Natalie Wolchover in Quanta:

There might be no getting around what Albert Einstein called “spooky action at a distance.” With an experiment described today in Physical Review Letters — a feat that involved harnessing starlight to control measurements of particles shot between buildings in Vienna — some of the world’s leading cosmologists and quantum physicists are closing the door on an intriguing alternative to “quantum entanglement.”

“Technically, this experiment is truly impressive,” said Nicolas Gisin, a quantum physicist at the University of Geneva who has studied this loophole around entanglement.

According to standard quantum theory, particles have no definite states, only relative probabilities of being one thing or another — at least, until they are measured, when they seem to suddenly roll the dice and jump into formation. Stranger still, when two particles interact, they can become “entangled,” shedding their individual probabilities and becoming components of a more complicated probability function that describes both particles together. This function might specify that two entangled photons are polarized in perpendicular directions, with some probability that photon A is vertically polarized and photon B is horizontally polarized, and some chance of the opposite. The two photons can travel light-years apart, but they remain linked: Measure photon A to be vertically polarized, and photon B instantaneously becomes horizontally polarized, even though B’s state was unspecified a moment earlier and no signal has had time to travel between them. This is the “spooky action” that Einstein was famously skeptical about in his arguments against the completeness of quantum mechanics in the 1930s and ’40s.

More here.

Brian Resnick in Vox:

Dan Kahan is a professor of law and psychology at Yale whose research over the years has taught us something critically important about political debate today.

It’s this: While we would like to believe we can persuade people on the other side of a political debate with evidence, his studies show the other side is likely to become even more deeply entrenched in its view in the face of more information. His findings are a blow to the great underlying assumption of democracy: that an informed public is the key for a government that works.

The phenomenon is called “politically motivated reasoning,” and it finds people use their minds to protect the groups to which they belong from grappling with uncomfortable truths. The motivation to conform is stronger than the motivation to be right.

That’s why his latest research finding “is totally unexpected,” he says. There’s an antidote to politically motivated reasoning, it turns out. And it’s wonderfully simple: curiosity.

More here.

Sheila Dow over at INET:

Gains from trade is another value-laden topic which loomed large in the US presidential debate. Mainstream theory concludes that more trade is always beneficial in aggregate, but it does so on the assumption that the DSGE structure remains unchanged, i.e. that there have not been irreversible changes in structures, behaviour and the exercise of power. What gained most attention in political debate was the other more obviously value-laden mainstream assumption, that aggregate gains benefit society even if the winners don’t compensate the losers. There is no escaping the fact that economics continues to be a moral science. Economists therefore have a moral responsibility to be transparent about the value judgements embodied in their theories, and to be prepared to debate them. This would address any suspicion that economists were serving vested interests. But there is a more profound moral responsibility which arises from the nature of economic knowledge itself. Experience has shown that predictive success is an inadequate basis for appraising theories, such that different bodies of theory using different methodological approaches co-exist (even if most are discouraged by purveyors of the mainstream). This is particularly the case for a field whose subject matter is a complex, evolving, open system. Knowledge about the economy is uncertain, severely limiting the scope for classical logic. Drawing instead on a range of lines of reasoning and types of evidence, what is required of the economist is reasonable judgement. As Marcuzzo (2010: 45) points out, reasonableness is a moral quality which addresses the collective good rather than the personal benefit sought by individual rationality.

It is therefore immoral not only to conceal value judgements, but also to present as scientific truth a conclusion which is approach-specific. It is incumbent on all economists to be prepared to explain their approach and defend it relative to others. Economists, as experts, know better than those who do not make an in-depth study of the economy. But no one economist can claim to “know best” without imposing her own value judgments on society and without arguing why her approach to economic knowledge is better than alternatives.

For experts to impose value judgments on society is also undemocratic.

More here.

Daniel Penny in Boston Review:

In her 1975 New York Review of Books essay “Fascinating Fascism,” Susan Sontag interrogates what was then a growing trend within 1970s popular culture of reviving fascist imagery after three decades of total rebuke. Sontag begins by examining Nazi propagandist Leni Riefenstahl’s photography book, The Last of the Nuba, in light of Riefenstahl’s involvement in the Third Reich. Sontag tracks a set of visual sensibilities across Riefenstahl’s filmmaking career, arriving at a kind of taxonomy of fascist aesthetics, which she calls “both prurient and idealizing.” For Sontag, fascist artworks share:

a preoccupation with situations of control, submissive behavior, and extravagant effort; they exalt two seemingly opposite states, egomania and servitude. The relations of domination and enslavement take the form of a characteristic pageantry . . . around an all-powerful, hypnotic leader figure or force. The fascist dramaturgy centers on the orgiastic transactions between mighty forces and their puppets.

Sontag connects these obsessions with theatrical control to the rise of Nazi imagery in cinema, erotica, and fine art in the 1970s. Arthouse films such as The Damned (1969) and The Night Porter (1974) use the “supremely violent but also supremely beautiful” imagery of the SS to lasciviously explore the twisted psychologies of sadomasochism-loving Nazis; while films such as Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS (1975) epitomize the cresting wave of Nazisploitation, in which “far-out sex has been placed under the sign of Nazism.” As Sontag sees it, the unique appeal of Nazis in the context of sadomasochist fantasy is twofold: first, by the 1970s, fascism had become both novel to young people, yet also taboo; and second, fascism provides a readymade sexual fantasy that requires little imagination, “a master scenario available to everyone,” replete with a highly organized visual system: “The color is black, the material is leather. . . .”

More here.

Ta-Nehisi Coates in The Atlantic:

Coates: I thought we’d talk about policy today. I wanted to start by getting a sense of your mind-set coming into the job, and as I’ve understood you—and you can reject this—your perspective is that a mixture of universalist policies, in combination with an increased level of personal responsibility and communal responsibility among African Americans, when we talk about these gaps that we see between black and white America, that that really is the way forward. Is that a correct summation?

Obama: I think it’s a three-legged stool and you left out one, which is vigorous enforcement of antidiscrimination laws. So the way we thought about it when we came in is that—and obviously we came in during crisis, so how we might have structured our policy sequencing if, when we came in, the economy was okay, and we weren’t potentially going into a great recession, and folks weren’t all losing their homes, might have been different. But as a general matter, my view would be that if you want to get at African American poverty, the income gap, wealth gap, achievement gap, that the most important thing is to make sure that the society as a whole does right by people who are poor, are working class, are aspiring to a better life for their kids. Higher minimum wages, full-employment programs, early-childhood education: Those kinds of programs are, by design, universal, but by definition, because they are helping folks who are in the worst economic situations, are most likely to disproportionately impact and benefit African Americans. They also have the benefit of being sellable to a majority of the body politic. Step No. 2, and this is where I think policies do need to be somewhat race-specific, is making sure that institutions are not discriminatory. So you’ve got something like the FHA [Federal Housing Administration], which was on its face a universal program that involved a huge mechanism for wealth accumulation and people entering into the middle class. But if, in its application, black folks were excluded from it, then you have to override that by going after those discriminatory practices. The same would be true for something like Social Security, where historically, if you just read the law and the fact that it excluded domestic workers or agricultural workers, you might not see race in it, unless you knew that that covered a huge chunk of African Americans, particularly in the South. So reinvigorating the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department, making sure that in our Department of Education, where we see evidence of black boys being suspended at substantially higher rates than white boys for the same behavior, in the absence of that kind of rigorous enforcement of the nondiscrimination principle, then the long-standing biases that I believe have weakened, but are still clearly present in our society, assert themselves in ways that usually disadvantage African Americans.

More here.

Martin Herbert at Artforum:

ARTIST RECITES POEM. That sounds bad, even given the past decade’s bed-hopping between the literary and visual art establishments. But let’s establish Phillipson’s bona fides. She has won a prestigious award for poets under thirty; had her first collection published, to acclaim, by Faber & Faber in 2009; and has since published two more, NOT AN ESSAY (2012) and Instant-flex 718 (2013). She discovered her writerly aptitude while studying art in London: Focusing on audio works and performance, she took a module in creative writing and fell for poetry—particularly the New York School (itself reciprocally involving a proto-Pop impulse toward linguistic assemblage). In parallel with her writing, and stemming from visual backdrops created for poetry readings, Phillipson makes videos—digitally driven, candy-colored, texturally shifting, kinetic, talky, and associative—and, since 2011, has been conflating them with elaborate sculptural environments.

These projects have steadily grown in scope. For example, her recent show at Plymouth Arts Centre in Devon, UK, “TRUE TO SIZE”—which opened early this past summer, during the hallucinatory moment of the country’s vote for Brexit—featured seven videos embedded in an eponymous colorful, nerve-jangling multipart installation, dated 2016, that intermingled eBay-sourced, sad-eyed, made-in-China bears, more umbrellas, and blown-up cutouts of various emojis: rainbow backdrops, flames, falling leaves, Holbeinesque anamorphic skulls, cigarettes, raindrops, clouds, tsunamis, blood-filled syringes, and nosediving planes. You navigated gingerly through these jutting artifacts toward the short digital films.

more here.

Lovia Gyarkye at The New Republic:

In 1948, James Baldwin left Harlem for Paris to save himself. After his friend Eugene Worth jumped off the George Washington Bridge to his death, Baldwin was afraid that he would suffer a similar fate. In a 1984 interview with The Paris Review, he said: “My luck was running out. I was going to go to jail, I was going to kill somebody or be killed.” It was because of this desire to escape the dire situation of being a black male in America that Baldwin found himself alone in France with only $40 in his pockets. Years later, Baldwin would write a series of essays reflecting on his Paris years. It was in Paris that he found his voice and also came to understand the complexity of his American identity. “The very word ‘America,’” Baldwin wrote in his 1959 essay “The Discovery of What It Means to be An American,” “remains a new, almost completely undefined and extremely controversial proper noun. No one in the world seems to know exactly what it describes, not even we motley millions who call ourselves Americans.

Raoul Peck’s I Am Not Your Negro, which opens on Friday in select theaters around the country, revisits Baldwin’s interrogation of what it means to be American. The film is not just a factual report about a particular event or person. Like the famed works that are its inspiration, it is an essay. And like any good essay, it begins with one question, and, over the course of its 90 minutes, asks a set of new ones. Similar to its literary counterpart, the essay-film escapes clear definition. It is the problematic stepchild in a world insistent on categorization. But the film’s troublesome, inquisitive nature is in keeping with what Montaigne, the inventor of the essay, meant his “Essais” to be—attempts, trials, experiments.

more here.

Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow at The Nation:

Jane Jacobs was born in 1916 with a decidedly less euphonious name—Jane Butzner—in the coal town of Scranton, Pennsylvania. The third child of a doctor and a teacher, she was delivered by her own father. In her childhood home, her parents encouraged her inquisitive mind and accepted her rebellious streak. Jacobs read widely, wrote poems, and held imaginary conversations with interlocutors like Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin.

Despite her precocity—or more likely because of it—the young Jane was never a good fit for school. She barely made it through high school and, instead of college, took a course in stenography. Her parents had instilled in her the importance of both learning a practical trade and pursuing her calling, which she determined early on would be writing.

In 1934, during the depths of the Depression, Jacobs moved to New York, where she lived with her elder sister Betty in Brooklyn Heights. In the mornings, she took the subway to Manhattan to interview for secretarial work; in the afternoons, she wandered around the city. On one outing, she discovered Christopher Street in Greenwich Village and promptly informed Betty that they’d be relocating to that neighborhood.

more here.

Tom Perrotta in the New York Times:

When Kate Atkinson’s “Life After Life” was published in 2013, it felt like something new, a wildly inventive historical novel in which the main character dies repeatedly, only to get resurrected under different circumstances. The story keeps looping back on itself like a video game, giving the protagonist another chance to get things right, or at least explore alternate avenues of possibility. It’s an exhilarating experiment, liberating both writer and reader from the unforgiving linear logic of realistic narrative while posing intriguing questions about fate, identity and the power of individuals to control their own lives.

Paul Auster ventures into similar territory in “4 3 2 1,” an epic bildungsroman that presents the reader with four versions of the formative years of Archie Ferguson, a Jewish boy born in Newark in 1947 (the origin of his unlikely surname is explained in the novel’s opening paragraph). Unlike Atkinson, who jumps around in time with mischievous pleasure, Auster sticks to chronological order, proceeding methodically from Ferguson’s childhood to his early 20s, focusing on fairly conventional coming-of-age subjects: family, friends, school, sports, sex and politics. What makes “4 3 2 1” original and dauntingly complex is that Auster sets all four of his stories on parallel tracks and tells them more or less simultaneously, giving us four versions of Chapter 1 (1.1, 1.2, 1.3 and 1.4), followed by four versions of Chapter 2 (2.1, 2.2, 2.3 and 2.4) and so on.

More here.

Sabine Hossenfelder in Back Reaction:

Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg has recently drawn attention by disliking quantum mechanics. Besides an article for The New York Review of Books and a public lecture to bemoan how unsatisfactory the current situation is, he has, however, also written a technical paper:

Lindblad Decoherence in Atomic Clocks, Steven Weinberg, Phys. Rev. A 94, 042117 (2016), arXiv: 1610.02537 [quant-ph]

In this paper, Weinberg studies the use of atomic clocks for precision tests of quantum mechanics. Specifically, to search for an unexpected, omnipresent, decoherence .

Decoherence is the process that destroys quantum-ness. It happens constantly and everywhere. Each time a quantum state interacts with an environment – air, light, neutrinos, what have you – it becomes a little less quantum.

This type of decoherence explains why, in every-day life, we don’t see quantum-typical behavior, like cats being both dead and alive and similar nonsense. Trouble is, decoherence takes place only if you consider the environment a source of noise whose exact behavior is unknown. If you look at the combined system of the quantum state plus environment, that still doesn’t decohere. So how come on large scales our world is distinctly un-quantum?

More here.

A.O. Scott in The New York Times:

To call “I Am Not Your Negro” a movie about James Baldwin would be to understate Mr. Peck’s achievement. It’s more of a posthumous collaboration, an uncanny and thrilling communion between the filmmaker — whose previous work includes both a documentary and a narrative feature about the Congolese anti-colonialist leader Patrice Lumumba — and his subject. The voice-over narration (read by Samuel L. Jackson) is entirely drawn from Baldwin’s work. Much of it comes from notes and letters written in the mid-1970s, when Baldwin was somewhat reluctantly sketching out a book, never to be completed, about the lives and deaths of Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. Reflections on those men (all of whom Baldwin knew well) and their legacies are interspersed with passages from other books and essays, notably “The Devil Finds Work,” Baldwin’s 1976 meditation on race, Hollywood and the mythology of white innocence. His published and unpublished words — some of the most powerful and penetrating ever assembled on the tortured subject of American identity — accompany images from old talk shows and news reports, from classic movies and from our own decidedly non-post-racial present.

Baldwin could not have known about Ferguson and Black Lives Matter, about the presidency of Barack Obama and the recrudescence of white nationalism in its wake, but in a sense he explained it all in advance. He understood the deep, contradictory patterns of our history, and articulated, with a passion and clarity that few others have matched, the psychological dimensions of racial conflict: the suppression of black humanity under slavery and Jim Crow and the insistence on it in African-American politics and art; the dialectic of guilt and rage, forgiveness and denial that distorts relations between black and white citizens in the North as well as the South; the lengths that white people will go to wash themselves clean of their complicity in oppression.

More here. (Note: At least one post throughout February will be in honor of Black History Month)

Sanjay Reddy over at his website:

Yesterday at the United Nations I spoke at a panel on addressing global poverty organized by the Club de Madrid, a group of former democratically-elected world leaders, which has in recent years championed a concept which they refer to as that of a ‘Shared Society’. The title of the concept was recently adopted, to some bemusement and bewilderment, by Theresa May in the UK who has sought to differentiate her government’s social vision from that of her Conservative predecessor, who championed the risibly named ‘Big Society’ – an idea which seemed to import from across the Atlantic while melding confusingly the terminology of the Great Society with the voluntarist vision of a ‘Thousand Points of Light‘.

In an effort to make sense of the concept advanced even earlier by the Club, I suggested that it could be thought of as composed of three themes. The first is that of individual dignity, rights and effective empowerment. The second is that of conviviality, bringing together the recognition of social pluralism with an appeal for involvement in a whole. The third is that of responsibility of all for the common good and for things held in common. Understood in these terms, the idea, and ideal, of a shared society can be applied on any scale. It can quite compatibly be thought of as applicable to the world as a whole, the nation, or local communities, or indeed de-territorialized communities, such as those which might nowadays be created, to ambivalent effect, on social media.

The Sustainable Development Goals, whatever their deficiencies, might be thought of as a reflection of the recognition of a global shared society. The guiding ideas of universality of application of the goals, and responsibility for attaining them, as well as of leaving no one behind, can be linked to an associated normative perspective. From such a vantage point, Theresa May’s recent statement that ‘if you believe you are a citizen of the world, you’re a citizen of nowhere’ deserves modification: ‘If you are a citizen of somewhere, you’re a citizen of the world’.

More here.

Moira Weigel in The Chronicle of Higher Education [h/t: John Collins]:

Jenkins and Ichikawa took the most common charges they had heard against nonmonogamy, and they refuted them one by one.

Take, for instance, the claim that it’s unhealthy to have multiple sexual partners. Jenkins and Ichikawa pointed out that this was simply untrue. It is perfectly possible to maintain sexual health with multiple partners; indeed, a person who has openly discussed the pros and cons of opening a relationship with a partner is more likely to practice safe sex than is the frustrated partner who resorts to "drunken flings, clandestine affairs, or other ill-considered hookups."

What about the assumption that nonmonogamy is psychologically damaging? "Different people are different," Jenkins and Ichikawa wrote. Many nonmonogamous people report that they come to feel less jealousy over time; conversely, many monogamous people complain of experiencing sexual jealousy. In response to the charge that nonmonogamy is "unnatural," Jenkins and Ichikawa pointed out that virtually no species are sexually monogamous, even if they are socially monogamous or pair-bond for life. ("Not even swans.")

They called their letter "On Being the Only Ones." Soon after they published it, they learned that they weren’t. Strangers, and couples they had known casually for years, started approaching them at conferences, they say, and thanking them for writing the piece. Many said they had quietly lived the same way and felt relieved to be able to speak about it. Emboldened by a new sense that she had an activist mission — that her coming out might help others like her, and that she, as a tenured professor, had the privilege to do so — Jenkins began writing more about nonmonogamy. She wrote about it in The Globe and Mail and Slate. She went on CBC to give radio interviews. But even in contexts in which people were willing to give her an audience, they struggled with her argument that polyamory and promiscuity were not the same thing.

More here.

Carrie Jenkins in Aeon:

Women who enter voluntarily into non-monogamous relationships are a direct challenge to the idea that women are ‘naturally’ monogamous. They are socially penalised to maintain the status quo. A non-monogamous woman will be portrayed as debased and disgusting – a ‘slut’. When I have discussed my open relationships online, I have been called a ‘cum-dumpster’, a ‘degenerate herpes-infested whore’, and many other colourful names.

My internet trolls focus on sex, partly because presenting non-monogamous relationships as ‘just sex’ makes it easier to degrade them, and partly because women who violate the monogamy norm – whose sexuality is out of (someone’s) control – are a threat to an ancient feeling of entitlement over women’s sexuality and reproductive potential. In contrast, a non-monogamous man is, at least sometimes, liable to be regarded as a ‘stud’.

Apart from monogamy, the only other relationship structure that controls paternity in a similar way is patriarchal polygamy, which is stigmatised in contemporary North America, for reasons including bona fide feminism as well as racism and cultural imperialism. One effect of this is that monogamy is seen as the only fair and liberal alternative.

Actually, there are many alternatives.

More here.

Tom Blunt in Signature:

Think about every bully you can remember, whether from fiction or real life. What do they all have in common?

For the most part, they don’t read — and if they do, they probably aren’t ingesting much literary fiction.

This isn’t just snobbery, it’s a case that scientists are slowly building as they explore a field called Theory of Mind, described by Science Magazine as “the human capacity to comprehend that other people hold beliefs and desires and that these may differ from one’s own beliefs and desires.” In an abstract published by the magazine in 2013, researchers found that reading literary fiction led to better results in subjects tested for Theory of Mind. That same year, another study found heightened brain activity in readers of fiction, specifically in the areas related to visualization and understanding language. As Mic explains: “A similar process happens when you envision yourself as a character in a book: You can take on the emotions they are feeling.”

More recently, Trends in Cognitive Sciences reported more findings that link reading and empathy, employing a test called “Mind of the Eyes” in which subjects viewed photographs of strangers’ eyes, describing what they believed that person was thinking or feeling (readers of fiction scored significantly higher). It turns out that the narrative aspect of fiction is key to this response. From the study: “participants who had read the fictional story Saffron Dreams by Shaila Abdullah … were found to have a reduced bias in the perception of Arab and Caucasian faces compared to control subjects who read a non-narrative passage.” More plot-driven genre fiction doesn’t seem to have the same effect.

More here.