Sabine Hossenfelder in Scientific American:

So how are we to gauge the 4.2-sigma discrepancy between the Standard Model’s prediction and the new measurement? First of all, it is helpful to remember the reason that particle physicists use the five-sigma standard to begin with. The reason is not so much that particle physics is somehow intrinsically more precise than other areas of science or that particle physicists are so much better at doing experiments. It’s primarily that particle physicists have a lot of data. And the more data you have, the more likely you are to find random fluctuations that coincidentally look like a signal. Particle physicists began to commonly use the five-sigma criterion in the mid-1990s to save themselves from the embarrassment of having too many “discoveries” that later turn out to be mere statistical fluctuations.

But of course five sigma is an entirely arbitrary cut, and particle physicists also discuss anomalies well below that limit. Indeed, quite a few three- and four-sigma anomalies have come and gone over the years.

More here.  [Thanks to Bill Benzon.]

Erica X Eisen in the Boston Review:

On April 14, 1945, as a group of American soldiers were leading him down the road in the village of Wittbräucke, German steel magnate Albert Vögler bit into a concealed cyanide ampoule, collapsed against an armored car, and died almost instantly. “I am ready to take part in the reconstruction of Germany,” he had told fellow industrialist Friedrich Flick earlier that year. “But I will never let myself be arrested.” Across the country, businessmen were doing the same thing: Siemens alone saw five of its board members kill themselves as the Red Army advanced through the streets of Berlin and captured its factory.

Those industrialists who remained behind, shredding documents and wrenching portraits of Hitler off the walls, would soon find themselves on the list of candidates for war crimes prosecution at Nuremberg—executives from Krupp, IG Farben, Daimler-Benz, Volkswagen, and elsewhere whose companies had collectively smelted steel for tanks and purified aluminum for gunbarrels, formulated the synthetic rubber and gasoline necessary for tires and engines, built airplanes and U-boats and V-2 rocket circuit boards, and manufactured nerve gas and Zyklon B. They had seized Jewish property and swallowed up businesses sold off for pennies by those fleeing Nazi persecution. They had contracted with the German government to exploit the labor of concentration camp internees and sited factories with the specific goal of better leveraging this free and disposable workforce. They had planned, profited from, and above all else made possible the Nazi war machine and its genocides.

More here.

Michael Barany at JSTOR Daily:

In 1935, one of France’s leading mathematicians, Élie Cartan, received a letter of introduction to Nicolas Bourbaki, along with an article submitted on Bourbaki’s behalf for publication in the journal Comptes rendus de l’Académie des Sciences (Proceedings of the French Academy of Sciences). The letter, written by fellow mathematician André Weil, described Bourbaki as a reclusive author passing his days playing cards in the Paris suburb of Clichy, without any pretense of overturning the foundations of all of mathematics (that more disruptive part of Bourbaki’s oeuvre and ambitions would come later). On the strength of Weil’s recommendation, Cartan helped launch what would become one of the most storied and notorious careers in the history of mathematics.

Weil, for his part, was playing a prank, propagating an elaborate in-joke that continued among mathematicians for decades. The math was real. Nicolas Bourbaki was not.

more here.

Ella Whelan in Spiked:

Queen’s University Belfast’s Pro-Life Society is under investigation by the students’ union over social-media posts. It stands accused of failing to respect the ‘spirit’ of the SU and its posts allegedly had the potential to bring the university ‘into disrepute’. The two posts featured images. The first compared abortion to slavery, with a man in chains captioned ‘Am I not a man and a brother?’ alongside a fetus with the line ‘Am I not a baby and a sister?’. On Holocaust Memorial Day, the society posted a second image which compared abortion to both slavery and the Holocaust.

There are few things more grotesque than the penchant among anti-choicers to compare a woman’s decision to terminate a pregnancy with the Holocaust or slavery. QUB’s Pro-life Society claims that it contacted the UK ambassador for a Holocaust remembrance organisation, who assured it that the post ‘was not disrespectful in any way to Holocaust victims or survivors’. I know a few Jews who would disagree. Undermining the specific horror of the Holocaust by relativising it to score political points against abortion is degrading, to say the least. In the same way, using Josiah Wedgwood’s abolitionist image of the ‘supplicant slave’ alongside a fetus in utero says something about the society’s understanding of racism. The organised enslavement of black people for economic gain, like the institutionalised murder of Jews under the Nazis, is clearly incomparable with abortion. To suggest the two are the same shows historical ignorance and a worrying lack of moral clarity.

More here.

Kunwar Khuldune Shahid in The Spectator:

Pakistan’s prime minister Imran Khan has once again blamed women for an appalling rise in rape cases. Khan used a televised question and answer session this week to say that sexual violence was a result of ‘increasing obscenity’. Women in Pakistan should remove ‘temptation’ because ‘not everyone has willpower’, he added, urging females to cover up to help reduce the sexual violence which has plagued our country.

Khan pointed the finger of blame at Bollywood and Hollywood, for spreading ‘vulgarity’. He also repeated the growing divorce tally of the UK as evidence of the ‘ethical plunge’ of the West, which he said is messing up the moral compass of the Muslim world and Pakistan. ‘World history tells when you increase vulgarity in society, two things happen: sex crimes increase and the family system breaks down,’ Khan said.

All this is hard to take from a twice–divorced former playboy, who appears to see his life prior to taking charge as prime minister as evidence of societal immorality, without saying, or realising, as much. Since coming to power he has upped the ante on his misogynistic views, objectifying nurses, condemning feminism, and hurling sexist abuses at his political opponents. Even more worryingly, born-again Muslim Khan is now upholding a merger of his personal chauvinism and the wider Islamist marginalisation of women in Pakistan.

More here.

Alexander Wells at the LARB:

IN A NABOKOV short story from 1945, some cultured English people hobnob about the Dresden bombing at a cocktail party: “‘My Dresden no longer exists,’ said Mrs. Mulberry. ‘Our bombs have destroyed it and everything it meant.’” For Anglo-Americans since World War II, Dresden has become an icon of ruin, first moral then physical — a sensational reminder of the evils of war. Recent histories like Sinclair McKay’s Dresden (2020) tend to conjure the firestorm as an act of sheer destruction, a brutish assault on a culture city that, if you squinted, was comparable to Vienna or Paris. (Such accounts tend to overstate Dresden’s innocence — the city was an important site for industry and transportation.) Heavily bombed during the war, then only haltingly rebuilt by Communist East Germany (GDR), Dresden is now a global symbol for atrocity against the run of play.

For contemporary Germans — and for Dresdeners in particular — it is far harder to talk constructively about the bombing. German wartime suffering remains a thorny moral question, especially for authors like Durs Grünbein, whose poetry collection Porcelain: Poem on the Downfall of My City, originally published in German in 2005, has been translated by Karen Leeder and released roughly to coincide with the 75th anniversary of the bombings.

more here.

Jennifer Wilson in The Nation:

The thing about big plans is that they require people to carry them out. The problem of personnel particularly plagued Peter the Great. Convinced by his European advisers that his country was backward and stuck in a medieval mindset, he spent much of his reign on a series of modernizing initiatives intended to get Russia “caught up” with the West. To implement his reforms—which included establishing a navy, imposing a tax on beards, and eventually drafting half a million serfs to build a city (named after himself) on nothing but marshland—he needed a robust bureaucracy and a standing military that could manage the demands of his new, spruced-up empire. Peter thus made service—civil or military—compulsory for the Russian nobility, and he implemented a new class system, the Table of Ranks, under which one could be promoted according to how long and how well one served.

The Table of Ranks included 14 classes, from collegiate registrars (which included lowly copy clerks) at the very bottom to the top civil rank of chancellor. While it was pitched as the introduction of a modern meritocratic system in Russia, in practice the table produced sharp class divisions, prevented people from working in fields that did not correspond to their rank, and tied social status to the name and nature of one’s profession. A version of this system continued in Russia all the way up to the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, and yet, in much of the literature of the 19th century, the civil service—which structured almost every aspect of life, particularly in the capital of St. Petersburg—feels weirdly merged into the background, more a fact of life than a facet of literary fiction, save for in the work of one writer: Nikolai Gogol.

More here.

Fermilab press release in Symmetry:

The long-awaited first results from the Muon g-2 experiment at the US Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory show fundamental particles called muons behaving in a way that is not predicted by scientists’ best theory, the Standard Model of particle physics. This landmark result, made with unprecedented precision, confirms a discrepancy that has been gnawing at researchers for decades.

The strong evidence that muons deviate from the Standard Model calculation might hint at exciting new physics. Muons act as a window into the subatomic world and could be interacting with yet undiscovered particles or forces.

“Today is an extraordinary day, long awaited not only by us but by the whole international physics community,” says Graziano Venanzoni, co-spokesperson of the Muon g-2 experiment and physicist at the Italian National Institute for Nuclear Physics. “A large amount of credit goes to our young researchers who, with their talent, ideas and enthusiasm, have allowed us to achieve this incredible result.”

More here.

Helena Cobban in the Boston Review:

It is hard to believe that it has been fifty years since I used to sit on the floor of drafty college residences in Oxford with Hussein Agha, Ahmad Samih Khalidi, Ahmad’s cousin Rashid Khalidi, and other luminaries of the Oxford University Arab Society, listening to their discussions of the then-parlous state of the Palestinian freedom movement (and voicing an occasional interjection). During the previous year, Palestinian guerrillas earlier chased out of the West Bank by Israel had proceeded to challenge King Hussein’s rule in Jordan; and during “Black” September 1970, Hussein hit back at them hard. In Spring 1971 the guerrillas were still reeling from Black September and were struggling to regroup in the extensive Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon. In Oxford we eagerly read any scrap of news we could get about their achievements there.

In 1974, one year after I graduated, I took out a loan to travel to Beirut to build a career as a foreign correspondent. During the next seven years one of the biggest constants in my news budget was the Palestinian story.

More here.

Katy Waldman in The New Yorker:

First, let’s survey the situation. It’s as though the haze of our inner lives were being filtered through a screen of therapy work sheets. If we are especially online, or roaming the worlds of friendship, wellness, activism, or romance, we must consider when we are centering ourselves or setting boundaries, sitting with our discomfort or being present. We “just want to name” a dynamic. We joke about our coping mechanisms, codependent relationships, and avoidant attachment styles. We practice self-care and shun “toxic” acquaintances. We project and decathect; we are triggered, we say wryly, adding that we dislike the word; we catastrophize, ruminate, press on the wound, process. We feel seen and we feel heard, or we feel unseen and we feel unheard, or we feel heard but not listened to, not actively. We diagnose and receive diagnoses: O.C.D., A.D.H.D., generalized anxiety disorder, depression. We’re enmeshed, fragile. Our emotional labor is grinding us down. We’re doing the work. We need to do the work.

Around every corner, trauma, like the unwanted prize at the bottom of a cereal box. The trauma of puberty, of difference, of academia, of women’s clothing. When I asked Twitter whether the word’s mainstreaming was productive, I was struck by two replies. First, overapplying the term might dilute its meaning, robbing “people who have experienced legitimate trauma of language that is already oftentimes too thin.” And, second, invoking “trauma” where “harm” might suffice could play into the hands of “people who despise and fear vulnerability.” During this exchange, Twitter served me an advertisement that urged me to “understand my trauma” by purchasing a yoga membership. Ridiculous, I thought. I’m not a sexual-assault survivor. I’ve never been to a war zone. But, countered my brain, after four years of Trump and four seasons of covid, are you not hurting? The earth is dying. Your mother issues! Your daddy issues! A clammy wave engulfed me. My cursor hovered over the banner.

Perhaps the language of mental health is burgeoning because actual mental health is declining.

More here.

Meilan Solly in Smithsonian:

Louis Renard, an 18th-century book publisher who moonlighted as a British spy, had a somewhat tenuous relationship with the truth. As writer and rare-book collector Edward Brooke-Hitching notes in The Madman’s Library: The Strangest Books, Manuscripts and Other Literary Curiosities From History, Renard “knew even less” about Indonesian wildlife than the average European of his day. Far from letting this obstacle stand in his way, however, the publisher leaned into his imagination, producing a fantastical compendium of fish from the opposite of the globe that featured illustrations of a mermaid, a four-legged “Running Fish” that trotted around like a dog and a host of other impossibly vivid-hued creatures.

Renard’s Fishes, Crayfishes, and Crabs (1719) is one of hundreds of unusual titles featured in Brooke-Hitching’s latest book. From books that aren’t actually books—like 20 Slices of American Cheese, a 2018 volume with a name that conveys all one really needs to know—to books made out of flesh and blood to books of spectacular size, The Madman’s Library takes readers on a riveting tour of literary history’s most overlooked corners.

More here.

Becca Rothfeld at Cabinet Magazine:

By all accounts, Maurice Schérer led an oppressively virtuous life. He never cheated on his wife. He was sober, refusing both drugs and alcohol, and he attended Mass each Sunday. Though he could have afforded a car, he never bought one, and he considered even occasional taxi trips an undue extravagance. In his old age, when he was suffering from painful scoliosis, he continued taking two buses to work in the Montparnasse neighborhood of Paris each morning, then the same two buses back home each night. He cherished quiet enjoyments: classical music, visits to museums, nights at home with his family. He was born in 1920 and died in 2010, but he never owned a telephone.

What does this self-effacing ascetic have to do with Éric Rohmer, the elusive yet glamorous filmmaker who has been called “the father of French New Wave”? Perhaps it is only incidental that they were, in fact, the same person, for the two of them led remarkably discrete lives.

more here.

Will Wiles at Literary Review:

Flyn isn’t interested so much in what we’ve done to nature as in how it bounces back. ‘What draws my attention’, she writes, ‘is not the afterglow of pristine nature as it disappears over the horizon, but the narrow band of brightening sky that might indicate a fresh dawn of a new wild as, across the world, ever more land falls into abandonment.’ More of the world being abandoned – is that right? We assume that as our numbers increase, so we claim more territory from the wild. But in fact our activity is increasingly concentrated in smaller areas and, in the developed world at least, we are leaving more land to its own devices.

Europe has been steadily reforesting for decades, and will continue to do so. The trend has been even more remarkable in the former Soviet Union, where there has been an abandonment of unviable state agriculture and a flight to the cities.

more here.

Adam Elkus in The New Atlantis:

What ever happened to machines taking over the world? What was once an object of intense concern now seems like a punchline. Take one of the latest videos released by the robotics company Boston Dynamics, of its iconic two- and four-legged machines shaking it to “Do You Love Me?” by The Contours, which was met with sarcastic online quips about the robots doing victory dances after murdering humans. The revolt of the machines, subsumed into the background ambiance of generalized fears of tech dystopia, no longer seems like a distinctive worry. For those who remember an earlier era of techno-panic, that should be startling.

Once upon a time — just a few years ago, actually — it was not uncommon to see headlines about prominent scientists, tech executives, and engineers warning portentously that the revolt of the robots was nigh. The mechanism varied, but the result was always the same: Uncontrollable machine self-improvement would one day overcome humanity. A dismal fate awaited us. We would be lucky to be domesticated as pets kept around for the amusement of superior entities, who could kill us all as easily as we exterminate pests.

Today we fear a different technological threat, one that centers not on machines but other humans. We see ourselves as imperiled by the terrifying social influence unleashed by the Internet in general and social media in particular. We hear warnings that nothing less than our collective ability to perceive reality is at stake, and that if we do not take corrective action we will lose our freedoms and way of life.

More here.

Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe:

In a world flooded with information, everybody necessarily makes choices about what we pay attention to. This basic fact can be manipulated in any number of ways, from advertisers micro-targeting specific groups to repressive governments flooding social media with misinformation, or for that matter well-meaning people passing along news from sketchy sources. Zeynep Tufekci is a sociologist who studies the flow of information and its impact on society, especially through social media. She has provided insightful analyses of protest movements, online privacy, and the Covid-19 pandemic. We talk about how technology has been shaping the information space we all inhabit.

More here.

Steve Donoghue in the Christian Science Monitor:

The “rogue scholar” referred to in Michael Blandings’ captivating book, “North by Shakespeare: A Rogue Scholar’s Quest for the Truth Behind the Bard’s Work,” is a researcher who has confronted one of the most entrenched literary orthodoxies: that William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon wrote the plays that bear his name.

Dennis McCarthy, an amateur independent researcher, is hardly the first to challenge that orthodoxy, of course. For well over a century, iconoclasts of all stripes, including such public figures as Sigmund Freud, Helen Keller, Henry James (who came to think that “the divine William is the biggest and most successful fraud ever practiced on a patient world”), and of course Mark Twain, whose little 1909 book “Is Shakespeare Dead?” still makes hugely entertaining reading.

As Blanding relates, McCarthy’s approach to this vexing question centers on Elizabethan courtier and famed Plutarch translator Sir Thomas North. McCarthy’s innovation isn’t to contend that North actually wrote the plays that bear Shakespeare’s name; instead, he argues that Shakespeare wrote the plays by plagiarizing liberally from North’s earlier works, some of which were published and are now lost.

More here.