Lorraine Boissoneault in Smithsonian:

In the beginning, there was smoke. It snaked out of the Andes from the burning leaves of Nicotiana tabacum some 6,000 years ago, spreading across the lands that would come to be known as South America and the Caribbean, until finally reaching the eastern shores of North America. It intermingled with wisps from other plants: kinnickinnick and Datura and passionflower. At first, it meant ceremony. Later, it meant profit. But always the importance of the smoke remained.

Today, archaeologists aren’t just asking which people smoked the pipes and burned the tobacco and carried the seeds from one continent to the next; they’re also considering how smoking reshaped our world. “We teach in history and geology classes that the origins of agriculture led to the making of the modern world,” says anthropologist Stephen Carmody of Troy University. “The one question that keeps popping up is which types of plants were domesticated first? Plants that would’ve been important for ritual purposes, or plants for food?” To answer that question and others, Carmody and his colleagues have turned to archaeological sites and old museum collections. They scrape blackened fragments from 3,000-year-old pipes, collect plaque from the teeth of the long-dead, and analyze biomarkers clinging to ancient hairs. With new techniques producing ever more evidence, a clearer picture is slowly emerging from the hazy past.

More here.

Tom Standage in The Economist:

In 1770 a chess-playing robot, built by a Hungarian inventor, caused a sensation across Europe. It took the form of a life-size wooden figure, dressed in Turkish clothing, seated behind a cabinet which had a chessboard on top. Its clockwork arm could reach out and move pieces on the board. The Mechanical Turk was capable of beating even the best players at chess. Built to amuse the empress Maria Theresa, its fame spread far beyond Vienna, and visitors to her court insisted on seeing it. The Turk toured Europe in the 1780s, prompting much speculation about how it worked, and whether a machine could really think: the Industrial Revolution was just getting started, and many people were questioning to what extent machines could replace people. Nobody ever quite guessed the Turk’s secret. But it eventually transpired that there was a human chess player cleverly concealed in its innards. The apparently intelligent machine depended on a person hidden inside.

It turns out that something very similar is happening today. Just like the Turk, modern artificial-intelligence (AI) systems rely on help from unseen humans. Training a “deep learning” system involves showing it millions of examples of an input (such as photographs of animals) and telling it what the correct output is (“cat”, “dog”) in each case. Once trained, the system can then correctly identify animals in pictures it has not seen before. But the training process requires huge numbers of correctly labelled examples – and those must be created by humans.

More here.

Robert Pogue Harrison in the New York Review of Books:

René Girard (1923–2015) was one of the last of that race of Titans who dominated the human sciences in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries with their grand, synthetic theories about history, society, psychology, and aesthetics. That race has since given way to a more cautious breed of “researchers” who prefer to look at things up close, to see their fine grain rather than their larger patterns. Yet the times certainly seem to attest to the enduring relevance of Girard’s thought to our social and political realities. Not only are his ideas about mimetic desire and human violence as far-reaching as Marx’s theories of political economy or Freud’s claims about the Oedipus complex, but the explosion of social media, the resurgence of populism, and the increasing virulence of reciprocal violence all suggest that the contemporary world is becoming more and more recognizably “Girardian” in its behavior.

In Evolution of Desire: A Life of René Girard, Cynthia Haven—a literary journalist and the author of books on Joseph Brodsky and Czesław Miłosz—offers a lively, well-documented, highly readable account of how Girard built up his grand “mimetic theory,” as it’s sometimes called, over time.

More here.

James Lanka in Phantom Sway:

I can’t understand the words. Heck, I can’t even identify all the instruments these guys are playing, but I am loving The HU.

Finding their video was just a happy accident thanks to whatever arcane divination is behind YouTube’s recommendation algorithm. For some serendipitous reason, it served up The HU’s video for Yuve Yuve Yu and I had to check it out.

Four guys looking like warriors from another age playing wildly ornate instruments against a rugged backdrop of Eurasian wilderness—the video is visually stunning. The music is at once alien and familiar. The hooks and the driving beat are pure rock and roll while the instrumentation and vocals are something that many in the west will find entirely new.

More here.

Thea N. Riofrancos in In These Times:

Despite Christine Blasey Ford’s stirring testimony, an FBI investigation, thousands of protesters (hundreds of whom were arrested), petitions and phone calls from constituents, an elevator confrontation and a record-high disapproval rating, on October 6 the U.S. Senate confirmed Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court by a margin of two.

That evening, Kavanaugh was granted a lifetime appointment to a deeply undemocratic institution. He was confirmed by a legislative body that counts some votes more than others, giving the loudest voice (per capita) to the most sparsely populated states. The Senate’s majority vote represented a minority of Americans (44 percent). And Kavanaugh was selected by a president who lost the popular vote, a pedigree he shares with three of his esteemed colleagues: Neil Gorsuch, John Roberts and Samuel Alito.

It was, in other words, an egregious case of the system working precisely as designed. The framers of the Constitution imagined the Supreme Court, the Senate and the Electoral College to function as checks on the “tyranny of the majority”—in other words, to ensure white male landowners had the final say. Two centuries later, the women’s suffrage and civil rights movements expanded the franchise far beyond what the founders intended. But, thanks to unprecedented electoral spending by corporations and the wealthy, as well as rampant voter suppression—both of which were granted a constitutional green light by recent Supreme Court decisions—the Republican-led government has become increasingly unmoored from the people it ostensibly represents.

More here.

Brooke Jarvis in the New York Times:

Sune Boye Riis was on a bike ride with his youngest son, enjoying the sun slanting over the fields and woodlands near their home north of Copenhagen, when it suddenly occurred to him that something about the experience was amiss. Specifically, something was missing.

It was summer. He was out in the country, moving fast. But strangely, he wasn’t eating any bugs.

For a moment, Riis was transported to his childhood on the Danish island of Lolland, in the Baltic Sea. Back then, summer bike rides meant closing his mouth to cruise through thick clouds of insects, but inevitably he swallowed some anyway. When his parents took him driving, he remembered, the car’s windshield was frequently so smeared with insect carcasses that you almost couldn’t see through it. But all that seemed distant now. He couldn’t recall the last time he needed to wash bugs from his windshield; he even wondered, vaguely, whether car manufacturers had invented some fancy new coating to keep off insects. But this absence, he now realized with some alarm, seemed to be all around him. Where had all those insects gone? And when? And why hadn’t he noticed?

More here.  [Thanks to Brooks Riley.]

Ganesh Sitaraman in The New Republic:

The last forty years have seen a transformation in American business. Three major airlines dominate the skies. About ten pharmaceutical companies make up the lion’s share of the industry. Three major companies constitute the seed and pesticide industry. And 70 percent of beer is sold to one of two conglomerates. Scholars have shown that this wave of consolidation has depressed wages, increased inequality, and arrested small business formation. The decline in competition is so plain that even centrist organizations like The Economist and the Brookings Institution have called for a reinvigoration of antitrust enforcement.

Antitrust law today is, however, very narrowly construed. The currently reigning paradigm originated in the 1970s with Robert Bork—the same Bork whom the Senate would later block from the Supreme Court. Bork’s book The Antitrust Paradox argued that the only goal of the antitrust laws was consumer welfare. This eagle-eyed focus was not only economically efficient, Bork and his followers pointed out, but easy for courts to administer, because consumer welfare could be measured in terms of prices: If prices are going down, the system is working. To abandon this standard, former FTC Commissioner Joshua Wright, a Republican, has said, “would be a monumental shift,” and “a dangerous one.”

More here.

David Shook at The Believer:

Much has been written about the courageous rebuilding of the Iraqi libraries destroyed by the Islamic State during its occupation of Mosul and other cities in the region. In adjacent Kurdish Iraq, the centuries-old struggle to build a repository of Kurdish culture and history has primarily and often necessarily continued with little visibility or fanfare, undertaken by willful idealists and brave individualists. Recently, I visited Zheen Archive Center, and met the people making that dream a reality. Here, two optimistic, broadminded brothers and an all-women team of crack manuscript preservationists are building a collection of books, manuscripts, and papers that have survived hundreds of years of language bans and the mass destruction of property that accompanied the countless murders of Saddam Hussein’s 1980s genocidal campaign, Anfal. Zheen—which means “life” in the Sorani dialect of Kurdish—houses the greatest collection of Kurdish cultural material of any other institution in the four contemporary nation-states that comprise the region of the Kurds, and probably the world. Remarkably, the Salih brothers formally founded Zheen in just 2004, and only acquired their present location, the nondescript four-story office building that houses its archives in northwest Sulaimani, in 2009.

more here.

Cecilia Sjöholm at Cabinet Magazine:

No story captures the lonely act of naming as a truly human capacity better than Daniel Defoe’s novel Robinson Crusoe (1719), where it saves the shipwrecked Crusoe from disintegration. Here, the logic of naming acquires a new twist. Friday—not an animal, but an aboriginal from a nearby island—becomes the center of his universe, the saving grace of his dwindling powers of perception, the focal point in his attempts to restructure something that at least looks like a society. Friday is not particularly responsive. But Crusoe invents a whole new kind of mastery, one in which Friday, in fact, becomes wholly redundant. Crusoe does not need Friday to confirm his powers. He does not need such affirmation because he has invented the technology of naming. Friday is named after a day in the calendar, and not according to a higher principle. He is named according to a certain principle of contingency, an operation of chance that can be repeated, serially, in as many varieties and forms as one likes. The question is no longer if names come from God or not, but rather how we are to produce them in the most efficient manner possible.

more here.

Leo Robson at The New Statesman:

Is this a good moment – propitious, welcoming – for the appearance of a long, rich and unflaggingly detailed account of the later life of Saul Bellow? Ten years in the making, Zachary Leader’s biography was rubber-stamped at an earlier and distinctively different point in time. Then, the writer still reflected the glow of adulation – from the reviews of James Atlas’s single-volume biography Bellow(2000); his final novel Ravelstein (2000) and his Collected Stories (2001); from the 50th-anniversary tributes to The Adventures of Augie March in 2003 and the appearance, the same year, of the Library of America compendium, Novels 1944-1953; and from the obituaries and memorial essays that appeared on his death in 2005, aged 89. When, around that time, I starting getting interested in fiction, I was made to feel about Bellow’s writing more or less what Charlie Citrine, in Humboldt’s Gift (1975), recalls feeling about Leon Trotsky in the 1930s – that if I didn’t read him at once, I wouldn’t be worth conversing with.

more here.

(Following Hurrican Katrina) Ethel Freeman’s body sat for days in her wheelchair
outside the New Orleans Convention Center. Her son Herbert, who had assured his
mother that help was on the way, was forced to leave her there once she died.

Ethel’s Sestina

Gon’ be obedient in this here chair,
gon’ bide my time, fanning against this sun.
I ask my boy, and all he says is Wait.
He wipes my brow with steam, says I should sleep.
I trust his every word. Herbert my son.
I believe him when he says help gon’ come.

Been so long since all these suffrin’ folks come
to this place. Now on the ground ’round my chair,
they sweat in my shade, keep asking my son
could that be a bus they see. It’s the sun
foolin’ them, shining much too loud for sleep,
making us hear engines, wheels. Not yet. Wait.

Lawd, some folks prayin’ for rain while they wait,
forgetting what rain can do. When it come,
it smashes living flat, wakes you from sleep,
eats streets, washes you clean out of the chair
you be sittin’ in. Best to praise this sun,
shinin’ its dry shine. Lawd have mercy, son,

is it coming? Such a strong man, my son.
Can’t help but believe when he tells us, Wait.
Wait some more. Wish some trees would block this sun.
We wait. Ain’t no white men or buses come,
but look—see that there? Get me out this chair,
help me stand on up. No time for sleepin’,

cause look what’s rumbling this way. If you sleep
you gon’ miss it. Look there, I tell my son.
He don’t hear. I’m ’bout to get out this chair,
but the ghost in my legs tells me to wait,
wait for the salvation that’s sho to come.
I see my savior’s face ’longside that sun.

Nobody sees me running toward the sun.
Lawd, they think I done gone and fell asleep.
They don’t hear Come.

Read more »

Alisen Antes in Nature:

“I was a human first, and then I learned to be a scientist. If I forget the human part, then that’s a problem.” This is what I heard when I interviewed 52 scientists recognized as exemplary by their peers for their scientific accomplishments and conduct. Related themes come up in my work with scientists who have been referred to a formal remediation programme after lapses in research integrity. I’m an organizational psychologist, specializing in the scientific workplace. What interests me are the decisions and behaviours that yield innovative, rigorous, ethical research. The past few months have drawn attention to unhealthy working environments, especially bullying in academia. We should also focus on a related, widespread problem: mentors who have excellent intentions but limited knowledge of how to create a healthy workplace. Many scientists whom I work with feel that they lack management and leadership skills. They want help with concrete tasks such as coordinating projects or facilitating meetings. But what comes up most emphatically is that conducting research requires them to establish and maintain positive relationships in the lab.

Many researchers in our remediation programme have had strained interactions with compliance officers and have struggled in their roles as supervisors. By contrast, exemplars resoundingly emphasize how they foster good team dynamics by being involved, approachable and aware of the workplace atmosphere. As one told me: “Rule number one in the lab is harmony. First and foremost, we have to get along, we have to respect each other, we have to trust each other, and that is the operating principle for everything else.” Yet, given the choice between working on a scientific paper or broaching a difficult conversation, many researchers pick the former — the task that feels most directly connected to research goals. Principal investigators might need to work consciously against the feeling that ‘nothing is getting done’ during personal interactions. Because, whether it is mentoring a struggling trainee or celebrating a hard-won achievement, investing in strong, respectful relationships is an investment in effective science.

So, what to do? All principal investigators should add relationship building to their to-do lists.

More here.

Lara Feigel in The Guardian:

In 1919 the German Dada artist Raoul Hausmann dismissed marriage as “the projection of rape into law”. It’s a statement that relishes its own violence: he is limbering up to fight marriage to the death. A strange mixture of dandy, wild man, provocateur and social engineer, Hausmann believed that the socialist revolution the Dadaists sought couldn’t be attained without a corresponding sexual revolution. And he lived as he preached. He was married, but was also in a four-year relationship with fellow artist Hannah Höch. Hausmann and Höch form one of the couples in the Barbican’s Modern Couples exhibition, which shows the freewheeling experimentation of interwar art to be inseparable from even more extravagant experiments in sexuality and coupledom. The exhibition includes several of the partly whimsical, partly grim collages Höch made at this time. Bobbing her hair and smoking in public, Höch was a self-styled “new woman” who shared Hausmann’s carnivalesque contempt for bourgeois morality. Her Bourgeois Wedding Couple (Quarrel) photomontage from 1919 satirises the married pair as ungainly children. The bride teeters on the boots of a grown-up woman, but she has the body of a mannequin and the face of an overgrown baby whose tantrum is observed by her childlike spouse.

However, the alternative to bourgeois marriage wasn’t obviously promiscuity for Höch in the way it was for Hausmann. Years later, she described being “disappointed, crushed, destroyed” by the double standards of the Dadaist men, who wanted to free women while remaining obdurately patriarchal.

More here.

Shayla Love in Vice:

Last November, on the Monday before Thanksgiving, David* was sitting in traffic on his drive home from work. He was suddenly overwhelmed by the realization that everything he experienced was filtered through his brain, entirely subjective, and possibly a complete fabrication.

“Not a unique or deep thought to be sure, but I felt the world drop out from under me and experienced panic—and a certainty that, if I chose to, I could go insane at that very moment,” he tells me. He rolled down the window, turned on the radio, and carefully made his way home.

That night, he couldn’t fall asleep. He would get very tired, come close to nodding off, and then a jolt of energy would shock him awake. “I was very shaken, suffering chest tension and nausea,” he says. “This continued unabated for six days during which I estimate I slept for a total of six hours. On Sunday evening I went to the emergency room.”

David had a hunch about what had caused his panic attack: his meditation practice.

More here.

Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis at the blog of the Oxford University Press:

Music can intensify moments of elation and moments of despair. It can connect people and it can divide them. The prospect of psychologists turning their lens on music might give a person the heebie-jeebies, however, conjuring up an image of humorless people in white lab coats manipulating sequences of beeps and boops to make grand pronouncements about human musicality.

In truth, that’s historically rather how music psychology used to work. In the early 1900s, elaborate mechanical apparatus were devised that purported to determine a child’s musical potential by measuring their perceptual acuity on tasks such as loudness discrimination. Measuring musical aptitude with performance on an acoustic judgment task misses out on what might be even more essential factors—say, the degree to which music captivates a child’s attention or inspires them to move.

But contemporary work on music perception embraces a variety of disciplines and methodologies, from anthropology to musicology to neuroscience, to try to understand the relationship between music and the human mind. Researchers use motion capture systems to record people’s movements as they dance, analyzing the gestures’ relationship to the accompanying sound. They use eye tracking to measure changes in infants’ attentiveness as musical features or contexts vary. They place electrodes on the scalp to measure changes in electrical activity, or use neuroimaging to make inferences about the neural processes that underlie diverse types of musical experiences, from jazz improvisation to trance-like states to simply feeling a beat.

More here.

Jens Kruse in Politico:

I was born in Hamburg, Germany, in 1949, so I grew up playing cowboys and Indians with my cousins in the rubble fields of my native city. Family lore had it that my mother, who had survived the Hamburg firestorm of 1943, made me baby shirts from the sugar bags that came in American care packages. Her father had been sent to a concentration camp during the early days of the Nazi dictatorship because he collected dues for an illegal union; fortunately, he survived. Because of the housing shortage caused by the bombings, my parents and I, for the first 11 years of my life, lived in a one-room apartment. Suffice it to say my childhood was a daily reminder of the catastrophic consequences of the destruction of the Weimar democracy and the rise of Adolf Hitler.

The other constant of my early life was a presence of things American that went beyond the baby shirts with “SUGAR” stamped on them. Even though we lived in the British occupation zone, American movies played at the local movie theater where my mother worked, and Bill Haley & His Comets were my father’s favorite rock ’n’ roll band. My father had been a prisoner of war of the Americans, and while he almost never talked about the war itself, he talked frequently about those years from 1945 to 1947 in camps in Germany, Holland and France. The Americans, he said, treated and fed him well and taught him to drive a 2.5-ton truck. When my parents traveled to the U.S. for the first time for my wedding to a wonderful American woman—six years after I had visited the U.S. for the first time and three years after I had spent a year at Indiana University as an exchange student—he brought his decades-old POW driver’s license in hopes that my father-in-law would let him drive his car.

More here.