Søren Wichmann in Aeon:

Simple questions often yield complex answers. For instance: what is the difference between a language and a dialect? If you ask this of a linguist, get comfortable. Despite the simplicity of the query, there are a lot of possible answers.

The distinction might depend on one’s point of view. From a political perspective, a language is simply that which is standardly spoken by a nation. From about 1850 to 1992, for instance, there was a language known as Serbo-Croatian, which had several dialects including Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian. But since Yugoslavia dissolved into several independent countries in the mid-1990s, those dialects have come to be recognised as distinct languages. This political definition works to some extent, though it poses more problems than solutions: there are languages that extend across different countries, notably Spanish in Latin America. Nobody would claim that Mexican Spanish and Colombian Spanish are different languages. Perhaps Spanish as spoken in some parts of Spain is different enough from the Latin American varieties that it deserves to be called a separate language, but that isn’t clear.

Perhaps the distinction between language and dialect can be made in terms of mutual intelligibility? Unfortunately, there are immediate problems with this approach. A Dane will understand Swedish somewhat better than a Swede will understand Danish. Similarly, someone speaking a peculiar, rural dialect of British English will understand an American from Los Angeles far better than the other way around. Mutual intelligibility often depends on exposure, a fairly uncontrollable variable, rather than anything intrinsic to language.

More here.

Emily Temple in Literary Hub:

If you can believe it, Japanese novelist, talking cat enthusiast, and weird ear chronicler Haruki Murakami turned 70 years old this weekend. 70! But I suppose we should believe it, despite the youthful gaiety and creative magic of his prose: the internationally bestselling writer has 14 novels and a handful of short stories under his belt, and it’s safe to say he’s one of the most famous contemporary writers in the world. To celebrate his birthday, and as a gift to those of you who hope to be the kind of writer Murakami is when you turn 70, I’ve collected some of his best writing advice below.

Read.

I think the first task for the aspiring novelist is to read tons of novels. Sorry to start with such a commonplace observation, but no training is more crucial. To write a novel, you must first understand at a physical level how one is put together . . . It is especially important to plow through as many novels as you can while you are still young. Everything you can get your hands on—great novels, not-so-great novels, crappy novels, it doesn’t matter (at all!) as long as you keep reading. Absorb as many stories as you physically can. Introduce yourself to lots of great writing. To lots of mediocre writing too. This is your most important task.

More here.

David Gunderman in The Conversation:

There are two things that connect the names Gauss, Riemann, Hilbert and Noether. One is their outstanding breadth of contributions to the field of mathematics. The other is that each was a professor at the same university in Göttingen, Germany.

Although relatively unknown today, Göttingen, a small German university town, was for a time one of the most productive centers of mathematics in history.

Göttingen’s rise to mathematical primacy occurred over generations, but its fall took less than a decade when its stars were pushed abroad by the advent of National Socialism, the ideology of the Nazi Party. The university’s best minds left Germany in the early 1930s, transferring its substantial mathematical legacy to Princeton, New York University, and other British and American universities. By 1943, 16 former Göttingen faculty members were in the U.S.

More here.

Gary Smith in Wired:

Nobel laureate Richard Feynman once asked his Caltech students to calculate the probability that, if he walked outside the classroom, the first car in the parking lot would have a specific license plate, say 6ZNA74. Assuming every number and letter are equally likely and determined independently, the students estimated the probability to be less than 1 in 17 million. When the students finished their calculations, Feynman revealed that the correct probability was 1: He had seen this license plate on his way into class. Something extremely unlikely is not unlikely at all if it has already happened.

The Feynman trap—ransacking data for patterns without any preconceived idea of what one is looking for—is the Achilles heel of studies based on data mining. Finding something unusual or surprising after it has already occurred is neither unusual nor surprising. Patterns are sure to be found, and are likely to be misleading, absurd, or worse.

More here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lv_4xmh_WtE

New World

Then after Eden,
was there one surprise?
O yes, the awe of Adam
at the first bead of sweat.

Thenceforth, all flesh
had to be sown with salt,
to feel the edge of seasons,
fear and harvest,
joy that was difficult,
but was, at least, his own.

The snake? It would not rust
on its forked tree.
The snake admired labor,
it would not leave him alone.

And both would watch the leaves
silver the alder,
oaks yellowing October,
everything turning money.

So when Adam was exiled
to our new Eden, in the ark’s gut,
the coined snake coiled there for good
fellowship also; that was willed.

Adam had an idea.
He and the snake would share
the loss of Eden for a profit.
So both made the New World. And it looked good.

by Derek Walcott
from Derek Walcott Collected Poems
Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1986

Michelle Alexander in The New York Times:

Leila McNeill in Smithsonian:

On the morning of June 10, 1898, Alice Lee marched into the all-male Anatomical Society meeting at Trinity College in Dublin and pulled out a measuring instrument. She then began to take stock of all 35 of the consenting society members’ heads. Lee ranked their skulls from largest to smallest to find that—lo and behold—some of the most well-regarded intellects in their field turned out to possess rather small, unremarkable skulls. This posed a problem, since these anatomists believed that cranial capacity determined intelligence. There were two possibilities: Either these men weren’t as smart as they thought they were, or the size of their skulls had nothing to do with their intelligence.

“In fact,” Lee would write in her thesis, “a number of the most capable men fall into the last nine, and J. Kollman, one of the ablest living anthropologists, has absolutely the smallest skull capacity!” Though only a doctoral student when she launched into her study of male and female intellectual difference, Lee’s study proved the most sophisticated criticism of cranium science to date, according to historian Cynthia Eagle Russet. Within a decade of publishing her findings in 1900, the field of craniology—and with it, the days of measuring skulls to interpret supposed biological human difference—would be no more. Ironically, Lee used craniologists’ own tools to cast doubt on the techniques they employed to argue their superiority to women, as well as to other races. In doing so, she waded into one of the most hotly debated social issues of her day: woman’s place in society.

More here.

Daniel J. Woodhouse in McSweeney’s:

Dear colleagues,

There is no escaping the widespread dissatisfaction within modern academia. With neoliberal upper management, bloated administration, recklessly expanded undergraduate programs, and shrinking departmental budgets, there isn’t much to be optimistic about. Those joining the ranks can look forward to bleak job prospects, excessive teaching loads, and writing stupefying grant proposals. All disciplines will have to adjust to the changing landscape. Within the sphere of pure mathematics — the oldest and most successful of humanity’s intellectual endeavors — I believe our best chance at preserving the integrity and dignity of our tradition is to return to our Pythagorean roots. We should become a cult.

Let us do away with the job market and mathjobs.com and reference letters. Let us stop pretending we understand each other’s respective sub-fields. Let us abandon those fuck-ugly Brutalist travesties we call our department buildings and leave them to those shills in applied math. Let us seclude ourselves in mountain caves and daub mysterious equations in blood across rock-faces to ward off outsiders. Let us embrace our most impenetrable mathematical texts as sacred and requiring divinely distributed revelation.

More here.

Damian Carrington in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists:

Global warming has heated the oceans by the equivalent of one atomic bomb explosion per second for the past 150 years, according to analysis of new research.

More than 90% of the heat trapped by humanity’s greenhouse gas emissions has been absorbed by the seas, with just a few per cent heating the air, land and ice caps respectively. The vast amount of energy being added to the oceans drives sea-level rise and enables hurricanes and typhoons to become more intense.

Much of the heat has been stored in the ocean depths but measurements here only began in recent decades and existing estimates of the total heat the oceans have absorbed stretch back only to about 1950. The new work extends that back to 1871. Scientists have said that understanding past changes in ocean heat was critical for predicting the future impact of climate change.

A Guardian calculation found the average heating across that 150-year period was equivalent to about 1.5 Hiroshima-size atomic bombs per second. But the heating has accelerated over that time as carbon emissions have risen, and was now the equivalent of between three and six atomic bombs per second.

More here.

Jonathan A. Rodden at Edge:

Over the last decade, I’ve been asking myself a couple of closely related questions. First, what explains the incredible growth in what we might call urban-rural polarization? What explains the fact that voting behavior has become so highly correlated with population density over time? This is something that’s happened not just in the United States, but also in a number of other industrialized countries. Secondly, what are the implications of this polarization for who wins and loses and whose policy agenda gets put into place?

In a political system like the United States, or Great Britain, or any of the countries that were colonized by Great Britain—including Australia, Canada and, for most of the postwar period, New Zealand—we draw single-member districts, and the way we form a legislature is by electing one individual from each of those districts. When we divide the world in that way, we end up concentrating voters for the urban parties of the left in urban districts, and end up with more dispersed support for the parties of the right elsewhere. This creates an important pattern in the transformation of votes to seats that has existed throughout the postwar period. It affects who gets represented and whose policies end up as law. In politics, geography matters in a way that we’ve been somewhat aware of for a long time, but all of these factors have become much more important over time, especially in the United States.

More here.

Asad Haider at n+1:

King was not the empty symbol Reagan and others claimed he was. He was a revolutionary, if one committed to nonviolence. But nonviolence does not exhaust his philosophy. As political theorist Brandon M. Terry puts it, King was not only an icon, but “a vital political thinker.” A half a century ago, Terry argues, King theorized the foundations of racism in a way that vastly surpasses the fashionable contemporary ideologies that “treat racism as near-immutable and overstate its explanatory effects.” As Terry points out, King understood that the racial question was overdetermined by wage stagnation, the declining power of organized labor, and the expulsion of workers from employment by automation. King had come to believe that transforming this structural injustice could only be achieved through mass civil disobedience.

As a theorist of inequality, King is our contemporary. But he was also a philosopher of equality, and thus of emancipation. At the core of his thought one finds the political subjectivity that the civil rights struggle was helping to engender. Important as his final year was, the radical outlines of this project are visible from 1955 to 1963, as King was drawn deeper into political activism and answered the call to engage in a political sequence that exceeded the boundaries of the existing situation.

more here.

Lara Pawson at the TLS:

David Wojnarowicz did not write dark fantasy. He wrote real life. In The Waterfront Journals he brilliantly captures electric tales from the mouths of strangers, those he described as “junkies, prostitutes, male hustlers, truck drivers, hobos, young outlaws, runaway kids, criminal types”, whose lives echo his own ostracized existence. He was thirteen when he was first paid for sex and sixteen when he started “turning tricks” regularly. His mother kicked him out of the house. By the time Wojnarowicz came out to friends in New York, he was in his early twenties. He was on the cusp of finding his voice as a writer and his confidence as an artist. It was the mid-1970s. AIDS was about to tear through the gay community.

Another journal, Weight of the Earth, gives form to Wojnarowicz’s own extraordinary life as it creeps closer and closer towards death. Originally taped as free-form audio diaries spanning the 1980s, these short dispatches offer insights into the mind of a man who was experiencing true love for the first time while also gaining a reputation on the New York art scene.

more here.

Emma Ramadan at The Quarterly Conversation:

When a sentence isn’t right, I feel it immediately in my back. I’ve said this before. Sometimes I can’t type fast enough to keep up with my thoughts and a specific word disappears from my train of thought forever. Sometimes my body has enough energy to take me to a translation workshop at a friend’s home and my translation is changed for it. Sometimes my body is tired from my day job and I work half as quickly as I used to. Sometimes my body catches cold and my brain muddles words on the page. Once I had a translation deadline to meet but I had just had my tonsils removed and could barely make out the page through the muck of medication. I realized shortly after that I had wound up with something that was half truth and half lie.

At Riffraff, we host an event to discuss my translation of Virginie Despentes’s Pretty Things. I am in conversation with a local trans woman and activist, who quite fairly makes the point that while Despentes’s book has been lauded as a feminist critique of the ways in which the beauty industry corrodes our confidence and distorts our sense of self-worth, what is left out of this book and its surrounding discussion is that this lens of feminism is not universal.

more here.

Vasily Rudich and Gabriella De Ferrari in The Paris Review:

By her own account, writing wasn’t easy for Francine du Plessix Gray, who died last Sunday at the age of eighty-eight. As she told Regina Weinreich in her 1987 Art of Fiction interview, “I’ve always had a terrifically painful ambivalence of love and terror towards the act of writing.” But this doesn’t come through in her fearless books, such as the novel Lovers and Tyrants, a semiautobiographical account of her childhood, and Them, an unsparing look at her tyrannical parents. She was born in 1930 at the French embassy in Warsaw, but after her father died in 1940, Gray and her mother emigrated to America. Gray arrived in the country knowing not a lick of English; fourteen months later, she won the school spelling bee.

…When Francine lived in her house in Connecticut, she loved to entertain her friends. Her dinners were small, and dotted with members of the local intellectual community. I was lucky enough to be invited to several. Francine envisioned herself a great cook. She was not. One of her favorite dishes to make was sorrel soup. She grew the sorrel in her garden and was very proud of it. The soup was dark green, creamy and bitter. Her enthusiasm for it was such that we all ate it quietly and fast. She insisted on seconds. As with everything else in her life: if she loved it, you were to love it, too. In the last years of Francine’s life, she  left her house in Warren to be near her sons and doctors. She moved to a small, rather dark apartment in New York City.  She insisted on filling the new apartment with as much of her furniture as possible. Her friend Peter Vaughn, who helped her move, stuffed in as much as he could. On the walls, she placed beautiful photographs of herself in her younger days. She greeted you in that apartment the way a princess would greet you: as if in a palace. She made the best of everything, and she made the best of this too. I so admired that about her. Not too long ago, I invited Francine to the opera.  I believe it was Aida.  A few minutes after the opera began, she fell asleep. After each intermission, and at the end of the show, she proclaimed it to have been a great cast and a great production. I never told her she slept through the whole thing. When I had dinner at her apartment in New York, she never spoke of sorrel. She no longer cooked, and we ate takeout. She must have missed the sorrel, but she never complained. Her emotions were hers alone. I hope they serve sorrel soup in heaven.

More here.