Eric Maskin and Amartya Sen in The NY Review of Books:

Americans have been using essentially the same rules to elect presidents since the beginning of the Republic. In the general election, each voter chooses one candidate; each state (with two current exceptions) awards all its Electoral College votes to the candidate chosen by the largest number of voters (not necessarily a majority) in that state; and the president-elect is the candidate with a majority of Electoral College votes.

Primary elections for president have also remained largely unchanged since they replaced dealings in a “smoke-filled room” as the principal method for selecting Democratic and Republican nominees. In each state, every voter votes for one candidate. In some states, the delegates to the national convention are all pledged to support the candidate getting a plurality of votes (again, possibly less than a majority). In others, delegates are assigned in proportion to the total votes of the candidates.

These rules are deeply flawed. For example, candidates A and B may each be more popular than C (in the sense that either would beat C in a head-to-head contest), but nevertheless each may lose to C if they both run. The system therefore fails to reflect voters’ preferences adequately. It also aggravates political polarization, gives citizens too few political options, and makes candidates spend most of their campaign time seeking voters in swing states rather than addressing the country at large.

There are several remedies. Perhaps in order of increasing chance of adoption, they are: (1) to elect the president by the national popular vote instead of the Electoral College; (2) to choose the winner in the general election according to the preferences of a majority of voters rather than a mere plurality, either nationally or by state; and, easiest of all, (3) to substitute majority for plurality rule in state primaries.

More here.

Isaac Butler in Parabasis:

Now that I've seen it, I’d like to briefly talk about a couple of aspects of Sam Gold’s recent, much-lauded production of Othello at New York Theatre Workshop and how it will hopefully come to influence how we produce Shakespeare. No, I’m not talking about the casting of movie stars, although both Daniel Craig and David Oyelowo’s performances were excellent. I’m talking instead about the way the production through sheer excellence makes a great case against both over conceptualization and the recent controversial efforts to “translate” Shakespeare plays to make them more accessible to contemporary audiences.

If you’ve seen this Othello, you might balk at my saying that it resists over conceptualization. This Othello was very directed, and the design was extremely present. The production transformed New York Theatre Workshop into a wood-lined barracks, with only a few light sources (none of them traditional theatrical light). When the audience entered, a soldier sat on stage playing Guitar Hero. The first scene took place almost entirely in the dark. The costumes looked deliberately unfinished. The cast sang Hotline Bling at one point. Two cast members besides Oyelowo were Black, shifting the focus away from Othello’s racial otherness and towards other themes.

Yet the production avoided literal conceptualizing. This play did not literally take place during the Iraq war, but it gestured at it. It did not literally take place in a barracks, but used elements of a barracks as scenery. Rather than taking us to a specific place or time, the design choices instead aimed to create the right environment for this interpretation of the text, an interpretation that was focused on war and its effects on masculinity.

More here.

Nancy Fraser in Dissent:

Trump’s victory is not solely a revolt against global finance. What his voters rejected was not neoliberalism tout court, but progressive neoliberalism. This may sound to some like an oxymoron, but it is a real, if perverse, political alignment that holds the key to understanding the U.S. election results and perhaps some developments elsewhere too. In its U.S. form, progressive neoliberalism is an alliance of mainstream currents of new social movements (feminism, anti-racism, multiculturalism, and LGBTQ rights), on the one side, and high-end “symbolic” and service-based business sectors (Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and Hollywood), on the other. In this alliance, progressive forces are effectively joined with the forces of cognitive capitalism, especially financialization. However unwittingly, the former lend their charisma to the latter. Ideals like diversity and empowerment, which could in principle serve different ends, now gloss policies that have devastated manufacturing and what were once middle-class lives.

Progressive neoliberalism developed in the United States over the last three decades and was ratified with Bill Clinton’s election in 1992. Clinton was the principal engineer and standard-bearer of the “New Democrats,” the U.S. equivalent of Tony Blair’s “New Labor.” In place of the New Deal coalition of unionized manufacturing workers, African Americans, and the urban middle classes, he forged a new alliance of entrepreneurs, suburbanites, new social movements, and youth, all proclaiming their modern, progressive bona fides by embracing diversity, multiculturalism, and women’s rights. Even as it endorsed such progressive notions, the Clinton administration courted Wall Street. Turning the economy over to Goldman Sachs, it deregulated the banking system and negotiated the free-trade agreements that accelerated deindustrialization. What fell by the wayside was the Rust Belt—once the stronghold of New Deal social democracy, and now the region that delivered the electoral college to Donald Trump. That region, along with newer industrial centers in the South, took a major hit as runaway financialization unfolded over the course of the last two decades. Continued by his successors, including Barack Obama, Clinton’s policies degraded the living conditions of all working people, but especially those employed in industrial production. In short, Clintonism bears a heavy share of responsibility for the weakening of unions, the decline of real wages, the increasing precarity of work, and the rise of the two–earner family in place of the defunct family wage.

More here.

Roni Caryn Rabin in The New York Times:

If you’re making resolutions for a healthier new year, consider a gut makeover. Refashioning the community of bacteria and other microbes living in your intestinal tract, collectively known as the gut microbiome, could be a good long-term investment in your health. Trillions of microbial cells inhabit the human body, outnumbering human cells by 10 to one according to some estimates, and growing evidence suggests that the rich array of intestinal microbiota helps us process nutrients in the foods we eat, bolsters the immune system and does all sorts of odd jobs that promote sound health. A diminished microbial ecosystem, on the other hand, is believed to have consequences that extend far beyond the intestinal tract, affecting everything from allergies and inflammation, metabolic diseases like diabetes and obesity, even mental health conditions like depression and anxiety.

Much of the composition of the microbiome is established early in life, shaped by forces like your genetics and whether you were breast-fed or bottle-fed. Microbial diversity may be further undermined by the typical high-calorie American diet, rich in sugar, meats and processed foods. But a new study in mice and people adds to evidence that suggests you can take steps to enrich your gut microbiota. Changing your diet to one containing a variety of plant-based foods, the new research suggests, may be crucial to achieving a healthier microbiome. Altering your microbiome, however, may not be easy, and nobody knows how long it might take. That’s because the ecosystem already established in your gut determines how it absorbs and processes nutrients. So if the microbial community in your gut has been shaped by a daily diet of cheeseburgers and pepperoni pizza, for example, it won’t respond as quickly to a healthy diet as a gut shaped by vegetables and fruits that has more varied microbiota to begin with.

More here.

Clio Chang in The New Republic:

Imagine that you’re a rude teen hanging near some trolley tracks, kicking around rocks, when you look up and notice that five people are tied to the tracks. A trolley suddenly appears, careening towards them. You can save the five people by pulling a lever, thus diverting the trolley to a different set of tracks where another person (dang! Just your luck!) is tied up. Do you pull the lever, killing one to save five?

This thought experiment, devised by philosopher Philippa Foot in 1967, along with its sadder partner dilemma, the Fat Man (instead of flipping a switch, you have to push a fat man off of a bridge to stop the trolley from hitting the five people), has found a resurgence in 2016, becoming what Brian Feldman has termed the “Internet’s Most Philosophical Meme.” The Facebook page Trolley Problem Memeshas grown to over 170,000 likes since its inception earlier this year; newly added memes attract thousands of likes and hundreds of in-depth comments (the inside joke “multi-track drifting” almost always inevitably comes up, which riffs off of another meme, the gory details of which are way beyond the scope of this piece). You can now buy t-shirts that say “I pulled the lever” or “I choose you to be my ethical dilemma” with a picture of the trolley on it. If something happened this year, you can bet that there is a trolley problem for it.

More here.

A roundtable discussion at Bookforum:

Christopher Lyon: First I'd like to say something about the book we're here to discuss. This 828-page tome on the art and life of Louise Bourgeois, who was born in 1911 and died in 2010, is the product of some thirty years of work on Robert Storr's part. It comprehensively surveys Bourgeois's career as an artist, which spanned nearly seventy-five years, with more than nine hundred illustrations. Chapters relating Bourgeois's life and analyzing her creative achievement alternate with portfolios, in chronological sequence, that show the unfolding of her oeuvre. The final chapter is a coda that details Rob's close and complicated relationship with his subject, beginning in the early 1980s. It is, and probably will remain, the definitive monograph on Louise.

Robert Storr: I don't think there's such a thing as a definitive book, that's part of my point. It will be the first essai at making a comprehensive book. I should just say in parentheses that the fact it exists at all is very much to the credit of Chris, who has stayed with this project long past the patience of most mere mortals. In terms of design, production, the whole thing.

CL: Thank you for saying that. I thought it would be good if we could pull everybody into the conversation at the beginning. You're all familiar with Louise's work and I wondered to what extent this book confirmed, challenged, or surprised you.

more here.

Michael McNay at The Guardian:

The art critic, essayist and novelist John Berger threw down his challenge early in his television series Ways of Seeing. This came in 1972, the year when Berger, who has died aged 90, broke through to real fame from his niche celebrity on the arts pages of the New Statesman. Ways of Seeing, made on the cheap for the BBC as four half-hour programmes, was the first series of its kind since Civilisation (1969), 13 one-hour episodes for which Kenneth Clark, its writer and presenter, and a BBC production team had travelled 80,000 miles through 13 countries exploring 2,000 years of the visual culture of the western world. Berger travelled as far as the hut in Ealing where his programmes were filmed, and no farther. What he said in his characteristic tone of sweet reasonableness was:

“In his book on the nude, Kenneth Clark says that being naked is simply being without clothes. The nude, according to him, is a form of art. I would put it differently: to be naked is to be oneself; to be nude is to be seen naked by others and yet not recognised for oneself. A nude has to be seen as an object in order to be a nude.”

In other words, art is a commodity and a woman in art is an object. No approach to art could have been more different from Clark’s gentlemanly urbanity.

more here.

Mike Jay at the LRB:

In October 2013 a Time magazine article entitled ‘Syria’s Breaking Bad’ alerted Western media to the prevalence across the region of a little-known stimulant drug, Captagon. Lebanese police had found five million locally produced tablets, embossed with a roughly stamped yin-yang symbol, sealed inside a Syrian-made water heater in transit to Dubai. In October 2015 Captagon made global headlines when the Saudi prince Abdel Mohsen was intercepted at Beirut airport with 32 shrink-wrapped boxes and eight leather suitcases containing two tons of top-grade pills, valued at £190 million. By this time rumours abounded on all sides in the Syrian war that Captagon was fuelling a grim cult of battlefield atrocities. An investigation by Vanity Fair in France last April uncovered a trail of testimonies and video images of pumped-up soldiers and ‘zombies roaming, all smiles, across fields of ruins and severed heads’. Caches of pills in ports and abandoned villages supplied the evidence.

Digital photograph by S. Abbas Raza, filling in for Sughra Raza who is on vacation.

by Jalees Rehman

Competition for government research grants to fund scientific research remains fierce in the United States. The budget of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), which constitute the major source of funding for US biological and medical research, has been increased only modestly during the past decade but it is not even keeping up with inflation. This problem is compounded by the fact that more scientists are applying for grants now than one or two decades ago, forcing the NIH to enforce strict cut-offs and only fund the top 10-20% of all submitted research proposals. Such competition ought to be good for the field because it could theoretically improve the quality of science. Unfortunately, it is nearly impossible to discern differences between excellent research grants. For example, if an institute of the NIH has a cut-off at the 13 percentile range, then a grant proposal judged to be in the top 10% would receive funding but a proposal in top 15% would end up not being funded. In an era where universities are also scaling back their financial support for research, an unfunded proposal could ultimately lead to the closure of a research laboratory and the dismissal of several members of a research team. Since the prospective assessment of a research proposal's scientific merits are somewhat subjective, it is quite possible that the budget constraints are creating cemeteries of brilliant ideas and concepts, a world of scientific what-ifs that are forever lost.

How do we scientists deal with these scenarios? Some of us keep soldiering on, writing one grant after the other. Others change and broaden the direction of their research, hoping that perhaps research proposals in other areas are more likely to receive the elusive scores that will qualify for funding. Yet another approach is to submit research proposals to philanthropic foundations or non-profit organizations, but most of these organizations tend to focus on research which directly impacts human health. Receiving a foundation grant to study the fundamental mechanisms by which the internal clocks of plants coordinate external timing cues such as sunlight, food and temperature, for example, would be quite challenging. One alternate source of research funding that is now emerging is "scientific crowdfunding" in which scientists use web platforms to present their proposed research project to the public and thus attract donations from a large number of supporters. The basic underlying idea is that instead of receiving a $50,000 research grant from one foundation or government agency, researchers may receive smaller donations from 10, 50 or even a 100 supporters and thus finance their project.

Read more »

From The Book of Life:

We’re hugely dependent on language to help us express what we really think and feel. But some languages are better than others at crisply naming important sensations.

Germans have been geniuses at inventing long – or what get called ‘compound’ – words that elegantly put a finger on emotions that we all know, but that other languages require whole clumsy sentences or paragraphs to express.

Here is a small selection of the best of Germany’s extraordinary range of compound words:

1. Erklärungsnot

[Explanation-Distress]

Literally, a distress at not having an explanation. The perfect way to define what a partner might feel when they’re caught watching porn or are spotted in a restaurant with a hand they shouldn’t be holding. More grandly, Erklärungsnot is something we feel when we realise we don’t have any explanations for the big questions of life. It’s a word that defines existential angst as much as shame.

2. Futterneid

[Food-Envy]

The feeling when you’re eating with other people and realise that they’ve ordered something better off the menu that you’d be dying to eat yourself. Perhaps you were trying to be abstemious; now you’re just in agony. The word recognises that we spend most of our lives feeling we’ve ordered the wrong thing. And not just in restaurants.

More here.

From the Globe and Mail:

Mark Twain once complained about newspapers that use one half of their pages to tell readers how good the other half are. It’s a valid grievance; no paper ought to do it. But in a year that saw a boom in fake news, neo-Nazi sloganeering against the “lugenpresse” and attacks on journalists by the president-elect of the United States, it is defensible for this little space to spend a minute celebrating, not our newspaper in particular, but a free and unbiased press in general.

Note the word “celebrating.” We could have said “defending,” but we aren’t going to play that game. The attacks on the media of the past year, from left and right, have been driven either by political operatives or opportunists. There is political gain to be had from whining ceaselessly that the “elite” media are biased against you, as Donald Trump and many others ritually do. There is also a solid business model in telling your readers that the mainstream press are lying to them, and that they should spend their money and time on the alternative that you just happen to own and operate. There is no point decrying these inevitabilities, and it is wrong to be censorial about them if one is committed to free speech.

Note in that first paragraph the word “unbiased.” There are undoubtedly readers who got to that contentious term and crumpled this page into a tightly wadded ball, carried it to the kitchen garbage pail and dropped it in with relish.

The charge of bias is a constant today, for reasons already stated, but also because there is no hiding the fact that newspapers and the people who write for them have a variety of leanings.

More here.

Azra Raza at Edge.org:

The Cancer Seed and Soil Hypothesis

One in 2 men and 1 in 3 women in the US will get cancer. Five decades after declaring war on the disease, we are still muddling our way rather blindly from the slash-poison-burn (surgery-chemo-radiation) strategies to newer approaches like targeted therapies, nanotechnology, and immunotherapies which benefit only a handful of patients. Among other reasons for the slow progress, a major flaw is the study of cancer cells in isolation, which de-links the seed from its soil.

Stephen Paget was the first to propose in 1889 that “seeds” (cancer cells) preferentially grew in the hospitable “soil” (microenvironment) of select organs. The cross-talk between seed-soil hypothesized by Paget indeed proved to be the case whenever the question was examined (such as in the elegant studies of Hart and Fiddler in the 1980s). Yet, consistent research combining studies of the seed and soil were not pursued, largely because in the excitement generated by the molecular revolution and discovery of oncogenes, the idea of creating animal models of human cancers appeared far more appealing. This led to the entire field of cancer research being hijacked by investigators studying animal models, xenografts and tissue culture cell lines in patently artificial conditions. The result of this de-contextualized approach, which is akin to looking for car keys under the lamppost because of the light instead of where they were lost a mile away, is nothing short of a tragedy for our cancer patients whose pain and suffering some of us witness and try to alleviate on a daily basis.

More here. And my own answer to the same question can be seen here. Do browse all the excellent entries at Edge.

Brian Gallagher in Nautilus:

You may have noticed it by now: the—I guess I’ll call it an impulse—to anthropomorphize “2016.” It began gradually. First, we objectified it, likening it to a disturbing film, a force of nature, broken hardware. As Slate put it:

In trying to wrap our heads around 2016’s all-reason-and-logic–defying onslaught of tragedy and absurdity, we objectified the year. We gave it a shape and form, likening it to a melodrama, a malfunctioning machine, an unstoppable meteor, anything to get some small grasp on the year’s surreal and hellish parade of events.

Then we subjectified 2016. We wrote letters to the year, chastising its bad behavior (for, among other things, offing beloved celebrities). John Oliver went further, detonating a large “2016” structure in an arena. A recent Atlantic article ran with the title “‘Fuck You, 2016’: On blaming a year for the things that happen in it.” But why are people blaming 2016 anyway? It could be that we’re anthropomorphizing the year to connect to it, and we need to connect to it because so many of our other connections are broken. In a study published in October, Jennifer A. Bartz, a psychologist at McGill University, with her colleagues described anthropomorphism as “a motivated process” that “reflect[s] the active search for potential sources of connection.” Bartz wanted to see if she could replicate, and extend, findings from a 2008 study by the University of Chicago social psychologist Nicholas Epley, and colleagues, who claimed that socially disconnected people may “invent humanlike agents in their environment” to help feel reconnected. Those researchers, Bartz and her colleagues write, “found that lonely people (compared with nonlonely people) were more likely to ascribe humanlike traits (e.g., free will) to an alarm clock, battery charger, air purifier, and pillow.”

This year, with its Presidential election, seems to have offered many occasions for Americans to question their sense of belonging. Neil Gross, a sociologist at Colby College, wrote in the New York Times recently that many people have been wondering, “Is this America?” “It’s a telltale sign of collective trauma, a grasping for identity when the usual bases for community aren’t there any more,” he writes. “For progressives, moderates and ‘Never Trump’ Republicans, the political order they long took for granted—defined by polarization, yes, but also by a commitment to basic principles of democracy and decency—is suddenly gone.” A recent Pew report, titled “A Divided and Pessimistic Electorate,” illustrated this: “Beyond their disagreements over specific policy issues, voters who supported President-elect Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton also differed over the seriousness of a wide array of problems facing the nation, from immigration and crime to inequality and racism.”

More here.