Ed Yong in The Atlantic:

Last November was a pivotal moment for the Democrats, who scored a surprisingly large slew of electoral victories in Virginia, New Jersey, and elsewhere. But it was also somewhat of a victory for science, as at least 17 candidates with backgrounds in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (stem) also won. Ralph Northam, who became Virginia’s governor, is a pediatric neurologist. Cheryl Turpin and Hala Ayala, who were both elected to the Virginia State House of Delegates, are respectively a science teacher and a cybersecurity expert. The so-called blue wave was also, at least partly, a nerdy one.

Shaughnessy Naughton, a chemist by training and a former breast-cancer researcher, wants a similar wave to crest in this year’s midterms. A year ago, Naughton founded 314 Action—a political-action committee that supports scientists running for office by helping them to find staff, plan campaigns, and connect with potential donors.

When I first wrote about 314 Action in January 2017, more than 400 people had filled out their recruitment form. At the time Naughton predicted that they’d attract a thousand potential candidates. “In fact, we had over 7,000,” she now tells me. There was a spike in interest after Trump’s inauguration, and another when Trump decided to pull the United States out of the Paris climate agreement. “There’s been one thing after another with this administration that’s engaged our community,” Naughton says.

Beyond stoking outrage, Trump may have motivated stem professionals in a different way. “For better or worse, Trump has changed the perceived necessities about running for office,” says the political consultant Kelly Gibson. “You don’t need to be elected at local or state levels, or even ‘understand’ how politics works, to be elected. It opened things up for people in education, the arts, and the sciences. That’s why there’s been this surge in nontraditional political candidates.”

More here.

Yascha Mounk in The Guardian:

There are long decades in which history seems to slow to a crawl. Elections are won and lost, laws adopted and repealed, new stars born and legends carried to their graves. But for all the ordinary business of time passing, the lodestars of culture, society and politics remain the same.

Then there are those short years in which everything changes all at once. Political newcomers storm the stage. Voters clamour for policies that were unthinkable until yesterday. Social tensions that had long simmered under the surface erupt into terrifying explosions. A system of government that had seemed immutable looks as though it might come apart.

This is the kind of moment in which we now find ourselves.

Until recently, liberal democracy reigned triumphant. For all its shortcomings, most citizens seemed deeply committed to their form of government. The economy was growing. Radical parties were insignificant. Political scientists thought that democracy in places like France or the United States had long ago been set in stone, and would change little in the years to come. Politically speaking, it seemed, the future would not be much different from the past.

Then the future came – and turned out to be very different indeed. Citizens have long been disillusioned with politics; now, they have grown restless, angry, even disdainful. Party systems have long seemed frozen; now, authoritarian populists are on the rise around the world, from America to Europe, and from Asia to Australia. Voters have long disliked particular parties, politicians or governments; now, many of them have become fed up with liberal democracy itself.

Donald Trump’s election to the White House has been the most striking manifestation of democracy’s crisis.

More here.

An excerpt from William Appleman Williams' 1961 The Contours of American History over at the Verso blog:

Relieved and exhilarated by their triumph over the Axis Powers in 1945, Americans seemed to have assumed that their traditional dream of becoming a world unto themselves was about to be realized. Far from having become disillusioned (or isolationist), they appeared casually confident that their earlier visions of Manifest Destiny were materializing as the reality of the present. Though vaguely uneasy about the full extent of its powers, most Americans looked upon the atom bomb as a self-starting magic lamp; even without being rubbed it would produce their long-sought City on the Hill in the form of a de facto American Century embracing the globe.

It was generally taken for granted that such benevolent Americanization of the world would bring peace and plenty without the moral embarrassments and administrative distractions of old-fashioned empires. And so, having created the most irrational weapon known to man, Americans proceeded with startling rationality to abandon the mass army as their principal strategic weapon. Armed only with their bomb, they then generously offered to help everyone become more like themselves. “We are willing to help people who believe the way we do,” explained Secretary of State Dean Acheson, “to continue to live the way they want to live.”

Had Americans applied their intelligence, humanitarianism, and power to the paradox of plenty without purpose within their own society and to the needs and aspirations of their fellow humans throughout the world, it is possible that their self-centered dream would have been transformed into a vision of brotherhood among men.

More here.

Chad Orzel in Forbes:

A couple of weeks ago, fellow Forbes blogger Ethan Siegel took to his keyboard with the goal of making me sigh heavily, writing a post about interpretations of quantum physics calling the idea that you need an interpretation "the biggest myth in quantum physics." Ethan's argument boils down to noting that all of the viable interpretations known at present make identical predictions about the probability of getting particular outcomes for any experiment we might do. Therefore, according to Ethan, there's no need for any interpretation, because it doesn't really matter which of them you choose.

As an experimentalist by training and inclination, I am not without sympathy for this point of view. In fact, when I give talks about quantum mechanics and get the inevitable questions about interpretations, I tend to say something in that general vein– that at present, nobody knows how to do an experiment that would distinguish between any of the viable interpretations. Given that, I say, the choice between interpretations is essentially an aesthetic one.

When, then, the heavy sigh on reading Ethan's post? There are two reasons why I had that reaction, and am writing this post in (belated) response.

The first reason is best explained via a historical analogy. For this, I would point to the infamous arguments between Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr that culminated in the famous paper by Einstein and his colleagues Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen that introduced the world to the physics of quantum entanglement. Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen proposed a thought experiment involving a pair of particles prepared in such a way that their individual states were indeterminate but correlated– most modern treatments make it a two-state system, so that the measurement of an individual particle has a 50/50 chance of coming up with either outcome, but when you make the same measurement on both particles, you're guaranteed to get the same answer.

More here.

In Jadaliyya:

Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book?

Suzanne Schneider (SS): I’ve always been fascinated by the history of what are often assumed to be timeless constellations of religious belief or practice. There is a widespread tendency to project onto religions a stability and historical consistency that they lack, and I think the appropriate scholarly response is work that highlights religion as a site of change and contestation. However, I found that many histories of the Middle East took religion for granted as something that meant the same thing in, for example, the mid-nineteenth century, as it does now. Consequently, in Mandatory Separation I wanted to explore what exactly made something “religious” within Jewish and Islamic circles in late Ottoman and early twentieth century Palestine, and how that designation came to matter in material terms. In good dialectical fashion, I also wanted to attend to how material conditions—say, the need to rationalize Palestinian agriculture—contributed to the re-definition of what types of human behaviors and activities were counted among the religious. I found this all the more necessary in light of the common assumption that Zionist and Palestinian nationalist movements were largely secular in makeup. In fact, my research has shown that educators and leaders within these movements were interested in constructing new forms of political identity that consciously blurred the religious/secular divide.

What drew me to religious education in particular were the parallel lines of thinking about “old-fashioned” forms of religious learning I found within the writings of Jewish and Arab-Muslim reformers active in the Haskalah and Nahda, respectively. Jewish and Muslims educators in Palestine were heirs to these modernist traditions, though they did not accept their positions across the board.

More here.

Duet

…… Night time is the right time . . .
…… —Ray Charles and Margie Hendricks

She had me in the car. I came forward like a song.
We did it before temple, after temple, between prayers.
The windows echoed her mantras, our cries warmed the air.
Two peaks merged, then sank below the clouds.

We did it before temple, after temple, between prayers.
Her stomach began to show and people asked us not to come.
Two peaks merged, then sank below the clouds.
Night and day, everything was changing.

. . . . .

Her stomach began to show and people asked her not to come.
My mother was all alone when I was born.
Night and day. Everything was changing.
The radio started playing rhythm and blues.

My mother was all alone when I was born—
The windows echoed her mantras, our cries warmed the air,
The radio started playing rhythm and blues.
She had me in a car. I came forward like a song.

by Duy Doan
from the Academy of American Poets

.

A. O. Scott in the New York Times:

Martin Amis, for those who need an introduction, is a writer living in Brooklyn. He was also, for a period beginning in the mid-1980s and lasting well into the span covered by “The Rub of Time,” his new collection of nonfiction, a famous British novelist. That phrase, which may strike some young American ears as an archaism if not an oxymoron, is worth unpacking, and Amis provides readers with a pocket account of the historical preconditions of his extravagant fame. In the Thatcher years, he writes, “the newspapers had been getting fatter and fatter (first the Sundays, then the Saturdays, then all the days in between) and what filled these extra pages was not additional news but additional features. And the featurists were running out of people to write about — running out of alcoholic actors, ne’er-do-well royals, depressive comedians, jailed rock stars, defecting ballet dancers, reclusive film directors, hysterical fashion models, indigent marquises, adulterous golfers, wife-beating footballers and rapist boxers. The dragnet went on widening until journalists, often to their patent dismay, were writing about writers: literary writers.”

In other words, the gossip-hungry public of the 1990s was treated to news about Martin Amis’s dental work, his divorce and his preferences in agents and real estate because tabloid science had not yet discovered the Kardashians.

I’m not sure I buy the theory, or that it’s meant to be bought, but it is certain that Amis, who also happens to be the son of a famous British novelist (and thus “the only hereditary novelist in the Anglophone literary corpus”), has been subjected to the kind of attention that his fellow Brooklyn scribblers, hunched over their laptops and cortados from Bushwick to Red Hook, can hardly imagine. As any thrifty novelist would, he has sometimes turned that scrutiny into fuel for his work, fictional and otherwise. Some of the essays, reviews and reported articles collected in “The Rub of Time” — including two miniature anthologies of questions posed in The Independent by fans, gawkers and haters — take Amis’s household-name status as an occasion or a theme. But the deep subject of this book, what holds its disparate bits together and makes it worth your time even if you have only the vaguest idea of who its author is supposed to be, is not celebrity at all. It’s professionalism.

More here.

Faye Flam at Bloomberg:

It’s surprising how easy it is to brush off dire existential threats. We remain, for example, unprepared for the next pandemic flu, though experts warn it’s only a matter of time before a new strain capable of killing millions will emerge. As epidemiologist Michael Osterholm and writer Mark Olshaker wrote recently in the New York Times, we aren’t even prepared for this year’s seasonal flu. The outbreak has killed 37 children as of late January, according to the CDC.

Osterholm and Olshaker wrote that much more money must go into the development of a so-called universal flu vaccine — one that would protect against any of flu’s many strains, including any new versions of the virus that might jump from animals to humans, as happened in 1918. In that pandemic flu, between 50 and 100 million people died.

The argument makes sense, but it’s unlikely flu vaccine researchers will get a big boost. Why? One problem is that we citizens of the 21st century have also been warned about our “woeful” lack of preparedness for Ebola and similar disease outbreaks, a major earthquake, sea level rise, nuclear war, and a massive asteroid striking the earth. And if that isn’t enough, experts at MIT and Cambridge University are discussing how unprepared we are for threats of technology run amok, such as intelligent machines taking over the world.

In short, we’re all at risk of getting burned out on impending disasters. It can feel useless to get prepared for any one of these threats when all the others loom. We could try to rank and prioritize them in a rational way, though it’s not easy. Some of these risks, such as the major asteroid strike, aren’t likely to happen soon, but they will be very, very bad when they do happen. Others are more likely to occur in the coming decades and will kill lots of people, but they won’t end the world.

More here.

More here. [By Ben Orlin.]

Jeff Maysh in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

In the United States, where we average seven mass shootings a week, gun control advocates often look to countries like Great Britain as examples of gun-free societies. Following several massacres involving lawfully licensed weapons in the late 1990s, Britain strengthened its gun control laws to be among the tightest in the world. It worked: since 1997, the United Kingdom has seen just one mass shooting.

So unusual are “active shooter” situations in Britain that a 2010 manhunt for a gunman named Raoul Moat created an American-style media circus, complete with television interruptions that recalled O. J. Simpson’s famous freeway chase. Andrew Hankinson’s 2016 book You Could Do Something Amazing With Your Life [You Are Raoul Moat] tells the story of the shooter’s seven days on the run in rural Northern England, after taking aim at three people in two days with an unlicensed sawed-off shotgun.

Moat, 37, a bodybuilder and nightclub bouncer, had emerged from prison with a lethal vendetta against his 22-year-old ex-girlfriend, Samantha Stobbart, who claimed to have left him for a younger man, a police officer. A Facebook message written by Moat revealed a man on the brink: “I’ve lost everything, my business, my property and to top it all off my lass of six years has gone off with the copper that sent me down.”

Written entirely in second person, and drawing extensively upon Moat’s written confessions, audio recordings, and telephone recordings, You Could Do Something Amazing With Your Life is one of the most original true crime books to emerge from Britain in the last decade.

More here.

Amelia Soth in JSTOR Daily [h/t: David Schneider]:

In the centuries after Alexander the Great’s death, a family of stories emerged. They star a fantastical version of the famous conqueror. He seeks unfettered exploration, unlimited knowledge, and (most importantly) eternal life. These stories revolve around Alexander’s failures, not his victories, and the portrait that emerges is strangely poignant. These Alexander stories offer like a dreamlike vision of human struggle, one cast in strange, dazzling colors.

This version of Alexander originates from the Historia Alexandri Magni, written by an unknown author in the 3rd century. As these stories were retold, they blossomed into a literary and folkloric tradition. There are Arabic versions of the tales, as well as Greek, French, English, Egyptian, Mongolian, and Persian versions, one of which includes a romance with a mustachioed, club-swinging warrior princess. The historical Alexander may have won battles, but the Alexander of legend conquered hearts.

What unites these tales is Alexander’s obsession with exceeding the limits of human existence, his irrepressible desire to visit other worlds. But the tales are also tinged with melancholy. Those who read and heard the Alexander stories knew what would happen at the tale’s end: that he would die with his work unfinished; that, after his death, his empire would dissolve. This sadness hangs over the stories like an ill omen.

More here.

Kenan Malik in the Guardian:

Never again will a single story be told as though it were the only one.” So says Giovanni in John Berger’s 1972 Booker prize-winning novel G. The line became an epigram to both Michael Ondaatje’s novel In the Skin of a Lion and Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things. It could also be an epigram to the new BBC series Civilisations, which began last week.

Presented jointly by Simon Schama, Mary Beard and David Olusoga, it has been heralded as the remaking for a new era of Civilisation, Kenneth Clark’s landmark 1969 series. The ghost that hovers over Civilisations is not, however, that of Clark, but that of Berger. Three years after Civilisation came Berger’s series Ways of Seeing. “The relation between what we see and what we know,” he tells us in the opening scene, “is never settled.” It was a direct riposte to Clark.

For Clark, every artwork embodies unique qualities and an inherent meaning that has to be drawn out and explained. For Berger, the meaning and worth of art rests not just in the frame or the marble but also in the relationship between the viewer and the object. Meaning is not intrinsic but emerges only in the viewing. At different points in space and time, and from different vantage points in any society, Berger insists, the meaning of the same work of art will necessarily be different.

More here.

Whistling Mummy

Noise in the shape
Of words whistling
Contorted into
Breath that smells
Of death approaching
Slowly sour
Patching memories
Only she can enter
Darkly

Mummy no longer
She’s an old woman
Without teeth
Who makes strange
Mockery of a love
Strained in the
Best of times

Monsters are
Our shadows
On walls etched
With the grief of
Anger

I find I cannot
Leave anything
Behind I fear
Neither can
She

Who must be

Obeyed

In this broken
World we
Share I
Wonder if death
Will break us
apart shattering

Comfort
a thought which
Is also a
Hope
The ties that bind
might set us both
Free as she

Wanders into
My dreams turning
The lock each night

Every night
I hold my breath

Wondering how long
She can

by Fawzia Afzal-Khan

Jeff Farrell in The Independent:

A province in Pakistan has planted a billion trees in just two years as part of an effort to restore forests wiped out by decades of felling and natural disasters such as floods. Cricket-star turned politician Imran Khan, who heads the political party Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI), launched the green mission in Khyber Pakhtunkhaw in the north-west of the country. The project – dubbed Billion Tree Tsunami – aims to slow down the effects of global warming in Pakistan which ranks in the Top 10 in a list of countries most likely to be affected by the phenomenon. And the effort in the province, which lies in the Hindu Kush mountain range, has surpassed an international commitment after it restored 350,000 hectares of forests and degraded land. The work in Khyber Pakhtunkhaw was focussed along the area beside the Gambila River, in the Bannu District, where vast swathes of forest were wiped out in the past after its banks broke. The Billion Tree Tsunami was completed this month ahead of the deadline set for December 2017 and is expected to be extended across Pakistan. It comes after decades of tree felling have reduced the country’s forests to less than 3 per cent of its land area. About 40 per cent of the remaining forests are in the north-western province.

…Experts at World Wildlife Fund-Pakistan, which is monitoring and auditing the tree-planting effort in Khyber Pakhtunkhaw, say the project has been an environmental, economic and social success, with one of the highest survival rates of trees in the world, ranging from 70 to 90 per cent. “If the trend continues, there will be more birds, there will be more microbes, there will be more insects, so there will be more animals, so more habitats. The ecosystem will kind of literally revive in certain places. There will be more rains because we do need rains,” Hamaad Khan Naqi, WWF-Pakistan’s director general, VOA news reported.

More here.

Amartya Sen in The Wire:

It is hard to find a measure of Asma Jahangir’s greatness. She was a brilliant intellectual, a superb humanist, a great political leader, an epitome of kindness, a personification of indomitable courage. Asma was all these things – and much more. Professionally she excelled as a magnificent lawyer – who did more than anyone else I can think of to defend and save helpless people from the unjust wrath of authoritarians and tyrants. As one of the most distinguished human rights lawyers in the world, Asma used her legal knowledge to protect the vulnerable and unimaginably strengthen people’s rights.