Jan-Werner Müller in The New Statesman:

Half a decade on, “Brexit and Trump” remain shorthand for the rise of right-wing populism and a profound unsettling of liberal democracies. One curious fact is rarely mentioned: the campaigns of Hillary Clinton and Remain in 2016 had similar-sounding slogans, which spectacularly failed to resonate with large parts of the electorate: “Stronger Together” and “Stronger in Europe”. Evidently, a significant number of citizens felt that they might actually be stronger, or in some other sense better off, by separating. What does that tell us about the fault lines of politics today?

Conventional wisdom has it that cultural divisions now matter most, and that plenty of people feel they have nothing in common with liberal, supposedly “globalist” elites. Yet that idea is not only empirically dubious; it also uncritically adopts a cultural framing of political conflict that plays into the hands of the right, if not the far right. The divisions that threaten democracies are increasingly economically driven, a development that has been obscured by the rhetorical strategies of a right committed to plutocratic populism.

More here.

Allison Whitten in Quanta:

Our mushy brains seem a far cry from the solid silicon chips in computer processors, but scientists have a long history of comparing the two. As Alan Turing put it in 1952: “We are not interested in the fact that the brain has the consistency of cold porridge.” In other words, the medium doesn’t matter, only the computational ability.

Today, the most powerful artificial intelligence systems employ a type of machine learning called deep learning. Their algorithms learn by processing massive amounts of data through hidden layers of interconnected nodes, referred to as deep neural networks. As their name suggests, deep neural networks were inspired by the real neural networks in the brain, with the nodes modeled after real neurons — or, at least, after what neuroscientists knew about neurons back in the 1950s, when an influential neuron model called the perceptron was born. Since then, our understanding of the computational complexity of single neurons has dramatically expanded, so biological neurons are known to be more complex than artificial ones. But by how much?

More here.

Mohsin Hamid in the Financial Times:

A little over half a century ago, in 1970, my mother’s parents took her to Kabul to shop for her wedding. From Lahore, Kabul was only a short flight or a long drive away, much closer than Karachi. It was the first time my mother had left Pakistan.

They stayed in a hotel but were shown around Kabul by a family friend, a young Persian-speaking Afghan woman who had attended medical school in Lahore with my mother’s sister. This friend wore stylish western dresses, as many well-off women in Kabul did, and my mother was struck by how modern and cosmopolitan Kabul seemed. The city was full of westerners, including, in my mother’s recounting, throngs of “hippies and druggies”. My mother loved it at once.

One day they went for a picnic in a park. There was a river or a canal nearby, and beside this body of water some western women were sunbathing in bikinis. A group of Afghan men in traditional attire emerged from the trees and began to stare. Clearly uncomfortable, the women covered themselves and ran off.

My mother’s party all laughed as they watched this scene unfold. It seemed harmless enough. “Westerners come here,” their Afghan friend said, “and forget where they are.”

More here.

Jon Bialecki at Public Books:

Anthropology has trouble with the future. So it is curious that, all of a sudden, there is a burst of anthropological monographs on one of the most future-facing social movements there is. At roughly the same moment (here measured by the inexact and rather broad standards of academic publishing), two books have come out about transhumanism and transhumanists.¹

Even if the term “transhumanism” is unfamiliar to you, you still probably know of this phenomenon. This is because, thanks to Silicon Valley and science fiction, transhumanists are becoming ubiquitous. Transhumanists are those either working on or advocating for technologies that potentially would so radically alter our lives that we would essentially transcend our humanity. This is stuff like cryonics: the freezing of the dead—though most cryonicists would not use the term “dead,” preferring to think of them more as patients in an extremely precarious condition—so that, in a future moment, they can be resuscitated and cured.

more here.

Allan Massie at Literary Review:

The title of this book is a surprise. Chesterton’s admirers have regarded him as a saintly figure; indeed he has been proposed for canonisation. Even those, like Bernard Shaw and H G Wells, who engaged in fierce argument with him regarded him with affection. He was a master of paradox whose sincerity was nevertheless rarely questioned. Orwell’s complaint that everything Chesterton wrote was intended to demonstrate the superiority of the Catholic Church was nonsense, and not only because he didn’t convert until 1922, when he was forty-eight, by which time he had, as Richard Ingrams observes, written his best books. It would be truer, though still an exaggeration, to say that everything he wrote was intended to demonstrate the good sense of the ordinary man. He might well, like a certain Tory politician today, have said we have had enough of experts.

more here.

From NPR:

SRINAGAR, India (AP) — India’s leaders are anxiously watching the Taliban takeover in Afghanistan, fearing that it will benefit their bitter rival Pakistan and feed a long-simmering insurgency in the disputed region of Kashmir, where militants already have a foothold. Lt. Gen. Deependra Singh Hooda, former military commander for northern India between 2014-2016, said militant groups based across the border in Pakistan would “certainly try and push men” into Kashmir, following the Taliban victory in Afghanistan. Hooda added it was too early to predict if any influx of fighters into Kashmir would be “in numbers that destabilize the security situation” and push the region into a military confrontation. Neighbors India and Pakistan have fought two wars over Kashmir and both countries rule parts of the Himalayan region, but claim it in full. Indian officials worry that Afghanistan under the Taliban could be a base for organizing Islamist militants in Kashmir, many of whom are allied with Pakistan in their struggle against New Delhi. New Delhi has called the Taliban Pakistan’s “proxy terrorist” group and supported Afghanistan’s U.S.-backed government before it was overthrown in August.

Syed Salahuddin, the leader of an alliance of Kashmiri rebel groups, called the Taliban’s victory “extraordinary and historical” in a voice message shared across social media days after the fall of Kabul. Salahuddin, who is based in Pakistan-controlled Kashmir, said he expected the Afghan group to aid Kashmir’s rebels. “Same way, in the near future, India too will be defeated by Kashmir’s holy warriors,” he added. In the last few years, anger in Kashmir has deepened after the Indian government — led by a right-wing Hindu nationalist party — stripped the Muslim-majority region of its semiautonomous status.

More here.

Jason Gregg in Smithsonian:

Moths

Tonight the air smells of cut grass.
Apples rust on the branches. Already summer is
a place mislaid between expectation and memory.
This has been a summer of moths.
Their moment of truth comes well after dark.
Then they reveal themselves at our windowledges
and sills as a pinpoint. A glimmer.
The books I look up about them are full of legends:
ghost-swift moths with their dancing assemblies at dusk.
Their courtship swarms. How some kinds may steer by the moon.
The moon is up. The back windows are wide open.
Mid-July light fills the neighbourhood. I stand by the hedge.

Once again they are near the windowsill –
fluttering past the fuchsia and the lavender,
which is knee-high, and too blue to warn them
they will fall down without knowing how
or why what they steered by became, suddenly,
what they crackled and burned around. They will perish –
I am perishing – on the edge and at the threshold of
the moment all nature fears and tends towards:
the stealing of the light. Ingenious facsimile.
And the kitchen bulb which beckons them makes
my child’s shadow longer than my own.

by Eavan Boland
from Literary Hub

Akeel Bilgrami (along with many others) in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

February 14, 1989, and September 11, 2001, have stood like bookends in my occasional writing on contemporary politics as it relates to Muslims. A rite of passage, a personal education. But the personal here reflects something wider in American, more generally Western, public life.

When the fatwa against Salman Rushdie was pronounced on the first of those dates, I had written critically of the absolutist stances taken by some Muslims in the aftermath of the publication of The Satanic Verses and in support of the commitments to free expression that I had been accustomed to in all the societies (India, England, America) I had inhabited. The long aftermath of the atrocities on September 11 found me withdrawing from these critical undertakings — not out of any funk but, curiously, out of a sense that it was the only self-respecting thing to do. My reason was just this: one does not make criticisms on demand. And there was an expectation, occasionally even explicitly voiced to me, that a Muslim living in a society that had been subjected to such an atrocity, should be declaring his anti-Jihadi credentials. It soon became clear, in fact, that criticism of extremist Islamist politics had become a sort of career path for Muslims in this part of the world and it was not a path I was willing to tread, even though a certain recognizably zealous type — some among my friends — thought my reaction to be too rarefied in its scruple.

This raises a wide range of issues about truth, speech, and location.

More here.

Tariq Ali in The Nation:

The Taliban observed the 20th anniversary of 9/11 in startling fashion. Within a week of the United States’ announcement that it would withdraw its forces from Afghanistan on September 11, the Taliban had taken over large parts of the country, and on August 15, the capital city of Kabul fell. The speed was astonishing, the strategic acumen remarkable: a 20-year occupation rolled up in a week, as the puppet armies disintegrated. The puppet president hopped a helicopter to Uzbekistan, then a jet to the United Arab Emirates. It was a huge blow to the American empire and its underling states. No amount of spin can cover up this debacle.

More here.

Joseph S. Nye in Project Syndicate:

What 9/11 illustrates is that terrorism is about psychology, not damage. Terrorism is like theatre. With their powerful military, Americans believe that “shock and awe” comes from massive bombardment. For terrorists, shock and awe comes from the drama more than the number of deaths caused by their attacks. Poisons might kill more people, but explosions get the visuals. The constant replay of the falling Twin Towers on the world’s television sets was Osama bin Laden’s coup.

Terrorism can also be compared to jujitsu, in which a weak adversary turns the power of a larger player against itself. While the 9/11 attacks killed several thousand Americans, the “endless wars” that the US subsequently launched killed many more. Indeed, the damage done by al-Qaeda pales in comparison to the damage America did to itself.

More here.

Sami Grover in Undark:

How much attention should each of us be paying to our individual carbon footprint? That question is the subject of a contentious debate that’s been raging in climate circles for quite some time.

In one camp stand folks like author Rebecca Solnit, whose recent op-ed for The Guardian argued that Big Oil invented carbon footprints as a deliberate attempt to “blame us for their greed.” The goal, she wrote, was to use relatively ineffectual calls for voluntary abstinence to distract the public from demanding systems-level interventions — like new taxes or the phasing out of gas-powered cars — that might meaningfully reduce society’s reliance on fossil fuels as a whole.

In the other camp are people like Polish researcher Michał Czepkiewicz, who assert that the concept of carbon footprints was simply co-opted by fossil fuel interests, and that it still has value in illuminating the vast inequality that exists between low- and high-carbon lifestyles. (A recent report from the anti-poverty organization Oxfam found that the wealthiest 10 percent of the global population — which includes the vast majority of people reading this op-ed — were responsible for more than 50 percent of global emissions between 1990 and 2015.)

More here.

Rafia Zakaria in The Baffler:

When workers do not come into a city, a city can wither; and an examination of slow recovery of retail districts that are close to certain subway stations frequented by New York city commuters prove this. This is simply because the vast economic machinery of the city requires a constant influx of cash. Office workers, now toiling at home, used to provide that. There were lunch-break or after-work shopping sprees to nearby retailers, there were lunches at cafes and restaurants, there are the million other things that are consumed in the course of the day. Students and creatives may still be thronging to the city, but it is the absent army of white-collar office workers whose taxes and transactions keep the city running. The urban cycle of constant production relies on all the people who earn money while being away from home and then spend it to make themselves feel better, feel more successful, more like a somebody rather than a nobody. New York has been all about this equation.

No one could have imagined that New York City’s decline would be so sudden. One recent ray of light was the re-opening of Broadway last week. Emotional scenes were reported as the shows began, with actors given standing ovations when they first appeared on stage. But Broadway, like so many places, remains on edge: intermissions and autograph-seeking are curtailed, and proof of vaccination is often required.

More here.

George Packer in The Atlantic:

September 11 is buried so deep under layers of subsequent history and interpretation that it’s hard to sort out the true feelings of that day. But I remember one image with indelible clarity. It’s the face of a young woman in a color photograph on a flyer that appeared at the entrance to my subway stop in Brooklyn, around my neighborhood, and then all over the city. we need your help, the flyer said. The sign was posted right after the attacks and stayed up long after it stopped being an urgent request to locate a missing person who might be wandering through the ashes of Lower Manhattan, and became a tribute to a lost daughter. The early hours and days were like that. The facts were incomprehensible. How many people died, how many survived, did any survive? When would the next attack come? Who had done it, and why?

Through most of September 12 and 13, I waited to give blood with other New Yorkers in a long sidewalk line. “I volunteered so I could be a part of something,” an unemployed video producer named Matthew Timms told me. “I’ve been at no point in my life when I could say something I’ve done has affected mankind. Like, when the news was on, I was thinking, What if there was a draft? Would I go? I think I would.” A teenager named Amalia della Paolera was passing out cookies. “This is the time when we need to be, like, pulling together and doing as much as we can for each other,” she said, not “sitting at home watching it on TV and saying, like, ‘Oh, there’s another bomb.’ ”

More here.

You begin

You begin this way:
this is your hand,
this is your eye,
this is a fish, blue and flat
on the paper, almost
the shape of an eye
This is your mouth, this is an O
or a moon, whichever
you like. This is yellow.
Outside the window
is the rain, green
because it is summer, and beyond that
the trees and then the world,
which is round and has only
the colors of these nine crayons.
This is the world, which is fuller
and more difficult to learn than I have said.
You are right to smudge it that way
with the red and then
the orange: the world burns.
Once you have learned these words
you will learn that there are more
words than you can ever learn.
The word hand floats above your hand
like a small cloud over a lake.
The word hand anchors
your hand to this table
your hand is a warm stone
I hold between two words.
This is your hand, these are my hands, this is the world,
which is round but not flat and has more colors
than we can see.
It begins, it has an end,
this is what you will
come back to, this is your hand.

by Margaret Atwood