Paula Kupfer at Harper's Magazine:

The drive from Panama City to Colón is a fast hour thanks to a new highway, completed in 2012, which provided a much-needed alternative to the congested old Transístmica road. The freeway runs more or less parallel to the Panama Canal and is flanked by thick rainforest until signs of the metropolis begin to appear the closer you get to the Pacific coast. Toward the historic center of Colón, the highway leads you past the enormous, pastel-hued shopping complex of Cuatro Altos onto an overpass that descends gently and merges into Colón’s main avenue. This thoroughfare, a wide two-way street with a tree-lined center path known as Avenida Bolívarand further along as Paseo del Centenario, is flanked by colorful buildings, cheap stores, and sidewalks dotted with street vendors. People walk in every direction; young men wash cars with water from dirty buckets on the side of the road; old men sell lottery tickets outside the market; local ladies offer manicures in makeshift outdoor setups. The once-elegant edifices lining the main road are still attractive, though more in the way of a sour ruin-porn fantasy. (In a 2008 James Bond film, Colón was used as a stand-in for Haiti).

One afternoon, Joel Ceras, a local architect and expert in restoring historical buildings, took us to see the rehabilitation of the Cinco de Noviembre park, where a group of young, tattooed men in reflective orange vests were at work with shovels in hand. Occupying a full block next to the city’s historic cathedral (itself on the last leg of a formidable renovation), the park is known locally as “La Concha” for its shell-shaped performance stage. During its renovation, workers discovered colorful tiles of the original fountain at the center of the park, dating to 1942. The young men at work were all part of the Barrios Seguros initiative.

more here.

Sean Guillory at Bookforum:

Then there's the second question: whether we are in a new Cold War. You can find the Cold War meme at work both among Russia's friends, such as The Nation's Stephen Cohen, and its foes, such as Edward Lucas of The Economist. Like the "Who lost Russia?" question, the ghost of a new Cold War has been haunting us pretty much since the end of the old Cold War. In every dust-up between the US and Russia of the past two decades, one or both sides have charged the other with having a "Cold War mentality" in order to shame and caution them against further escalation. It's a favorite insult, intended to point out the other side's backwardness. Sadly, it's lately begun to feel like rather less of a laughable throwback. The idea of a replay of the Cold War expresses itself as both trauma and desire. A new Cold War is scary because in theory it places the entire world at the mercy of US-Russia relations. By the same token, it's weirdly consoling for both sides, even offering a certain measure of nostalgia. Both powers were at their peak during the Cold War's tensest periods, and both understood the rules of engagement—the Cold War framing restores a sense of familiar, binary order in a rapidly changing world. We shouldn't entirely discount the subconscious appeal a return to that greatness and simplicity might offer, especially at a time when the US and Russia are both experiencing internal shocks, newer powers are on the rise, and there are signs of utter chaos elsewhere.

more here.

Fleur MacDonald in The Economist:

In 2012, two years after Instagram launched, photojournalists Peter DiCampo and Austin Merrill started Everyday Africa, a feed on the photo-sharing application. On assignment in the Ivory Coast, which was recovering from its second civil war, they posted the photos that newspaper and magazine editors wouldn’t commission: images of an Africa where disease, poverty and war weren’t the focus. The idea took off. The account, which has posted over 3,500 photos, has 300,000 followers; the hashtag #EverydayAfrica has been used more that 179,000 times; and offshoots of the project have sprung up in Asia, India and Latin America. Think-pieces about the project have been published in the very publications that initially spurned such pictures.

The success of Everyday Africa is partly down to the quality of its images. A select group of 30 professional and amateur photographers have the password to the account and permission to post images they’ve taken with their mobile phones. But it also aspires to democratise the dissemination of information through social media – a hope that was particularly prevalent in 2012, when the Arab spring was still fresh in people’s minds – and taps into the widespread belief that the news media only runs negative stories (the hashtag #theafricathemedianevershowsyou has also hit a nerve). Now DiCampo and Merrill have put together a book of images from the project. “Everyday Africa: 30 Photographers Re-picturing a Continent” is square, like an Instagram post. The photographs – of children playing, teenagers flirting, people working and old women gossiping – depict scenes of daily life that will be familiar to everyone, whether African or not. While the book is not as completist as its title makes out – this Africa excludes much of North Africa, as well as Zimbabwe, Chad, Tanzania and Cape Verde – these photographs do give a different impression of a place that has too often been misrepresented by the media.

More here.

Matthew Hutson in Scientific American:

People mislead themselves all day long. We tell ourselves we’re smarter and better looking than our friends, that our political party can do no wrong, that we’re too busy to help a colleague. In 1976, in the foreword to Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene, the biologist Robert Trivers floated a novel explanation for such self-serving biases: We dupe ourselves in order to deceive others, creating social advantage. Now after four decades Trivers and his colleagues have published the first research supporting his idea. Psychologists have identified several ways of fooling ourselves: biased information-gathering, biased reasoning and biased recollections. The new work, forthcoming in the Journal of Economic Psychology, focuses on the first—the way we seek information that supports what we want to believe and avoid that which does not.

In one experiment Trivers and his team asked 306 online participants to write a persuasive speech about a fictional man named Mark. They were told they would receive a bonus depending on how effective it was. Some were told to present Mark as likable, others were instructed to depict him as unlikable, the remaining subjects were directed to convey whatever impression they formed. To gather information about Mark, the participants watched a series of short videos, which they could stop observing at any intermission. For some viewers, most of the early videos presented Mark in a good light (recycling, returning a wallet), and they grew gradually darker (catcalling, punching a friend). For others, the videos went from dark to light. When incentivized to present Mark as likable, people who watched the likable videos first stopped watching sooner than those who saw unlikable videos first. The former did not wait for a complete picture as long as they got the information they needed to convince themselves, and others, of Mark’s goodness. In turn, their own opinions about Mark were more positive, which led their essays about his good nature to be more convincing, as rated by other participants.

More here.

Raymond H. Anderson in the New York Times:

Yevgeny Yevtushenko, an internationally acclaimed poet with the charisma of an actor and the instincts of a politician whose defiant verse inspired a generation of young Russians in their fight against Stalinism during the Cold War, died on Saturday in Tulsa, Okla., where he had been teaching for many years. He was 83.

His death, in a hospital, was confirmed by a close friend, Mikhail Morgulis, with the TASS news agency. It said he had been admitted late Friday in “serious condition,” but the cause of death was not specified. His wife, Maria Novikova, and their two sons, Dmitry and Yevgeny, were reportedly with him when he died.

Mr. Yevtushenko’s poems of protest, often declaimed with sweeping gestures to thousands of excited admirers in public squares, sports stadiums and lecture halls, captured the tangled emotions of Russia’s young — hope, fear, anger and euphoric anticipation — as the country struggled to free itself from repression during the tense, confused years after Joseph Stalin’s death in 1953. In 1961 alone Mr. Yevtushenko gave 250 poetry readings.

He became, as one writer described him, “a graying lion of Russian letters” in his later years, teaching and lecturing at American universities, including the University of Tulsa, and basking in the admiration of succeeding generations before and after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

But it was as a tall, athletic young Siberian with a spirit both hauntingly poetic and fiercely political that he established his name in 20th-century literature.

More here.

Laurel Braitman in The California Sunday Magazine:

Dutch Harbor is a small town on a small island far out in Alaska’s Aleutian chain, nearly 1,200 miles from Anchorage at the edge of the Bering Sea. It’s the most productive fishing port in the United States. Every winter the tiny population swells with thousands of people who come to work in the fish processing plants, on the crab boats, or out on the big cod and pollack trawlers. But they’re not the only ones trying their fortunes in town or out on the boats.

People in town call them Dutch Harbor pigeons. The rest of us call them bald eagles. In a community of just over 4,700 permanent residents, there live an estimated 500 to 800 eagles. They stare judgily down from light posts, peer intently into people’s windows, eat foxes and seagulls while perched in the trees next to the high school, and sit on rooflines like living weather vanes. Down at the docks, they swarm every boat that comes into port like some sort of Hitchcockian nightmare, fighting for scraps of bait, elbowing one another for prime positions, crowding together on top of crab pots, and squawk-cheeping their opinions.

We’re used to seeing our national bird as a valiant hero in nature documentaries plucking salmon from pristine streams, on the back of every dollar bill in our wallets, or on pretty much every federal seal — from the NSA and the CIA to the office of the president. But in Dutch, especially in winter when it’s harder for them to catch fish, you can see eagles for what they really are: hardy, scrappy scavengers.

Turns out that when you live with a federal symbol up close and personal, day in and day out, it’s a little harder to think of them as majestic.

More here.

Arika Okrent in Mental Floss:

The BBC’s Matthew Anderson tweeted about a rule that “English speakers know, but don’t know we know.” It was a screen grab of a passage from Mark Forsyth’s The Elements of Eloquence explaining that the reason “great green dragons” sounds better than “green great dragons” is that we unconsciously follow a rule that stipulates that the order of adjectives in English goes opinion-size-age-shape-color-origin-material-purpose. Size comes before color, so no “green great dragons.”

People reacted to the tweet with amazement, astonishment, and thousands of retweets. It can be shocking to realize that we are able to follow rules that no one ever taught us explicitly. But that’s what most of language is: Not the little things that textbooks tell us we’re getting wrong, but the solid ones we always get right. Non-native speakers, however, might get them wrong, and that gives us a good opportunity to get a peek at the rules we don’t otherwise notice.

1. WHY “MY BROTHER’S CAR” AND NOT “THE CAR OF MY BROTHER”

There are two main ways to express possession in English, one with possession marked on the possessor (my brother’s car) and one with an “of” phrase (the car of my brother). Teachers and usage guides don’t usually give rules telling you why “the car of my brother” sounds bad but “the door of my house” sounds fine, because no one thinks to say “the car of my brother” in the first place. But why not? After all, languages like Spanish and French use this kind of construction (el coche de mi hermano, la voiture de mon frère). Why does “my brother’s car” sound so much better than “the car of my brother,” but “my house’s door” sounds the same or worse than “the door of my house”?

More here.

Christopher Carroll at The NY Review of Books:

In 1942 the composer Ned Rorem, then nineteen, attended a panel at Northwestern University made up of various grandees from the world of music. One of them—a short, stocky bald man with a high-pitched voice and a face like an owl—was Virgil Thomson, a composer and the chief classical music critic for the New York Herald Tribune. The panel, as Rorem remembered it, began with an attempt to define music:

The others were falling back on Shakespeare’s “concord of sweet sounds” when Thomson shrieked: “Boy, was he wrong! You might as well call painting a juxtaposition of pretty colors, or poems a succession of lovely words. What is music? Why, it’s what we musicians do.”

The story captures some of what makes Thomson’s music writing at once so admirable and so maddening. At its best, his criticism was disarmingly direct and unpretentious. He could write with style, and had a knack for bringing the sound of music to life, as when he described the finale of the Brahms Third Symphony, “where the winds play sustained harmonic progressions which the violins caress with almost inaudible tendrils of sound, little wiggly figures that dart like silent goldfish around a rock.” He was a fierce advocate of styles of music that were dismissed as quaint and unimportant or ignored entirely, especially French music, such as the works of Debussy, Ravel, Poulenc, and Satie, and new music by living American composers. Most of all he had a willingness to speak his mind even when it meant contradicting the press, the concert-going public, and the administrations who ran the orchestras.

more here.

Coco Fusco at Hyperallergic:

The presence of blackness in a Whitney Biennial invariably stirs controversy — it’s deemed to be unfit or not enough, or too much. The current Whitney Biennial is no exception — the art press has been awash this past week with reports of a protest staged in front of a painting of a disfigured Emmett Till lying in his casket and a letter penned by an artist who called for the work to be removed and destroyed. The painter is Dana Schutz, a white American. The author of the letter is Hannah Black, a black-identified biracial artist who hails from England and resides in Berlin. The protestors are a youthful coalition of artists and scholars of color. The curators being called on the carpet are both Asian American. Debates about the painting and the letter rage on social media, to the exclusion of discussion of the many works by black artists in the show, most notably Henry Taylor’s rendering of Philando Castile dying in his car after being shot by police. This multicultural melodrama took a rather perverse turn on March 23, when an unknown party hacked Schutz’s email address and committed identity theft by submitting an apologia under her name to the Huffington Post and a number of other publications; it was printed and then retracted. Up to now, none of Schutz’s detractors have addressed whether they think it’s fine to punish the artist by putting words in her mouth.

more here.

Calvin Tomkins at The New Yorker:

I asked Schutz if she’d thought any more about the Emmett Till painting. “That one turned out,” she said, sounding surprised. She had put it in the Berlin show, where it caused no controversy. She found the image on her iPhone, and showed it to me. Based on a widely reproduced photograph of Till’s mutilated corpse in his coffin, the painting was dominated on one side by a mostly abstract, thickly painted head in shades of dark brown and black, and on the other side by his white dress shirt. Till’s mother had dressed him formally for his funeral, and she had insisted on leaving the casket open so that people could see what the killers had done to his face. “This is about a young boy, and it happened,” Schutz said. “It’s evidence of something that really happened. I wasn’t alive then, and it wasn’t taught in our history classes.” She was still uncertain about the painting. “I don’t know if it has the right emotionality,” she said. “I like it as a painting, but I might want to try it again.” All the Berlin pictures were sold (at prices ranging from ninety thousand dollars to four hundred thousand), but Schutz had kept two of them for herself: a painting of two men coping with oversized insects, and the Till painting, which was called “Open Casket.”

more here.

Robert Fulford in National Post:

Charles Darwin was confounded by an “odd state of mind” that he recognized in himself and many others.

Shyness.

Why did it exist? He could work out how lust, greed, love, etc. evolved as traits over many millennia. Each of them had a clear purpose in the creation and survival of humanity. But shyness? It was, so far as he could see, of no benefit to our species. And shyness could lead sometimes to blushing, another non-starter among human qualities. Darwin noted that it makes the blusher suffer and the beholder uncomfortable, “without being of the least service to either of them.”

Why?

The problem that Darwin never solved is the subject of a splendidly quirky book, Shrinking Violets: The Secret Life of Shyness (Yale University Press), by Joe Moran, who teaches cultural history in Liverpool. Moran searches tirelessly through history, literature, folklore and a little medicine without concluding why so many millions of us are shy. It remains as mysterious as it is pervasive. Some shy people suffer from feelings of inadequacy that they don’t care to acknowledge. Some may have secrets. When people say “I can’t stand cocktail parties,” that usually means they feel misplaced and self-conscious when talking to large groups of people whom they only half know. When they say “I have no small talk,” what they mean is that they’ve never mastered easygoing conversation. Moran doesn’t know why he’s often shy himself but realizes he’s a chronic case. Before he makes a phone call, he writes out what he wants to say. He keeps a notebook full of topics to raise when he finds himself at a loss for words, which apparently happens often. I’m also painfully shy on occasion and recognize Moran as a fellow sufferer, but I have never developed such an organized strategy.

From his perch in England, Moran observes that this is a national characteristic of the English.

More here.

Heidi Ledford in Nature:

Databases worldwide are rapidly swelling with the sequences of thousands of cancer genomes. Now, some scientists are advocating that researchers shift their focus back in time: to study the DNA of tumours in their adolescence, before they commit to being cancerous. At the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) annual meeting in Washington DC, researchers gathered on 2 April to discuss the growing call to sequence the genomes of pre-cancerous lesions — abnormal growths that sometimes progress into full-blown cancers. The results could help researchers to determine which tumours warrant treatment and could aid the development of therapies to block cancers on the path to malignancy. It is a project that is now near the top of the cancer research wish list, says oncologist Elizabeth Jaffee of the Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. “This is something that has really taken off throughout the cancer community,” she says.

The idea could be one of the next 'big science' projects for cancer. The idea is to borrow some tactics — such as coordination among scientists and sequencing centres — from The Cancer Genome Atlas, one of the first and biggest cancer genome efforts, which characterized the genomes of 33 cancers using samples from more than 11,000 people. But the new 'Pre-Cancer' Genome Atlas would also study cancers over time. It would ideally include multiple snapshots of the same tumour as it developed, in the hope that researchers will be able to determine what changes pushed it across a tipping point to become cancerous.

More here.

Before it was published, censors approved Ahmed Naji's subversive novel 'Using Life' – so how did he end up in jail for what he wrote?

Jonathan Guyer in Rolling Stone:

On a scorching Saturday morning in July, Ahmed Naji stood in the crowded cage of a Cairo courtroom. The 31-year-old author had been convicted six months earlier of "violating public morality" for publishing a piece of literature. In his novel, Using Life, an irreverent portrayal of youth culture on the cusp of the 2011 Egyptian revolution, the protagonist performs cunnilingus, rolls hash joints and gulps from bottles of vodka. Censors had approved the book, which is also sometimes translated as The Use of Life, but when an excerpt appeared in Cairo's premier literary review, Akhbar Al-Adab, an absurd series of events eventually led Naji to prison. Though he was released in December thanks to a high-powered team of Egyptian lawyers and campaigns from international arts communities, he lives in fear that anything he says or writes could land him back in Egypt's most notorious prison. He described to Rolling Stone how self-censorship has entered into his considerations at the keyboard. "When you are writing, you are thinking… someone will read something or this could affect the case and so on," says Naji. "It's hard to move on and write."

Torn from the pages of Kafka, Naji's case sheds light on the risks of free speech in an authoritarian state. In Egypt, if a citizen experiences personal injury from an offensive piece of writing or television program, he or she can bring a case forward to the public prosecutor claiming the violation of public morals, a vague clause enshrined in the constitution and taken from the French legal system. There have only been few instances of such cases moving forward, but public prosecutors do often relish in the opportunity to serve as the moral police. "The accused disseminated written materials that exude sexual lust and fleeting pleasures, lending out his pen and his mind to violate the sanctity of public morals and good character," the prosecutor told a local news outlet last year. Naji's story shows literature's ambiguous power to agitate and the state of arts and letters in a country that experienced a widespread uprising just six years ago.

More here.

Shelley Fan in Singularity Hub:

Humans are exceptionally good at transferring old skills to new problems. Machines, despite all their recent wins against humans, aren’t. This is partly due to how they’re trained: artificial neural networks like Google’s DeepMind learn to master a singular task and call it quits. To learn a new task, it has to reset, wiping out previous memories and starting again from scratch.

This phenomenon, quite aptly dubbed “catastrophic forgetting,” condemns our AIs to be one-trick ponies.

Now, taking inspiration from the hippocampus, our brain’s memory storage system, researchers at DeepMind and Imperial College London developed an algorithm that allows a program to learn one task after another, using the knowledge it gained along the way.

When challenged with a slew of Atari games, the neural network flexibly adapted its strategy and mastered each game, while conventional, memory-less algorithms faltered.

More here. [Thanks to Ali Minai.]

Douglas T. Kenrick in Psychology Today:

Here’s a one-item test: “Who founded the science of psychology?”

One possible answer would be “William James,” who wrote the first psychology textbook, Principles of Psychology, in 1890.

You would get a few more points for answering “Wilhelm Wundt.” Indeed, Wundt started the first formal laboratory in 1879, at the University of Leipzig, and William James was initially inspired to study psychology when he read one of Wundt’s papers in 1868, whilst visiting Germany.

But Wundt himself had started his career as a lab assistant to the man I would nominate as psychology’s first true genius: Hermann Helmholtz.

Helmholtz made at least two great contributions to modern psychology…

More here.

Michael R. Bloomberg in the New York Times:

President Trump’s unfortunate and misguided rollback of environmental protections has led to a depressing and widespread belief that the United States can no longer meet its commitment under the Paris climate change agreement. But here’s the good news: It’s wrong.

No matter what roadblocks the White House and Congress throw up, the United States can — and I’m confident, will — meet the commitment it made in Paris in 2015 to reduce greenhouse gas emissions that are warming the planet. Let me explain why, and why correcting the false perception is so important.

Those who believe that the Trump administration will end American leadership on climate change are making the same mistake as those who believe that it will put coal miners back to work: overestimating Washington’s ability to influence energy markets, and underestimating the role that cities, states, businesses and consumers are playing in driving down emissions on their own.

Though few people realize it, more than 250 coal plants — almost half of the total number in this country — have announced in recent years that they will close or switch to cleaner fuels. Washington isn’t putting these plants out of business; the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan hasn’t even gone into effect yet.

More here.