to make Albania more like wherever they came from: the West. Their presence would change Albania, would stabilize Albania.

The government of Edi Rama has gladly and smartly catered to the feelings of self-importance of these foreign dignitaries, who, more often than not, were not exactly the brightest of their class. After all, whose career as foreign diplomat would be well served with a post in a relatively unimportant European country?

But Rama adopted their language and made them feel as if he were one of them. He would create a state, he would invite the IMF and World Bank back into the country, he would reform the police, the justice system, and so on and so forth. He clothed himself in the drapes of European enlightenment – cosmopolitan culture, contemporary art, good taste.

But looking back it seems that Albania has changed hardly at all. What has changed, however, is the West, and in particular the EU. In a relatively short period it has developed (once again) the nationalist and populist discourses that twenty years ago would have been unthinkable in the liberal, affluent, multicultural societies from which they sprang up. The EU has even experienced its first secession, a phenomenon that in the 1990s was strictly reserved to the Balkans.

more here.

Grey Anderson at n+1:

THE DECLINE OF THE SOCIALIST PARTY has been accompanied in tandem by the efflorescence of the far right. Jean-Marie Le Pen’s impressive showing in 2002 came as a brutal shock to mainstream opinion in France; his daughter’s first-round success 2017 is widely perceived to be inevitable. Beginning with the 2012 election, in which Marine Le Pen won the highest ever score for a FN candidate in a presidential race, the party has gone from success to success: in both the European elections of 2014 and departmental elections the year after the FN won the largest share of first-round votes, in each case about a quarter of the electorate. Although the Front’s isolation has largely prevented it from converting this support into political power, as alliances between the other parties traditionally result in FN candidates being defeated in runoffs, mounting signs indicate that this “glass ceiling” may be fragile.

Founded in 1972 out of a hodge-podge of far-right and neo-fascist groups seeking a parliamentary road to power, the FN first tasted electoral success in 1983, when the party won the mayoralty of Dreux, to the west of Paris, and saw ten municipal councilors elected. Its real breakthrough came three years later, in the wake of a law introducing a measure of proportionality in legislative elections; in 1986, thirty-five MPs and six regional presidents were elected on FN lists, with almost 10 percent of the vote in legislative and regional elections held on the same day.

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Barry Schwabsky at The Nation:

The best way to approach “Inventing Downtown” is to follow the curator’s lead and see it not as an exhibition of works or even of artists, but of places—or rather, of a unique kind of place: those exhibition venues that sometimes move from place to place but always reflect a confluence of artists who elected to exhibit their work together. Some of the best-known among them, including the Tanager Gallery, Brata Gallery, and Hansa Gallery, were structured as cooperatives; the artists shared the expenses of the gallery as well as the decision-making and some of the labor. Others were simply the studios or living spaces of artists who invited colleagues to show their work. For instance, the City Gallery was part of Red Grooms’s loft on Sixth Avenue, and 112 Chambers Street was Yoko Ono’s studio. Other groups used donated spaces, like the Judson Gallery, which Marcus Ratliff (later a prominent graphic designer) started with Jim Dine and Tom Wesselmann at the Judson Memorial Church on Washington Square.

The finale of “Inventing Downtown” is devoted to the Green Gallery, a commercial gallery on 57th Street whose founder, Richard Bellamy, had been the hired director of the cooperative Hansa (which itself had moved uptown during the course of its seven-year existence). Bellamy became a key figure in the New York art world and was known as “one of the remarkable, eccentric personalities of the city.” A recent biography, Judith E. Stein’s Eye of the Sixties: Richard Bellamy and the Transformation of Modern Art, offers a sympathetic portrait of an unconventional figure more adept at understanding art and artists than at the business of running a gallery.

more here.

Steve Chawkins in LA Times:

In the nearly five years it took Robert Pirsig to sell “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,” 121 publishers rejected the rambling novel. The 122^nd gently warned Pirsig, a former rhetoric professor who had a job writing technical manuals, not to expect more than his $3,000 advance. “The book is not, as I think you now realize from your correspondence with other publishers, a marketing man’s dream,” the editor at William Morrow wrote in a congratulatory note before its 1974 publication. He was wrong. “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values” sold 50,000 copies in three months and more than 5 million in the decades since. The dense tome has been translated into at least 27 languages. A reviewer for the New Yorker likened its author to Herman Melville. Its popularity made Pirsig “probably the most widely read philosopher alive,” a British journalist wrote in 2006.

Pirsig, a perfectionist who published only one major work after “Zen” but inspired college classes, academic conferences and a legion of “Pirsig pilgrims” who retrace the anguished, cross-country motorcycle trip at the heart of his novel, died Monday at his home in South Berwick, Maine, the Associated Press confirmed. He was 88 and had been in failing health. “Zen” and Pirsig’s less successful 1991 novel, “Lila,” are not easy reads. In both, he develops what he calls the “Metaphysics of Quality,” a philosophy that attempts to unite and transcend the mysticism of the East and the reason of the West. “Zen” is the account of a 1968 motorcycle trip that Pirsig, his 11-year-old son Chris and two friends made from Minneapolis through the West. A fifth traveler was sensed but unseen: Phaedrus, Pirsig’s alter ego, brilliant, uncompromising and obsessed with the search for truth. Like the real-life Pirsig, the ghost-like Phaedrus had an IQ of 170, entered a university at 15 and, as a young man, was committed to mental hospitals where he underwent electroconvulsive therapy.

“He was dead,” Pirsig’s narrator writes in “Zen.” “Destroyed by order of the court, enforced by the transmission of high-voltage alternating current through the lobes of his brain.”

More here.

Nick Wingfield in The New York Times:

Zoran Popović knows a thing or two about video games. A computer science professor at the University of Washington, Dr. Popović has worked on software algorithms that make computer-controlled characters move realistically in games like the science-fiction shooter “Destiny.” But while those games are entertainment designed to grab players by their adrenal glands, Dr. Popović’s latest creation asks players to trace lines over fuzzy images with a computer mouse. It has a slow pace with dreamy music that sounds like the ambient soundtrack inside a New Age bookstore.

The point? To advance neuroscience.

Since November, thousands of people have played the game, “Mozak,” which uses common tricks of the medium — points, leveling up and leader boards that publicly rank the performance of players — to crowdsource the creation of three-dimensional models of neurons. The Center for Game Science, a group at the University of Washington that Dr. Popović oversees, developed the game in collaboration with the Allen Institute for Brain Science, a nonprofit research organization founded by Paul Allen, the billionaire co-founder of Microsoft, that is seeking a better understanding of the brain. Dr. Popović had previously received wide attention in the scientific community for a puzzle game called “Foldit,” released nearly a decade ago, that harnesses the skills of players to solve riddles about the structure of proteins. The Allen Institute’s goal of cataloging the structure of neurons, the cells that transmit information throughout the nervous system, could one day help researchers understand the roots of neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s and their treatment. Neurons come in devilishly complex shapes and staggering quantities — about 100 million and 87 billion in mouse and human brains, both of which players can work on in Mozak.

More here.

Prayaag Akbar in Aeon:

In October 2016, a young man walked into a flour mill in Uttarakhand, a state of northern India where the mist-wrapped mountains of the outer Himalayas begin. He was Dalit (Sanskrit for broken, scattered, downtrodden), a relatively recent collective identity claimed by communities across the nation that are considered untouchable in the caste system. Present in the mill was a Brahmin schoolteacher – Brahmins are the caste elite – who accused the Dalit man of having defiled all the flour produced there that day, merely by his entry: notions of purity and pollution are integral to caste. After the Dalit man objected to the insult, the schoolteacher took out a blade and slit the Dalit’s throat, killing him instantly.

The incident caused uproar in the national press. Dalit groups in Uttarakhand staged a series of protests. The Brahmin schoolteacher was arrested, along with his brother and father, who had threatened the murdered man’s family if they went to the police; booked for murder and criminal intimidation, the men were also charged under the ‘Prevention of Atrocities’ act – a vital part of the Indian Penal Code that prohibits a range of violent and non-violent action against members of the lowest castes and tribes.

After the initial flurry of limited upper-class angst – followed by self-congratulation (at the foresight of the lawmakers for how the state machinery kicked into gear to protect the lower-castes) – the violence was then safely imagined as belonging to a distant, retrograde realm, where things would soon change. Silence followed, then forgetting. There was no discussion of the deep-seated convictions and codes that enabled this gruesome act, or how each Indian life was linked to it: the key to living in a caste society is to distance yourself from its most horrifying manifestations.

More here.

Akeel Bilgrami in the NOMIS Workshop Series: Nature and Value Discussion Papers (page 107 and on):

There are several other features of the political philosophy we have inherited that one could summon to present the tension between liberty and equality, and I have mentioned only these two just to give a completely familiar sense of how far such thinking has gone into our sensibility, how entrenched it is in the very way we deploy these terms, and how, therefore, it would seem almost to change the semantics of the terms if we were to think that the tension could be removed or resolved. That is to say, if we managed to see them as not being in tension, it would only be because, as Thomas Kuhn might have put it, we have changed the meanings of the terms ‘liberty’ and ‘equality’, not because we have produced an improved theory or politics within the framework of the Enlightenment. Within that framework things are, on this score, unimprovable. In other words, what I mean by framework here is perhaps one of the (diverse) things that Kuhn meant by his term ‘paradigm’ and, if so, clearly we need to shift to another framework if we are ever going to remove the tension between these two notions. In such a new framework, neither ‘liberty’ nor ‘equality’ would mean what they mean in the framework of Enlightenment thought, no more than ‘mass’ in Einstein’s physics meant what it meant in Newtonian mechanics, if Kuhn is right.

How might such a shift in framework be sought? Here is a proposal. Let’s, as a start, usher the very ideals of liberty and equality off centre-stage. If this is to disinherit an entire tradition of liberal thought of the Enlightenment, so be it. Once these are exeunt, we need to replace them on centre-stage with a third, more primitive, concept; that is to say, a concept more fundamental to our social and political life than even liberty and equality. And this is to be done with the idea that ‘liberty’ and ‘equality’ may subsequently be introduced once again – by the back door, as it were– but now merely as necessary conditions for the achievement of this more basic ideal that occupies the central position. So re-introduced, there is reason to think that these terms may have undergone substantial revision in their meaning, and thus may not any longer express concepts that are at odds with one another.

More here. Sanjay Reddy responds following Bilgrami's essay.

William E. Scheuerman in Boston Review:

Germany’s defeat helped free Habermas from the provincial social climate. He listened to live radio broadcasts of the Nuremberg Trials and, shocked by the horrors recounted, seems to have quickly grasped the criminal nature of the regime under which he had grown up. Revealingly perhaps, his academic interests shifted away from medicine, a more professionally secure field, to philosophy. His 1954 University of Bonn doctoral dissertation on the Romantic philosopher Friedrich Schelling offers little evidence of Habermas’s growing radicalism, but his early journalistic pieces, published during the early and mid ‘50s in major German newspapers and intellectual journals, anticipate his life-long political concerns. Directed against right-wing intellectuals (for example, Heidegger), they criticize an older generation for failing to take democracy seriously—that “magic word,” according to Habermas, that brought together otherwise disparate voices within his own postwar generation who sought a clean break from Nazism.

Because Habermas took the magic word of democracy so seriously, he found himself disenchanted not only with established conservative intellectuals but also political elites who preferred to keep their mouths shut about their Nazi entanglements, and for whom Germany’s new liberal order was primarily about stability and security, not democratic self-government. Dictatorship and the racism that motored it still haunted his country. Democracy was not a fortunate historical inheritance one could simply take up, but instead an unfinished project. As he has more recently claimed, democracy represents the surviving “remnant of utopia”: only democracy is “capable of hacking through the Gordian knots of otherwise insoluble problems.” Thus his life-long intellectual project of trying to understand democracy’s promise and possibilities.

More here.

Robert Darnton in The New York Review of Books:

One of the bombs dropped during the current presidential campaign in France is Histoire mondiale de la France, an eight-hundred-page tome surveying 40,000 years of French history. A collaborative work written by 122 academics and directed by Patrick Boucheron, a distinguished medievalist at the Collège de France, it hardly seemed destined for the best-seller lists when it was published in January. But the French have snapped it up: 70,000 copies have been sold as of mid-March and sales are still going strong. After several decades of somnolence, academic history is a hit.

Although the book owes much of its success to the talent of its authors, its publication was timed perfectly to make a splash during the election campaign. History has always been a battleground in France. As Éric Zemmour, a right-wing journalist and historian, remarked in an angry review in Le Figaro, “History is war. Not just the history of war but the war of history.” He went on to condemn Histoire mondiale de la France as an attack on the identity of France and an attempt to destroy the “national narrative” (“roman national”) at the heart of what it means to be French.

Alain Finkielkraut, a conservative philosopher and member of the Académie française, damned the book in an equally savage review: “The authors of Histoire mondiale de la France are the gravediggers of the great French heritage.” Other commentators on the right have echoed the same theme. Michael Jeaubelaux, a blogger who supports the conservative presidential candidate François Fillon, wrote: “When the Collège de France buries France and the French, it is urgent for the people to seize power against those who are paid to destroy our country, its history, its heritage, its culture!”

More here.