David A. Bell at The Nation:

Pinker might also have to concede that, especially outside of France, most Enlightenment thinkers did not oppose reason to religious faith, as his book implies. They certainly did not consider forms of belief “generators of delusions” or consider a belief in the existence of the soul dangerous. He might have to admit that it was not just brave atheists, but devout Christians, above all Quakers, who were among the first who organized to fight the most barbaric European practice of all, namely slavery.

Historians know that there was in fact no single, monolithic “Enlightenment project,” and that the Enlightenment can be generalized about only with great caution. Throwing this caution to the wind, Pinker has taken his own 21st-century values and projected them back onto the intellectual scene of the 18th century. He has described his work as an “evidence-based take on history,” but by “evidence” he clearly means numerical data. Aren’t books evidence as well?

Meanwhile, Pinker fails to acknowledge how very closely his own radical optimism echoes some of the wilder—and more misguided—pronouncements about the human future from the Enlightenment itself. “The human species…is capable of…unbounded improvement…mankind in a later age are greatly superior to mankind in a former age.”

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Samanth Submaranian at The New Yorker:

Doshi was not alone in infusing Le Corbusier’s modernism with an Indian spirit. A small school of other architects—Charles Correa, Ranjit Sabikhi, Raj Rewal—joined him in this idiom between the nineteen-sixties and the eighties. The Indian state was still building itself out, so there were plenty of public commissions on offer, and the socialist temper of the times agreed with these architects’ interest in planning for utopia. They were displaced only a couple of decades ago, when the country’s economy opened up and a global design aesthetic blew in. Commissions now come from companies that seem to want their buildings to fit into a universal ideal of a central business district. The most ambitious government-funded project in decades—the design of Amaravati, a new state capital—lies in the hands of the world-trotting English starchitect Norman Foster.

India isn’t always a pleasant country for architects. “In some way, architecture has been associated with the country’s urban problems,” Gautam Bhatia, an architect in New Delhi, told me. “The housing is insufficient, the infrastructure is insufficient. When you have these problems, is it even ethical to worry about design? There’s a strange guilt the profession harbors.” Most architects, as a result, work on private commissions, Bhatia said.

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Boris Kachka in The New York Times:

The novelist Mary Gordon, known for books like 1981’s “The Company of Women,” about a girl who escapes her sheltered upbringing to embrace rebellion in 1960s America, considers her lifelong admiration of British actor-politician Glenda Jackson a “romance.” Gordon was 16 when she first saw Jackson onstage, in the 1965 Broadway production of “Marat/Sade,” a philosophical investigation of the meaning of protest set during and after the French Revolution.

MG: How would you define yourself as an actor in the British tradition?

GJ: I benefited from that huge change in British theater otherwise known as [playwright] John Osborne. When I left drama school, the director said to me, “Don’t expect to work much before you’re 40, because you’re essentially a character actress.” And that was a very accurate assessment, because the British theater then was still essentially a middle-class world. Then Osborne wrote “Look Back in Anger” (1956), and the whole thing just exploded.

MG: I saw “Stevie” (1977) in the West End in London [starring Jackson as British poet Stevie Smith]. I adore her work, and she is just tough as an old boot. Funny, but looks at the darkest things. As Emily Dickinson said, “Tell the truth but tell it slant.”

GJ: I’m so pleased you said that, because I’m a big fan of Emily Dickinson. The view of both Stevie and Emily Dickinson seems to be that here were these two solitary, depressed, lonely women, but they lived in these fantastic worlds!

MG: They’re great, greater than anybody around at that time. But their forms are small. And so, female gets defined as minor. Some of American women writers’ best work was done in the form of the short story: Flannery O’Connor, Eudora Welty, Katherine Anne Porter, Jean Stafford. I think what’s funny is around the same time that Emily Dickinson wrote, “I’m nobody! Who are you?” Whitman wrote, “I am large, I contain multitudes.”

GJ: [Laughs] Well, we had a program, years I’m going back now. This woman went back to Oxford to speak at her college. There’d been a big upsurge in women going to university, but it was very rare that a woman had a first-class degree. So she asked her old professor why, and this professor — also a woman — said because their examiners are still in the main men, and they like a lot of flash and filigree, whereas women go to endless lengths of attribution and details.

MG: I teach at a women’s college, Barnard, across the street from Columbia, which used to be male for donkey’s years, and I say to my students, “Do not speak into your collar when you tell me your name. There are men across the street saying things of immense stupidity at the top of their lungs!”

More here.

Syntax

Occasionally a god speaks to you,
rutted tollway a flint knife breaching
gutted fields hung on event

horizon, clear cut contradiction
through soybeans and sheared corn: blue
pickup an orange blaze, white letters

blistered, boiling down to tarmac,
asphalt, sulfur fume cured by a methane
gas burn-off pipe, blue flame chipped

with white raising a buttress of weather
-burnt bricks, flaking wind
totem. We stopped to take some cargo

on, weighted October with a freight
of waiting snow traveling east, panic of
starlings startled from stubble husks

by a harvest moon dangled directly
ahead: drove into the pitted sphere, bloody
pearl punched in a sky just out of reach

(vanishing point retreating, peeling),
one of the yellowed streetlights
by now, dimming, diminishing. The road

says to perspective, wait.
.

by Reginald Shepherd
from Otherhood: Poems by Reginald Shepherd
University of Pittsberg Press

Mark Bittman and David L. Katz in Grub Street:

It’s beyond strange that so many humans are clueless about how they should feed themselves. Every wild species on the planet knows how to do it; presumably ours did, too, before our oversized brains found new ways to complicate things. Now, we’re the only species that can be baffled about the “right” way to eat.

Really, we know how we should eat, but that understanding is continually undermined by hyperbolic headlines, internet echo chambers, and predatory profiteers all too happy to peddle purposefully addictive junk food and nutrition-limiting fad diets. Eating well remains difficult not because it’s complicated but because the choices are hard even when they’re clear.

With that in mind, we offered friends, readers, and anyone else we encountered one simple request: Ask us anything at all about diet and nutrition and we will give you an answer that is grounded in real scientific consensus, with no “healthy-ish” chit-chat, nary a mention of “wellness,” and no goal other than to cut through all the noise and help everyone see how simple it is to eat well.

Here, then, are the exhaustively assembled, thoroughly researched, meticulously detailed answers to any and all of your dietary questions.

Just tell me. Ethical concerns aside, which diet is the best: vegan, vegetarian, or omnivorous?

We don’t know, because the study to prove that any one diet is “best” for human health hasn’t been done, and probably can’t be. So, for our health, the “best” diet is a theme: an emphasis on vegetables, fruits, whole grains, beans, lentils, nuts, seeds, and plain water for thirst. That can be with or without seafood; with or without dairy; with or without eggs; with or without some meat; high or low in total fat.

More here.

Issie Lapowsky in Wired:

The morning John Kennedy was set to testify last December, he woke up at 1:30 am, in an unfamiliar hotel room in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, adrenaline coursing through his veins. He'd never gone to court before for anything serious, much less taken the stand.

Some time after sunrise, he headed to the courthouse, dressed in a gray Brooks Brothers suit, and spent the next several hours reviewing his notes and frantically pacing the halls. “I think I made a groove in the floor,” Kennedy says.

By 3:30 pm, it was finally time. Kennedy’s answers started off slowly, as he worked to steady his nerves. Then, about an hour into his testimony, Exhibit 81 flashed on a screen inside the courtroom. It was a map of part of Pennsylvania’s seventh congressional district, but it might as well have been a chalk outline of a body.

“It was like a crime scene,” explains Daniel Jacobson, an attorney for Arnold & Porter, which represented the League of Women Voters in its bid to overturn Pennsylvania’s 2011 electoral map, drawn by the state’s majority Republican General Assembly. The edges of the district skitter in all manner of unnatural directions, drawing comparisons to a sketch of Goofy kicking Donald Duck.

As an expert witness for the League of Women Voters and a political scientist at West Chester University, Kennedy’s job was to show how the state’s map had evolved over time, and to prove that the General Assembly had drawn it specifically to ensure that Republicans would always win the most seats in Congress.

More here.

Paul Lewis and Paul Hilder in The Guardian:

The blueprint for how Cambridge Analytica claimed to have won the White House for Donald Trump by using Google, Snapchat, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube is revealed for the first time in an internal company document obtained by the Guardian.

The 27-page presentation was produced by the Cambridge Analytica officials who worked most closely on Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.

A former employee explained to the Guardian how it details the techniques used by the Trump campaign to micro-target US voters with carefully tailored messages about the Republican nominee across digital channels.

Intensive survey research, data modelling and performance-optimising algorithms were used to target 10,000 different ads to different audiences in the months leading up to the election. The ads were viewed billions of times, according to the presentation.

The document was presented to Cambridge Analytica employees in London, New York and Washington DC weeks after Trump’s victory, providing an insight into how the controversial firm helped pull off one of the most dramatic political upsets in modern history.

More here.

In a Station

once I walked through the halls of a station
someone called your name
in the streets I heard children laughing
they all sound the same

wonder, could you ever know me
know the reason why I live
is there nothing you can show me
life seems so little to give

once I climbed up the face of a mountain
and ate the wild fruit there
fell asleep until the moonlight woke me
and I could taste your hair

isn't everybody dreaming
then the voice I hear is real
out of all the idle scheming
can't we have something to feel

once upon a time leaves me empty
tomorrow never came
I could sing the sound of your laughter
still I don't know your name

must be some way to repay you
out of all the good you gave
if a rumor should delay you
love seems so little to say

by Richard Manuel
from Music From Big Pink

Paul Voosen in Science:

As a teenager in the 1950s, Vaclav Smil spent a lot of time chopping wood. He lived with his family in a remote town in what was then Czechoslovakia, nestled in the mountainous Bohemian Forest. On walks he could see the Hohenbogen, a high ridge in neighboring West Germany; less visible was the minefield designed to prevent Czechs from escaping across the border. Then it was back home, splitting logs every 4 hours to stoke the three stoves in his home, one downstairs and two up. Thunk. With each stroke his body, fueled by goulash and grain, helped free the sun's energy, transiently captured in the logs. Thunk. It was repetitive and tough work. Thunk. It was clear to Smil that this was hardly an efficient way to live.

Throughout his career, Smil, perhaps the world's foremost thinker on energy of all kinds, has sought clarity. From his home office near the University of Manitoba (UM) in Winnipeg, Canada, the 74-year-old academic has churned out dozens of books over the past 4 decades. They work through a host of topics, including China's environmental problems and Japan's dietary transition from plants to meat. The prose is dry, and they rarely sell more than a few thousand copies. But that has not prevented some of the books—particularly those exploring how societies have transitioned from relying on one source of energy, such as wood, to another, such as coal—from profoundly influencing generations of scientists, policymakers, executives, and philanthropists. One ardent fan, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates in Redmond, Washington, claims to have read nearly all of Smil's work. "I wait for new Smil books," Gates wrote last December, "the way some people wait for the next Star Wars movie."

Now, as the world faces the daunting challenge of trying to curb climate change by weaning itself from fossil fuels, Smil's work on energy transitions is getting more attention than ever. But his message is not necessarily one of hope. Smil has forced climate advocates to reckon with the vast inertia sustaining the modern world's dependence on fossil fuels, and to question many of the rosy assumptions underlying scenarios for a rapid shift to alternatives. "He's a slayer of bullshit," says David Keith, an energy and climate scientist at Harvard University. ive Smil 5 minutes and he'll pick apart one cherished scenario after another. Germany's solar revolution as an example for the world to follow? An extraordinarily inefficient approach, given how little sunlight the country receives, that hasn't reduced that nation's reliance on fossil fuels. Electric semitrailers? Good for little more than hauling the weight of their own batteries. Wind turbines as the embodiment of a low-carbon future? Heavy equipment powered by oil had to dig their foundations, Smil notes, and kilns fired with natural gas baked the concrete. And their steel towers, gleaming in the sun? Forged with coal.

"There's a lot of hopey-feely going on in the energy policy community," says David Victor, an expert on international climate policy at the University of California, San Diego. And Smil "revels in the capability to show those falsehoods."

More here.

Jon Cruddas at Prospect Magazine:

James Bloodworth’s unflinching account of life and work in the towns we have come to know as being “left behind” exposes the mercilessness of the low-wage economy and modern capitalism. Working in a warehouse, a call centre, as a care worker and an Uber driver, he finds insecurity, ruthless discipline, surveillance, atomisation, underpayment and underemployment.

Workers are treated as mere units of production, squeezed for maximum efficiency. Nor does the exploitation end at work: the unscrupulousness of agencies and landlords—one of the rooms he stays in has a cardboard partition—drain any sense of control from the lives of his subjects.

While not romanticising the working class, Bloodworth is critical of some liberals who caricature them as uneducated and intolerant. He exposes how degrading working and living conditions shape how people see their relationships, bodies, diets and other people—not least immigrants and politicians.

Hired is a refreshing antidote to the fashionable post-work theses written from steel-and-ivory towers, which want us to sidestep the political imperative of improving the quality of work in favour of demanding full automation and free money. Bloodworth’s interviews reveal that meaningful work offers a sense of dignity, solidarity, support networks and community identity.

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Armin Rosen at Harper's Magazine:

Since 2003, al-Qassemi has accumulated around 1,000 modern and contemporary works by Arabic-speaking artists or artists of Arab heritage. Under the guidance of three curators, works rotate through his Barjeel Foundation space, a small public gallery inside of a large arts center in al-Qassemi’s home city of Sharjah, about twenty minutes north of Dubai. Between 200 and 300 pieces are lent to museums around the world each year, something from which al-Qassemi derives no financial benefit. The collection, now one of the most important of its kind, is so vast and geographically scattered that there are major pieces al-Qassemi hasn’t actually seen before. At an opening of an exhibition of his works at Washington’s American University in September, he confronted an eerily static blown-up photo of exploding mortar shells by the Lebanese artist Akram Zaatari for the first time, and uttered a long, guttural “wow.”

Until the UAE joined in the Saudi-led boycott of Qatar this past summer, al-Qassemi hosted a show on Al Jazeera’s AJ+ where he walked viewers through collection highlights. He had over 500,000 Twitter followers before he deactivated his account, and was one of Gulf Business’s one hundred most powerful Arabs of 2017, falling within respectable distance of Gigi Hadid.

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Thomas Nagel at the NYRB:

Kwame Anthony Appiah is a writer and thinker of remarkable range. He began his academic career as an analytic philosopher of language, but soon branched out to become one of the most prominent and respected philosophical voices addressing a wide public on topics of moral and political importance such as race, cosmopolitanism, multiculturalism, codes of honor, and moral psychology. Two years ago he even took on the “Ethicist” column in The New York Times Magazine, and it is easy to become addicted to his incisive answers to the extraordinary variety of real-life moral questions posed by readers.

Appiah’s latest book, As If: Idealization and Ideals, is in part a return to his earlier, more abstract and technical interests. It is derived from his Carus Lectures to the American Philosophical Association and is addressed first of all to a philosophical audience. Yet Appiah writes very clearly, and much of this original and absorbing book will be of interest to general readers.Its theme and its title pay tribute to the work of Hans Vaihinger (1852–1933), a currently neglected German philosopher whose masterwork, published in 1911, was called The Philosophy of “As If.” Vaihinger contended that much of our most fruitful thought about the world, particularly in the sciences, relies on idealizations, or what he called “fictions”—descriptions or laws or theories that are literally false but that provide an easier and more useful way to think about certain subjects than the truth in all its complexity would.

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Melissa Dahl in the New York Times:

In the 1960s, a chimpanzee named Washoe learned how to sign. Shortly thereafter, as Byrne tells us in this entertaining and thought-provoking book, she learned how to swear.

Roger Fouts — now a respected primatologist; then a lowly research assistant — was tasked with potty-training Washoe, who lived with researchers almost as if she were a human member of their family. Eventually, Washoe internalized the notion that “dirty” (the sign for feces) was shameful outside of the toilet. Soon, “dirty” became her favorite insult. “Dirty monkey,” she signed at the macaque that scared her. “Dirty Roger,” she signed at Fouts when he refused to let her out of her cage.

The potty-mouthed Washoe may help us understand what happened when early humans learned to lob the idea of excrement at one another instead of the real thing. Swearing, Byrne argues, helped us begin to form stronger societies. Today, a well-placed curse word at work can help colleagues bond; studies have also found that swearing, curiously, often indicates that someone is less likely to become physically violent. Perhaps it’s a little like the way toddlers finally, blessedly, learn to use their words instead of their fists, or their teeth.

More here.

Carl Zimmer in the New York Times:

In less than three years, Dr. Reich’s laboratory has published DNA from the genomes of 938 ancient humans — more than all other research teams working in this field combined. The work in his lab has reshaped our understanding of human prehistory.

“They often answer age-old questions and sometimes provide astonishing unanticipated insights,” said Svante Paabo, the director of the Max Planck Institute of Paleoanthropology in Leipzig, Germany.

Dr. Reich, Dr. Paabo and other experts in ancient DNA are putting together a new history of humanity, one that runs in parallel with the narratives gleaned from fossils and written records. In Dr. Reich’s research, he and his colleagues have shed light on the peopling of the planet and the spread of agriculture, among other momentous events.

In a book to be published next week, “Who We Are and How We Got Here,” Dr. Reich, 43, explains how advances in DNA sequencing and analysis have helped this new field take off.

“It’s really like the invention of a new scientific instrument, like a microscope or a telescope,” he said. “When an instrument that powerful is invented, it opens up all these horizons, and everything is new and surprising.”

More here.

William Hogeland in Lapham's Quarterly:

The rule of law is making news. Representative headlines include “Trump’s All-Out Attack on the Rule of Law” (The Nation), an open door to anarchy: “President Trump Is a Threat to America’s Rule of Law and its National Security” (U.S. News & World Report), and “Trump’s Latest Attack on the Rule of Law” (Washington Post). The revived phrase usefully distills John Adams’ favorite definition of a republic, “a government of laws and not of men.” A government not, that is, arbitrary but regular, with benefits not personal but public, proceeding by written-down precept, not ad hoc impulse, thus sheltering rights from changes of party and whims of personality. Keeping the rule of law in mind can help cut through the Trump administration’s dizzying incoherence to arrive at an underlying fault: total disdain, sometimes barely covert, sometimes brazen, for the restraints legally imposed on the office. Using power to satisfy personal desires, enrich friends and family, put on shows for supporters, and punish enemies and critics sets this administration at odds with values that many Americans, of conflicting political persuasions, have long believed run deeper than political disagreement.

Not that our government has always or even often enough operated according to the rule of law. The current president has taken violation to a degree of heedlessness so grotesque that we can’t be sure he knows he’s violating anything. That degree, it turns out, puts us through the looking glass. We may never have known before how deeply rooted a sense of respect for the concept of the rule of law has been to everything we hope that our government can be. When calling a republic a government of laws and not of men, Adams was paraphrasing seventeenth-century writer James Harrington, whose thinking about tyranny and liberty in the context of England’s Puritan revolution had a powerful influence on the country’s founders. Harrington called the precept “ancient,” by which he meant something like “fundamental to legitimate order.” The American founders, adopting that view, did something Harrington couldn’t. They put the rule of law into practice, forming a new nation explicitly on its basis.

More here.

Legacy

—after George Jackson

Because something else must belong to him,
More than these chains, these cuffs, these cells—
Something more than Hard Rock’s hurt,
More than remembrances of where men
Go mad with craving—corpuscle, epidermis,
Flesh, men buried in the whale of it, all of it,
Because the so many of us mute ourselves,
Silent before the box, fascinated by the drama
Of confined bodies on prime-time television,
These prisons sanitized for entertainment &
These indeterminate sentences hidden, because
We all lack this panther’s rage, the gift
Of Soledad & geographies adorned with state numbers
& names of the dead & dying etched on skin,
This suffering, wild loss, under mass cuffs,
Those buried hours must be about more
Than adding to this surfeit of pain as history
As bars that once held him embrace us.

by Reginald Dwayne Betts
from Bastards of the Reagan Era
Four Way Books, 2015

Steven Poole in The Guardian:

You probably think you have beliefs, desires, fears, a personality, an “inner life”, maybe even a subconscious. Poppycock, says Nick Chater, a behavioural psychologist. All that stuff is folk nonsense. The brain essentially just makes everything up as it goes along – including what we fondly think of as our direct perceptions of the world, which are a patchwork of guesses and reconstructions. There is nothing going on “underneath”; there are no depths. The book could equally have been called “The Mind Is Shallow”, though potential readers might have found that more off-puttingly rude.

This is one of those books that is a superb exposition of scientific findings, from which the author proceeds to draw highly polemical and speculative inferences. There are beautiful discussions of how little we actually see around us: eye-tracking software can show us a page filled with Xs with one word positioned exactly where we are looking , and we have the experience of seeing a full page of text. We can’t even see two or more colours at once but switch between one at a time. In general, our richness of experience seems to be a construct.

Feelings are not much cop, either. Emotions are probably generated when we notice changes in our bodily state (this was William James’s insight in the 19th century), rather than bubbling up from some subconscious to teach us a lesson. Memory is a highly fallible re-creation rather than a retrieval of information, and political affiliations can be influenced by cognitive biases. People commonly report, meanwhile, that a solution to some puzzle pops into their head after they have stopped working on it and taken a walk or a shower. But Chater insists that there is never any “unconscious processing” working on some problem while we do something else. In his view, the brain can attend to only one thing at a time.

More here.

Adithya Rajagopalan in Nautilus:

The first pieces of the brain’s “inner GPS” started coming to light in 1970. In the laboratories of University College London, John O’Keefe and his student Jonathan Dostrovsky recorded the electrical activity of neurons in the hippocampus of freely moving rats. They found a group of neurons that increased their activity only when a rat found itself in a particular location.¹ They called them “place cells.” Building on these early findings, O’Keefe and his colleague Lynn Nadel proposed that the hippocampus contains an invariant representation of space that does not depend on mood or desire. They called this representation the “cognitive map.”² In their view, all of the brain’s place cells together represent the entirety of an animal’s environment, and whichever place cell is active indicates its current location. In other words, the hippocampus is like a GPS. It tells you where you are on a map and that map remains the same whether you are hungry and looking for food or sleepy and looking for a bed. O’Keefe and Nadel suggested that the absolute position represented in the hippocampal place cells provides a mental framework that can be used by an animal to find its way in any situation—be that to find food or a bed.

Over the next 40 years, other researchers—including the husband and wife duo of Edvard and May-Britt Moser—produced support for the idea that the brain’s hippocampal circuitry acts like an inner GPS.³ In recognition of their pioneering work, O’Keefe and the Mosers were awarded the 2014 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine. You’d think that this would mean that the role of the hippocampus in guiding an animal through space was solved. But studying the brain is never that straightforward. Like a match lighting a fuse, the 2014 Nobel Prize set off an explosion of experiments and ideas, some of which have pushed back against O’Keefe and Nadel’s early interpretation. This new work has suggested that when it comes to spatial navigation, the hippocampal circuit represents location information that is relative and malleable by experience rather than absolute. The study of the hippocampus seems to have stumbled into an age-old philosophical argument.

More here.