Cody Delistraty at The Paris Review:

Wanderlust is, historically, a German idea. Wandern, meaning to hike or to roam, and lust, of course, meaning to desire, began not as a leisure activity but as a serious existential exercise of going out into nature in order to go into oneself. The Romantics believed this is where happiness and self-contentment could be found. The Germans of the eighteenth century, especially, were enamored with Italy for its natural landscapes, but German men with the time and the means for long hikes tended mostly to traverse their own country’s varied landscapes, from the Rhine Valley to the Harz Mountains to the Elbe Sandstone Mountains, which straddle the Czech Republic nearby.

At the time, hiking in Germany was akin to participating in a Parisian salon: a marker of status and intellectualism. Courbet painted himself as a trekker in The Meeting, or Bonjour Monsieur Courbet (1854) and Gauguin, in homage, also painted himself as one in Bonjour Monsieur Gauguin (1889).

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Ahmed Rashid at the NYRB:

An equally pressing issue, which the US forces, especially, have yet to address, concerns the source, or sources, of all the Taliban’s new equipment. Providing logistics, massing fighters, and coordinating serial attacks around the country are the task of a well-drilled, well-supplied command structure. That is what Washington and Kabul are dealing with: a Taliban force, once considered a rag-tag army of militants, that now has the savvy of generals and the resources of a serious army.

For the US, this development is surely resonant of Vietnam. It was the 1968 Tet offensive launched by the South Vietnamese guerrillas, leading to talks in Paris with a North Vietnamese delegation, that paved the way for US withdrawal, which, once completed, left the South Vietnamese regime to collapse in 1975 and the communists to stroll into Saigon. Afghanistan may just have seen its Tet offensive. A resumption of talks with the US will eventually follow, but to what end this time?

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Gertler et al in Nature:

Replication is essential for building confidence in research studies¹, yet it is still the exception rather than the rule^2,3. That is not necessarily because funding is unavailable — it is because the current system makes original authors and replicators antagonists. Focusing on the fields of economics, political science, sociology and psychology, in which ready access to raw data and software code are crucial to replication efforts, we survey deficiencies in the current system.

We propose reforms that can both encourage and reinforce better behaviour — a system in which authors feel that replication of software code is both probable and fair, and in which less time and effort is required for replication.

Current incentives for replication attempts reward those efforts that overturn the original results. In fact, in the 11 top-tier economics journals we surveyed, we could find only 11 replication studies — in this case, defined as reanalyses using the same data sets — published since 2011. All claimed to refute the original results. We also surveyed 88 editors and co-editors from these 11 journals. All editors who replied (35 in total, including at least one from each journal) said they would, in principle, publish a replication study that overturned the results of an original study. Only nine of the respondents said that they would consider publishing a replication study that confirmed the original results. We also personally experienced antagonism between replicators and authors in a programme sponsored by the International Initiative for Impact Evaluation (3ie), a non-governmental organization that actively funds software-code replication. We participated as authors of original studies (P.G. and S.G.) and as the chair of 3ie’s board of directors (P.G.). In our experience, the programme worked liked this: 3ie selected influential papers to be replicated and then held an open competition, awarding approximately US$25,000 for the replication of each study⁴. The organization also offered the original authors the opportunity to review and comment on the replications. Of 27 studies commissioned, 21 were completed, and 7 (33%) reported that they were unable to fully replicate the results in the original article. The only replication published in a peer-reviewed journal⁵ claimed to refute the results of the original paper.

Despite 3ie’s best efforts, adversarial relationships developed between original and replication researchers. Original authors of five studies wrote in public comments that the replications actively sought to refute their results and were nitpicking.

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Joseph E. Stiglitz in the New York Times:

First came the books describing just how much worse economic inequality had become over the past 20 years, with all the dramatic political implications now impossible to ignore. Then there were the tomes about globalization (including my own, I admit), detailing the West’s unfettered pursuit of neoliberal policies that abetted all this unfairness.

Well, prepare for a new genre: books gently and politely skewering the corporate titans who claim to be solving such problems. It’s an elite that, rather than pushing for systemic change, only reinforces our lopsided economic reality — all while hobnobbing on the conference circuit and trafficking in platitudes.

Anand Giridharadas, a former columnist for The New York Times, spoke about this phenomenon at an Aspen Institute conference in 2015, and he takes his ideas further in his entertaining and gripping new book, “Winners Take All.” As the Democratic Party struggles to figure out its future and global demagogy thrives, it’s worth considering where we went wrong and how best to save the world from the dangerous turn it has taken. It’s now very clear that globalization, technology and market liberalization did not bring their promised benefits — at least not for the vast majority of Americans and those in advanced countries around the world.

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Ana Lopes at the website of CERN:

In a paper published today in the journal Nature, the ALPHA collaboration reports that it has literally taken antimatter to a new level. The researchers have observed the Lyman-alpha electronic transition in the antihydrogen atom, the antimatter counterpart of hydrogen, for the first time. The finding comes hot on the heels of recent measurements by the collaboration of another electronic transition, and demonstrates that ALPHA is quickly and steadily paving the way for precision experiments that could uncover as yet unseen differences between the behaviour of matter and antimatter.

The Lyman-alpha (or 1S-2P) transition is one of several in the Lyman series of electronic transitions that were discovered in atomic hydrogen just over a century ago by physicist Theodore Lyman. The transition occurs when an electron jumps from the lowest-energy (1S) level to a higher-energy (2P) level and then falls back to the 1S level by emitting a photon at a wavelength of 121.6 nanometres.

It is a special transition. In astronomy, it allows researchers to probe the state of the medium that lies between galaxies and test models of the cosmos. In antimatter studies, it could enable precision measurements of how antihydrogen responds to light and gravity. Finding any slight difference between the behaviour of antimatter and matter would rock the foundations of the Standard Model of particle physics and perhaps cast light on why the universe is made up almost entirely of matter, even though equal amounts of antimatter should have been produced in the Big Bang.

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Roger Gathman in Book and Film Globe:

When I got to Walter Benjamin Platz, I figured I was in the wrong place. It wasn’t that I was lost, or had failed to follow the map correctly—it was that the place was wrong.

What I saw before me was a broad square, marked on both ends by small concrete posts meant to impede any motorized traffic, with smooth square slabs of stone paving and a tame trickle of a fountain extending to two facing buildings that defined the Platz. These mixed use buildings, which went up eight stories, had a sleek, grayish look. On the rez-de-chaussée, there was a colonnade, with shops and restaurants. It was all as bland and corporate as a focus group.  It wasn’t that there was anything noxious about this site—but it had the look of a space that would never be missed if it were, for some reason, to be utterly changed. Above all, it said nothing about Walter Benjamin, the great explorer of the city as labyrinth, the theorist of the private life of public spaces, one of the founding spirits of psychogeography. There were definitely no minotaurs here.

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Arwa Ibrahim at Al Jazeera:

It is Friday afternoon and a lively and diverse crowd starts to gather under a blazing August sun on the banks of the Tigris River, just metres away from al-Mutanabi Street, the Iraqi capital’s historic bookselling centre.

For several years now, al-Qishla, an Ottoman military barracks-turned-cultural-hub in the heart of Baghdad, has become a space where intellectuals, poets and artists come together to exchange ideas and discuss current affairs.

Regular attendees say al-Qishla provides residents with a safe avenue to share views freely, as well as a sliver of hope that Baghdad – once a major international intellectual and cultural hub – may return to a shadow of its former self before successive wars gripping the country for decades, left it in decay.

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Andrew Curry in Nautilus:

One day in March 2010, Isak McCune started clearing his throat with a forceful, violent sound. The New Hampshire toddler was 3, with a Beatles mop of blonde hair and a cuddly, loving personality. His parents had no idea where the guttural tic came from. They figured it was springtime allergies. Soon after, Isak began to scream as if in pain and grunt at his parents and peers. When he wasn’t throwing hours-long tantrums, he stared vacantly into space. By the time he was 5, he was plagued by insistent, terrifying thoughts of death. “He would smash his head into windows and glass whenever the word ‘dead’ came into his head. He was trying to drown out the thoughts,” says his mother, Robin McCune, a baker in Goffstown, a small town outside Manchester, New Hampshire’s largest city. Isak’s parents took him to pediatricians, therapy appointments, and psychiatrists. He was diagnosed with a host of disorders: sensory processing disorder, oppositional defiance disorder, and obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). At 5, he spent a year on Prozac, “and seemed to get worse on it,” says Robin McCune. The McCunes tried to make peace with the idea that their son might never come back. In kindergarten, he grunted and screamed, frightening his teachers and classmates. “He started hearing voices, thought he saw things, he couldn’t go to the bathroom alone,” Robin McCune says. “His fear was immense and paralyzing.”

As his behaviors worsened, both parents prepared themselves for the possibility that he’d have to be home-schooled or even institutionalized. Searching for some explanation, they came across a controversial diagnosis called pediatric autoimmune neuropsychiatric disorders associated with streptococci, or PANDAS. First proposed in 1998, PANDAS linked the sudden onset of psychiatric symptoms like Isak’s to strep infections. They didn’t give it much thought. Periodic strep tests on Isak had always come back negative. And his symptoms seemed too dramatic to be the result of a simple, common childhood infection.

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Emily Wilson in The Guardian:

In The Iliad, a poem about the terrible destruction caused by male aggression, the bodies and pretty faces of women are the objects through which men struggle with each other for status. The women are not entirely silent, and goddesses always have plenty to say, but mortal women speak primarily to lament. They grieve for their dead sons, dead fathers, dead husbands and dead protectors; for the city of Troy, soon to fall, and for their own freedom, taken by the victors of war. Andromache pleads with her Trojan husband Hector not to leave her and their infant son to go back to fight Achilles. She has already endured the sack of her home city by Achilles, and seen the slaughter of her father and seven brothers, and the enslavement of her mother. If Hector dies, their child will be hurled from the city walls, Troy will fall and Andromache will be made the concubine of the son of her husband’s killer. Hector knows this, but he insists that his own need to avoid social humiliation as a battle-shirker trumps it all: “I would be ashamed before the Trojan men and women,” he says. He hopes only to be dead before he has to hear her screams.

Pat Barker’s brilliant new novelistic retelling of The Iliad puts the experience of women like Andromache at the heart of the story: the women who survive in slavery when men destroy their cities and kill their fathers, brothers and children. The central character is Briseis, the woman awarded to Achilles, the greatest Greek fighter, after his army sacks one of the towns neighbouring Troy. Agamemnon, the most powerful, although not the bravest, of the Greek warriors – a character whose downright nastiness comes across beautifully in Barker’s telling – has lost his own most recent female acquisition and seizes Briseis from Achilles. Achilles’ vengeful rage against Agamemnon and his own comrades, and the subsequent vast death toll of the Greeks and Trojans, is the central theme of The Iliad.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_nxqzwaQL4E

Tehila Sasson in Dissent:

Is capitalism immoral? Bill Gates, the second-richest man in the world, doesn’t believe that it has to be. In a recent interview, Gates argued that anyone with money has an ethical responsibility to do something positive with it. “Once you’ve taken care of yourself and your children, the best use of extra wealth is to give it back to society.” Gates himself lives this approach, recently giving away $4.6 billion in Microsoft shares to his philanthropic organization, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. “We are impatient optimists,” its webpage declares, “working to reduce inequity.”

Back in 2014, after reading Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Gates said he agreed that economic inequality was the central problem of our time. “However,” wrote Gates, “Piketty’s book has some important flaws.” According to Gates, ethical consumption and philanthropy—not Piketty’s preferred method of global taxation—were the best means to address inequality. Gates thinks we can invest in charities the same way we invest in any other business: using financial tools to maximize the profitability of philanthropic ventures that reduce inequality. Those fond of neologisms have dubbed Gates’s approach “philanthrocapitalism.” But there’s a much older term to use: moral economy.

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