Lisa Zyga in Phys.org:

Researchers have discovered that the solutions to a famous mathematical function called the Riemann zeta function correspond to the solutions of another, different kind of function that may make it easier to solve one of the biggest problems in mathematics: the Riemann hypothesis. If the results can be rigorously verified, then it would finally prove the Riemann hypothesis, which is worth a $1,000,000 Millennium Prize from the Clay Mathematics Institute.

While the Riemann hypothesis dates back to 1859, for the past 100 years or so mathematicians have been trying to find an operator function like the one discovered here, as it is considered a key step in the proof.

"To our knowledge, this is the first time that an explicit—and perhaps surprisingly relatively simple—operator has been identified whose eigenvalues ['solutions' in matrix terminology] correspond exactly to the nontrivial zeros of the Riemann zeta function," Dorje Brody, a mathematical physicist at Brunel University London and coauthor of the new study, told Phys.org.

What still remains to be proven is the second key step: that all of the eigenvalues are real numbers rather than imaginary ones. If future work can prove this, then it would finally prove the Riemann hypothesis.

More here.

Ed Yong in The Atlantic:

Just as birders can identify birds by their melodious calls, David George Haskell can distinguish trees by their sounds. The task is especially easy when it rains, as it so often does in the Ecuadorian rainforest. Depending on the shapes and sizes of their leaves, the different plants react to falling drops by producing “a splatter of metallic sparks” or “a low, clean, woody thump” or “a speed-typist’s clatter.” Every species has its own song. Train your ears (and abandon the distracting echoes of a plastic rain jacket) and you can carry out a botanical census through sound alone.

“I’ve taught ornithology to students for many years,” says Haskell, a natural history writer and professor of biology at Sewanee. “And I challenge my students: Okay, now that you’ve learned the songs of 100 birds, your task is to learn the sounds of 20 trees. Can you tell an oak from a maple by ear? I have them go out, pour their attention into their ears, and harvest sounds. It’s an almost meditative experience. And from that, you realize that trees sound different, and they have amazing sounds coming from them. Our unaided ears can hear how a maple tree changes its voice as a soft leaves of early spring change into the dying one of autumn.”

More here.

Jennifer Senior in the New York Times:

Read enough stories about the madness whipping through college campuses right now, and you can’t help but wonder if our institutions of higher learning have put the “loco” in in loco parentis. There was once a time when America’s students and faculty were united in their desire to defend their free-speech prerogatives, but no longer: Universities are now hypervigilant about protecting students from ideas that might be considered offensive or traumatizing, and many students are hyper-assertive in their demands to be protected from them.

I do not want to reduce the turbulence on today’s college campuses to caricature. (Though last month’s flare-up at Middlebury, which turned a planned colloquy into a crime scene, makes for a pretty fat target.) Those who defend trigger warnings, safe spaces and “empathetic correctness” have reasons for doing so, and no one wants vulnerable young people to experience gratuitous suffering.

But it’s also hard to ignore the irony here: Universities are now terrible places to find political heterogeneity. Campus discourse has become the equivalent of the supermarket banana. Only one genetic variety remains.

Among the educators who recently found herself at the treacherous intersection of free speech and sensitivity politics is Laura Kipnis, a film professor, cultural critic and dedicated provocateur at Northwestern University. Responding to a new campus directive that prevented professors from dating undergraduates, she wrote an essay for The Chronicle of Higher Education in February of 2015 entitled “Sexual Paranoia Strikes Academe.” Within days of publication, she was brought up on Title IX complaints for creating a “hostile environment.” She spent 72 days in the public stockade for it, until the university cleared her of any wrongdoing.

More here.

From EurikAlert!

Communication studies Associate Professor Christina Yoshimura teaches courses in interpersonal communication, and her research focuses on how personal relationships intersect with larger systems, such as health care or the workplace. Yoshimura also volunteers as a clinical mental health counselor at UM's Curry Health Center Counseling Services in order to bring research out of academia and into the daily lives of students at UM.

…"In our culture there are so many things we give people specific teaching in, like how to calculate the circumference of a circle or how to drive a car," she said. "Yet even though we know from countless research studies that good relationships are essential to our health and well-being, and even though we know many communication behaviors that are correlated with healthy relationships, it is rare to find any of that taught to people outside of select university classes." For example, people often struggle to start a conversation with someone new, or handle conflict effectively. Yoshimura's practice-based counseling allows students to get an overview of productive relational communication skills and then practice them with one another. "This incorporates cognitive understanding of the skill with the repeated physical experience of using the skill," Yoshimura said. "Most people have room to improve their social functioning, and could experience less anxiety and more satisfying interpersonal interactions with even just a little practice." "I see communication as a powerful frame for understanding and improving our human experiences," she said. "Participating on the Department of Justice grant was deeply meaningful to me as a way of seeing, serving and respecting sexual assault survivors on campus. This is of the utmost importance here at UM, and it's also an issue of national importance. Providing an avenue for students to develop and refine their skills in building positive relationships is another way to serve the students on our campus. "Using the social science research in interpersonal communication to work directly in the lives of our students is an immense privilege," Yoshimura said, "and the obligation to do that well will continue to guide my choices here at the University and within our Missoula community."

More here.

Brian Klaas in Alternet:

For the first time since the end of the Cold War, the world is losing faith in democracy. Between Donald Trump’s rise in American politics and the predictable but self-inflicted "Brexit" economic shockwave, many are now openly asking what was previously an unthinkable question in the West: can people really be trusted with self-government? Is it time to ditch democracy and try something else? After the Soviet Union fell, democracy expanded at an unprecedented rate. Today, global democracy has receded slightly every year since 2006; in other words, there has been no democratic forward progress for the last decade. At the other end of the spectrum, powerful authoritarian regimes are becoming more authoritarian. Across multiple indexes and measures, democracy is steadily declining at worst and stagnating at best. Unless the trend is reversed, anyone born in 2016 will be, on average, less free than someone born during the 1990s. These declines are not an accident; they are the battle scars of a struggle between the rule of the people and the rule of despots and dictators. Right now, the people are losing.

However, the democratic sky is not falling. The world remains more democratic than it has been at almost any time in human history. Many countries that were bastions of authoritarian repression just a few decades ago are now democracies. Nonetheless, the recent retreat of democracy is serious cause for concern. This is not a theoretical philosophical debate. Billions of people remain trapped in unresponsive, unaccountable regimes where ruthless oppression is common. As many despots have rolled back democracy or refused to embrace it, they have found an unlikely accomplice: the West. Western governments, in London, Paris, Brussels, and most of all Washington, have directly and indirectly aided and abetted the decline of democracy around the globe. This unfortunate truth comes despite the stated goals of all Western governments and despite the personal principles of almost everyone in those governments. Overwhelmingly, Western elites genuinely believe in democracy. They want democracy to spread. Moreover, Western governments have been, are, and will continue to be the biggest force backing democracy in the world. But their current approach is backfiring. … For the moment, though, the West is suffering an acute case of democracy promotion fatigue. Its leaders have less of a stomach for the short-term risks it presents than they used to.

More here.

Richard Marshall interviews John Broome in 3:AM Magazine:

3:AM: Economics has recently been accused ( see Amitai Etzioni in‘Evonomics’) of leading to unethical, anti-social thinking so do you think economics needs an ethical theory? If it does, which one?

JB: ‘Of course it does’. Economists constantly make recommendations about all sorts of things, from how the banking system should be organized to what should be done about climate change. What sort of ‘should’ is that? There are non-ethical ‘shoulds’, such as the way you should hold a golf club. But the economists’ ‘should’ always involves balancing the conflicting interests of different people against each other. This makes it inevitably a matter for ethics. Since it is engaged in ethics, economics needs ethical theory to do its work well.

These days many economists deny this. They are so thoroughly immersed in their own ethical assumptions that they don’t recognize them for what they are. The explicitly ethical branch of economics is known, oddly, as ‘welfare economics’. When I was a student in economics around 1970, we were taught serious welfare economics, including such topics as the value of equality and the theory of ‘optimal taxation’. But soon after that, welfare economics stopped being taught in most US universities, and a generation grew up in ignorance of it.

It was this ignorance that drew me back to work with economists ten years ago. At the start of ‘The Stern Review of the Economics of Climate Change‘ the economist Nicholas Stern announced that his work rested on ethical premises, and he would state what they were. His report drew strong criticism from some US economists, who claimed that ethical premises had no place in economics. I was incensed. I was by then a moral philosopher and not an economist, but I could not let economists propagate their own ethical views whilst pretending they were not ethical views at all. So I found myself once again working with economists on climate change, to try and make sure they recognized their ethical premises.

More here.

Joseph Schreiber at The Quarterly Conversation:

Unlike the standard guidebook, Anderson offers his traveler no pictures, maps, or diagrams. This is intentional. Side trips are encouraged as the fancy strikes, and generous footnotes are provided for those who wish to follow up on quotes and references. (Of course, there is also the ease of stopping into Google for quick access to an image, biography, or further background material.) Anderson’s extended essay feels like spending time with an entertaining, well-read explorer who has traversed the cities of the imagination and returned with exotic tales that stretch back into pre-history and out into the solar system. We are in the presence of a modern-day Marco Polo who understands that “all cities can, and should be read.” His aim is to help us learn to trace these narratives ourselves.

Our guide is an Irish writer living in Scotland. He is neither an academic nor an architect, but his focus of attention lies in the intersection of culture, architecture, and technology. In a recent podcast, Anderson traced the genesis of this project to long-standing fascinations with cities and with the point at which reality and myth meet. As he became increasingly obsessed with architects and started looking through their plans, he found that beyond their iconic structures, each had drafted countless schemes and designs that would remain, for a variety of reasons, unrealized. With a different set of circumstances, then, the skylines and urban landscapes we know now could have been very different—as they once were in the past and will be in the future. The modern city is in flux and can perhaps best be understood only through a shifting kaleidoscope of angles and perspectives.

more here.

Julia Lovell at The Guardian:

In the spring of last year, Xi Jinping – China’s paramount leader – presided over a national conference on religion. He seized the opportunity to declare Chinese Communist party (CCP) authority over questions of faith. Religious matters, Xi announced, are of “special importance” to the CCP: “We should guide and educate the religious circle and their followers with the socialist core values.” Believers must “dig deep into doctrines and canons that are in line with social harmony and progress, and favourable for the building of a healthy and civilised society, and interpret religious doctrines in a way that is conducive to modern China’s progress and in line with our excellent traditional culture”. Members of the CCP, he further emphasised, must remain “unyielding Marxist atheists, consolidate their faith, and bear in mind the party’s tenets”.

Xi’s remarks exemplified the fierce tensions that surround the past and present role of religion in communist China. While the party acknowledges and accepts the resurgence of religious belief made possible by the post-Mao thaw, it retains an ongoing compulsion to regulate faith – a compulsion that has resulted inviolent suppressions of spiritual movements such as Falun Gong.

more here.

Parul Sehgal in The New York Times:

Troubles — like ants — seldom walk alone. In GHACHAR GHOCHAR (Penguin, $15, paper), a new novella by the Indian writer Vivek Shanbhag, translated from Kannada by Srinath Perur, a family is besieged by both and develops a taste for responding with imaginative cruelty. Sudden wealth only makes them more ruthless. “It’s true what they say — it’s not we who control money, it’s the money that controls us,” the nameless narrator realizes, a little late in the day. “When there’s only a little, it behaves meekly; when it grows, it becomes brash and has its way with us. Money had swept us up and flung us in the midst of a whirlwind.” This spiny, scary story of moral decline, crisply plotted and no thicker than my thumb, has been heralded as the finest Indian novel in a decade, notable for a book in bhasha, one of India’s vernacular languages. The Great Indian Novel has almost always referred to a particular kind of book: big, baggy, polyphonic and, crucially, written in English — “Midnight’s Children,” say, or “The God of Small Things.” Admirers of this austere little tale, who include Suketu Mehta and Katherine Boo, have compared Shanbhag to Chekhov. Folded into the compressed, densely psychological portrait of this family is a whole universe: a parable of rising India, an indictment of domestic violence, a taxonomy of ants and a sly commentary on translation itself.

The title is a nonsense phrase, meaning tangled beyond repair. Our narrator (who, with his excellent intentions and total lack of initiative, recalls Nick Carraway) hears it for the first time on his honeymoon. He has pounced on his new wife, Anita, in their hotel room, but can’t untie the drawstring of her sari’s petticoat. It’s all knotted up — ghachar ghochar, she says, reaching for a word from her childhood, a word invented by her little brother to describe a snarled kite string. The narrator is thrilled by this intimacy, to be welcomed into her secret language. In the morning, he gestures at the disheveled bedsheets, their entwined, with their own idioms, rites and taboos. Anita is not the only character who has grown up within the borders of a particular culture, yet when the narrator tries to share something of his own world, as new lovers will, Anita is understandably less charmed. To survive years of privation, his peculiar family has learned to move as one. The narrator can scarcely extricate himself in his own mind: “What can I say of myself that is only about me and not tied up with the others? Wherever I try to start, I quickly run into one of three women . . . each more fearsome than the other.” Everyone has a specific role. His uncle runs the family business, a spice packaging company. His fearsome mother and sister fight the family’s battles and keep his father, a co-owner of the business, appeased until he makes a will. The narrator’s job is to stay out of the way, mainly, “killing time with great dedication.”

More here.

Megan Molteni in Wired:

GRAHAM JOHNSON IS an artist with a curious muse: the human cell. He’s the Matisse of mitochondria, the Goya of the Golgi apparatus. Twenty years ago he graduated from a quiet corner of Johns Hopkins where students draw cadavers instead of cutting them up. At first, Johnson stuck to the medical illustrator canon, animating cells in a classic, cartoonish style. But he dreamed of constructing three-dimensional, data-driven models that could capture all their beautiful complexity. For that, he’d need computers, lots of them. And some really powerful microscopes.

Johnson found them both at the Allen Institute for Cell Science—a Seattle-based research center established in late 2014 by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. (Before getting recruited to the center, Johnson completed a PhD in computational biology and molecular graphics.) Today, he and the institute’s team of nearly 50 cell biologists, microscopy specialists, and computer programmers revealed what they’ve been working on the past two years: the Allen Cell Explorer. It’s the largest public collection of human cells ever visualized in 3-D, which serves as fuel for the project’s engine: the first-ever deep learning model to predict how cells are organized. To create their model of the organic shapes and structures inside the cell, the Allen team trained deep learning algorithms on 3-D images of more than 6,000 induced pluripotent human stem cells. But first they had to make those images. They dyed each cell’s outer membrane and nuclear DNA to stand as lighthouses in a sea of cellular noise. Then they used Crispr/Cas9 gene editing to fluorescently tag well-known proteins in structures like microtubules and mitochondria. Powerful microscopes captured the multicolored light display.

More here.

Daniel W. Drezner in The Chronicle of Higher Education:

Both Public Intellectuals and Thought Leaders engage in acts of intellectual creation, but their style and purpose are different. To adopt the language of Isaiah Berlin, Public Intellectuals are foxes who know many things, while Thought Leaders are hedgehogs who know one big thing. The former are skeptics, the latter are true believers. A Public Intellectual will tell you everything that is wrong with everyone else’s ideas. A Thought Leader will tell you everything that is right about his or her own idea.

Both intellectual types serve a vital purpose in a democracy. Public Intellectuals are often bashed as elitists, but they help to expose shibboleths masquerading as accepted wisdom. They are critics, and critiquing bad ideas is a necessary function. Their greatest contribution to public discourse is to point out when an emperor has no clothes. Thought Leaders, on the other hand, are often derided as glib TED-talkers lacking in substance, but they can introduce and promote new ideas. During times of uncertainty and change, Thought Leaders can offer intellectually stimulating ways to reimagine the world.

A public sphere dominated by Public Intellectuals has high barriers to entry; the marketplace of ideas becomes ossified and stagnant over time. One dominated by Thought Leaders has high barriers to exit; too many bad ideas linger in the intellectual ether. A healthy public discourse in which good ideas rise to the top requires a balance between the two types of thinkers.

In the past few decades, however, the market has become unbalanced. The surge of ideas conferences, speaker bureaus, and TED-like events suggests that the demand for thinkers has grown. The proliferation of media platforms has accelerated that trend. At the same time, the supply of intellectuals has increased far beyond the academy. In foreign policy and economic analysis, the areas I am most familiar with, academics must compete with a welter of think tanks, private-sector outlets, and professional pundits to have their voice heard.

More here.

Bruce Robbins in The Nation:

In “Components of the National Culture” (1968), Perry Anderson argued that some of the most influential intellectuals who fled to Britain from political violence on the continent—people like Berlin, Karl Popper, Bronislaw Malinowski, Melanie Klein, and Ludwig Wittgenstein—had elective affinities with Britain’s very uncontinental tradition of nonviolent continuity and relative social stability. Once established in Britain, Anderson said, they reinforced and expanded that tradition, leaving Britain more conservative still. 


In Anderson’s view, Deutscher was the most prominent exception to this “White emigration.” Perhaps because of the idiosyncrasies of his radicalism—one that did not quite conform with either British communist or social-democratic politics—Deutscher was ignored by Britain’s academic world. Or perhaps it was because his intellectual independence, his journalistic flair and polemical style, didn’t conform with England’s cloistered and sometimes stodgy university culture. In any case, Anderson never ignored him—in fact, anyone searching for evidence of Deutscher’s intellectual afterlife would need look no further than Anderson’s brilliant accomplishments as a historian and political analyst. 


Like Deutscher, Anderson has proved over the years to be a polyglot polymath; like Deutscher, he recognizes no appeal above or beyond what Gregory Elliott calls, in his book about Anderson, “the merciless laboratory of history.” Both were drawn to the “olympian universalism” of Marx and Engels, although perhaps not equally so. 


Anderson related an anecdote that suggested a small but telling difference between the two men. In the 1960s, Anderson was loudly indignant at England’s lack of political dynamism. Why, he asked, could France boast of so many revolutions, while modern England had had none? In a foreword to the volume in which “Components” is reprinted, he recalled Deutscher informing him that he could not fully approve of Anderson’s disengagement from political possibilities on the ground, imperfect as they might be. Borrowing a term from Rosa Luxemburg’s misguided refusal to support Polish independence before World War I, Deutscher said that Anderson’s position was guilty of “national nihilism.” 


In saying no to nihilism even about nationalism, of which he was no fan, Deutscher was passing on some practical wisdom—­wisdom intended in particular for anyone trying to stretch political commitment beyond the heady enthusiasm of youth. To judge everyday politics by the high standard of revolution is to make oneself vulnerable to despair, or at least apathy. It can also be self-defeating, parachuting a set of abstract standards into a community that might be receptive to a politics’ goals but is either confused or alienated by the language in which those goals are pursued. As a longtime revolutionary, Deutscher was well-placed to insist that there are other paths toward social justice.


More here.

For my hylozoist friends,Hedda Hassel Morch in Nautilus:

[T]he deep nature of consciousness appears to lie beyond scientific reach. We take it for granted, however, that physics can in principle tell us everything there is to know about the nature of physical matter. Physics tells us that matter is made of particles and fields, which have properties such as mass, charge, and spin. Physics may not yet have discovered all the fundamental properties of matter, but it is getting closer.

Yet there is reason to believe that there must be more to matter than what physics tells us. Broadly speaking, physics tells us what fundamental particles do or how they relate to other things, but nothing about how they are in themselves, independently of other things.

Charge, for example, is the property of repelling other particles with the same charge and attracting particles with the opposite charge. In other words, charge is a way of relating to other particles. Similarly, mass is the property of responding to applied forces and of gravitationally attracting other particles with mass, which might in turn be described as curving spacetime or interacting with the Higgs field. These are also things that particles do or ways of relating to other particles and to spacetime.

In general, it seems all fundamental physical properties can be described mathematically. Galileo, the father of modern science, famously professed that the great book of nature is written in the language of mathematics. Yet mathematics is a language with distinct limitations. It can only describe abstract structures and relations. For example, all we know about numbers is how they relate to the other numbers and other mathematical objects—that is, what they “do,” the rules they follow when added, multiplied, and so on. Similarly, all we know about a geometrical object such as a node in a graph is its relations to other nodes. In the same way, a purely mathematical physics can tell us only about the relations between physical entities or the rules that govern their behavior.

One might wonder how physical particles are, independently of what they do or how they relate to other things. What are physical things like in themselves, or intrinsically? Some have argued that there is nothing more to particles than their relations, but intuition rebels at this claim. For there to be a relation, there must be two things being related. Otherwise, the relation is empty—a show that goes on without performers, or a castle constructed out of thin air. In other words, physical structure must be realized or implemented by some stuff or substance that is itself not purely structural. Otherwise, there would be no clear difference between physical and mere mathematical structure, or between the concrete universe and a mere abstraction. But what could this stuff that realizes or implements physical structure be, and what are the intrinsic, non-structural properties that characterize it? This problem is a close descendant of Kant’s classic problem of knowledge of things-in-themselves. The philosopher Galen Strawson has called it the hard problem of matter.

More here.

William Janeway over at INET:

Productivity is the key driver of economic growth. It is the force that increases output of goods and services beyond what increased inputs of labor, capital and other factors of production like energy can account for. So growth in productivity increases income per head, the size of the pie available for distribution. And, as conventionally defined, the “Productivity Puzzle” is the unexplained decline in the growth of productivity observable over the past decade, through the recovery from the Great Recession triggered by the Global Financial Crisis of 2008. Here is the IMF’s picture for the advanced economies:

https://blog-imfdirect.imf.org/2017/03/13/chart-of-the-week-the-productivity-puzzle/

In fact, the decline in productivity growth has a longer history: over the past 30 years, with the exception of the uptick during the years of the great Dotcom/Internet Bubble of the late 1990s, productivity growth has slowed markedly.

Gavyn Davis, “Is Economic Growth Permanently Lower?” available at https://www.ft.com/content/3822867f-85bf-33a2-85a5-4a40974d7d9e

Post-war reconstruction, especially of the devastated economies of western Europe and Japan, was responsible for a rate of growth in productivity that was unsustainable. But in 2012, ignoring the one-off character of the 15 years to 1972 and focusing on the US, the distinguished economic historian Robert Gordon established himself as a leading techno-skepticist. In his provocative essay “Is U.S. Economic Growth Over?” Gordon graphically dramatized the divergence from the previous trend that began in 1972:

http://www.nber.org/papers/w18315, p. 15

One mode of response to Gordon and to the data has been to focus on the potential mismeasurement of output in the increasingly digalized economy, since any such shortfall would automatically reduce the measured rate of growth in productivity. Thus, MIT’s Erik Brynjolfsson and Joohee Oh, note:

Over the past decade, there has been an explosion of digital services on the Internet, from Google and Wikipedia to Facebook and YouTube. However, the value of these innovations is difficult to quantify, because consumers pay nothing to use them.

But their estimate of the missing output is only $30 billion, barely a rounding error in a $18 trillion economy.

Recently, leading economist of innovation Philippe Aghion and colleagues have identified what appears to be a substantially larger source of under-measurement of productivity in the over-statement of inflation.

More here.

Abeba Birhane in Aeon:

Few respected philosophers and psychologists would identify as strict Cartesian dualists, in the sense of believing that mind and matter are completely separate. But the Cartesian cogito is still everywhere you look. The experimental design of memory testing, for example, tends to proceed from the assumption that it’s possible to draw a sharp distinction between the self and the world. If memory simply lives inside the skull, then it’s perfectly acceptable to remove a person from her everyday environment and relationships, and to test her recall using flashcards or screens in the artificial confines of a lab. A person is considered a standalone entity, irrespective of her surroundings, inscribed in the brain as a series of cognitive processes. Memory must be simply something you have, not something you do within a certain context.

Social psychology purports to examine the relationship between cognition and society. But even then, the investigation often presumes that a collective of Cartesian subjects are the real focus of the enquiry, not selves that co-evolve with others over time. In the 1960s, the American psychologists John Darley and Bibb Latané became interested in the murder of Kitty Genovese, a young white woman who had been stabbed and assaulted on her way home one night in New York. Multiple people had witnessed the crime but none stepped in to prevent it. Darley and Latané designed a series of experiments in which they simulated a crisis, such as an epileptic fit, or smoke billowing in from the next room, to observe what people did. They were the first to identify the so-called ‘bystander effect’, in which people seem to respond more slowly to someone in distress if others are around.

Darley and Latané suggested that this might come from a ‘diffusion of responsibility’, in which the obligation to react is diluted across a bigger group of people. But as the American psychologist Frances Cherry argued in The Stubborn Particulars of Social Psychology: Essays on the Research Process (1995), this numerical approach wipes away vital contextual information that might help to understand people’s real motives. Genovese’s murder had to be seen against a backdrop in which violence against women was not taken seriously, Cherry said, and in which people were reluctant to step into what might have been a domestic dispute. Moreover, the murder of a poor black woman would have attracted far less subsequent media interest. But Darley and Latané’s focus make structural factors much harder to see.

Is there a way of reconciling these two accounts of the self – the relational, world-embracing version, and the autonomous, inward one? The 20th-century Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin believed that the answer lay in dialogue. We need others in order to evaluate our own existence and construct a coherent self-image.

More here.

Henry Martyn Lloyd in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

In an attempt to view its treasures in less than nine minutes and 43 seconds, three youths run recklessly through the Louvre, laughing breathlessly. The scene, from Jean-Luc Godard’s 1964 Bande à part, is one of French cinema’s most famous. Invoked in the conclusion to Michelle Boulous Walker’s Slow Philosophy: Reading Against the Institution, it is made to capture the malaise that grips contemporary philosophy in its institutional context, where the demands of speed and efficiency dominate at the expense of considered contemplation, and where the rapid production and consumption of knowledge have almost completely displaced the pleasures of the text. As Boulous Walker bluntly asserts, “this is not how we look at art.”

Godard’s image is striking for its visual poetry. By contrast, the dominant if somewhat covert image of Maggie Berg and Barbara K. Seeber’s The Slow Professor: Challenging the Culture of Speed in the Academy is striking for its banality. Teenagers working casualized jobs on a minimum wage serve homogenized products devoid of nutritional or aesthetical value to obese, diabetic, and utterly docile consumers. Fluorescent lights accentuate garish plastic furniture and everybody smiles, although nobody knows why. Welcome to McUniversity.

Much has already been written about the corporatization of higher education, the state of the contemporary academy, and particularly the state of the humanities. There has been enough diagnosis. What is needed now is a response that seeks to identify and cultivate a space for resistance within the modern corporate university, for keeping “alive the craft.” It is against the consumptive “student experience” model of education, the productive “publish or perish” culture and their corollaries, that Boulous Walker and Berg and Seeber set themselves. And they do so with a much-needed sense of optimism that such resistance is still possible.

More here.

Jesse Marczyk in Psychology Today:

Sticking to mammals just for the sake of discussion, males of most species endure less obligate parenting costs than females. What this means is that if a copulation between a male and female results in conception, the female bears the brunt of the biological costs of reproduction. Many males will only provide some of the gametes required for reproduction, while the females must provide the egg, gestate the fetus, birth it, and nurse/care for it for some time. Because the required female investment is substantially larger, females tend to be more selective about which males they're willing to mate with. That said, even though the male's typical investment is far lower than the female's, it's still a metabolically-costly investment: the males need to generate the sperm and seminal fluid required for conception. Testicles need to be grown, resources need to be invested into sperm/semen production, and that fluid needs to be rationed out on a per-ejaculation basis (a drop may be too little, while a cup may be too much). Put simply, males cannot afford to just produce gallons of semen for fun; it should only be produced to the extent that the benefits outweigh the costs.

For this reason, you tend to see that male testicle size varies between species, contingent on the degree of sperm competition typically encountered. For those not familiar, sperm competition refers to the probability that a female will have sperm from more than one male in her reproductive tract at a time when she might conceive. In a concrete sense, this translates into a fertile female mating with two or more males during her fertile window. This creates a context that favors the evolution of greater male investment into sperm production mechanisms, as the more of your sperm are in the fertilization race, the greater your probability of beating the competition and reproducing. When sperm competition is rare (or absent), however, males need not invest as many resources into mechanisms for producing testes and they are, accordingly, smaller.

More here.

Jon Card in The Guardian:

“The nine to five is barbaric. I really believe that. I think one day we will look back at nine-to-five employment in a similar way to how we see child labour in the 19th century,” he says. “The future will not have the nine till five. Instead, the whole day will be interspersed with other parts of your life. Scheduling will become freeform.”

In the same way the industrial revolution led to the creation of the weekend as a break from work, the cloud is altering our work schedule, Coupland says. He points to developments in Silicon Valley, where companies such as Facebook encourage staff to work from home on Wednesdays. Coupland explains that avoiding the San Francisco Bay area commute was part of the reason for this, but getting away from meetings and office politics is the most popular aspect of it with staff. “In the future, every day of the week is going to be a Wednesday. There will be no more weekends, it’ll be one smooth flow. I wish I could say that in the future there will be no meetings, but there will always be meetings.”

The demise of jobs will be unsettling for people both staff and employers, Coupland notes. No one really wants to be trapped in a job, but people still crave structure, he says. “Do people want to be in a job-job? God, no! But while most people like the notion of free time, actually having to deal with it is horrible. It’s a deal with the devil. At least when they’re employed they don’t have to do deal with the freefall; the nothingness of free time.”

More here.