Ted Jackson in The Times-Picayune:

One foot in front of the other, the hulking old man trudged up the ramp to the Pontchartrain Expressway. A cold wind stiffened his face, so he bundled tighter and kept walking. His decision was made. A life full of accolades and praise meant nothing to him now. A man who was once the pride of his New Orleans hometown, his St. Augustine alma mater and his 7th Ward family and friends was undone. He was on his way to die.

The man was tired. In his 63 years, he had run with the gods and slept with the devil. Living low and getting high had become as routine as taking a breath. A hideous disease was eating his insides. He was an alcoholic, and he also craved crack cocaine. He was tired of fighting. He was tired of playing the game.

He crossed the last exit ramp and continued walking the pavement toward the top of the bridge. He dodged cars as they took the ramp. No one seemed to notice the ragged man walking to his suicide. If they did notice, they didn’t stop to help.

Only a half-mile more and it would all be over. One hundred and 50 feet below, the powerful currents of the Mississippi River would swallow his soul and his wretched life. He dodged another car. But why did it matter? Getting hit by a car would serve his purposes just as well as jumping.

How did it come to this? This was long after Jackie had turned his life around, or so we both thought.

More here.

Julia Azari in FiveThirtyEight:

We’re now one year into the Trump era, and politics seems more nasty, divided and polarized than ever. A government shutdown is imminent over immigration policy. Congress hasn’t passed a single, major bipartisan bill. President Trump’s approval rating among Democrats has fallen to 5 percent. Some reports suggest that a quarter of Americans have real animosity toward the other party. You’d be forgiven for wondering why we can’t just go back to those halcyon days of bipartisanship. Remember when Ronald Reagan and Tip O’Neill would supposedly come to compromise over drinks?

Here’s the thing: By some measures, the United States is more partisan than ever, but that more peaceful and unified past, that golden age of unity, was … pretty much never.

Let’s think for a moment about what the nature of political division looks like right now in the U.S. Using presidential election results, my FiveThirtyEight colleague David Wasserman found that elections are getting less and less competitive at the county level; a record number of counties in 2016 voted for either Trump or Hillary Clinton in a blowout. This is consistent with findings in political science that even when national presidential races are competitive, many individual states are not. Political scientists have characterized the polarized U.S. as “two one-party nations,” instead of one two-party nation.

The issues we fight over — gender, race, immigration, culture and the role of government — divideAmericans neatly and consistently under party labels. The current moment feels divisive because major policy and political questions are “sorted” between the parties — Republicans are mostly unified around one set of answers, and Democrats are mostly unified around another.

More here.

Noam Shpancer in Quillette:

The scientific case against spanking is one of those rare occasions in which, over a span of 50 years or so, a scientific controversy actually gets resolved, as various programs of increasingly rigorous research converge upon a consensus conclusion.

True, the issue has not been 100% mapped out. Waiting for social science to map any issue out 100% is like waiting for the perfect spouse. You’ll wait forever, pointlessly. Spanking, like any socio-behavioral phenomenon, is bound to have somewhat differing implications depending on multiple variables such as culture, timing, dose, gender, what definition of spanking is used, etc. Local skirmishes about this will continue.

Another hindrance to an air-tight resolution concerns the fact that, due to ethical constraints (you can’t randomly assign parents to spanking and non spanking groups or assign children randomly to parents), true experimentation in this area is all but impossible. In the absence of experimental evidence, causal relations are difficult to establish with certainty. Finding, as we have, that spanking strongly and consistently predicts negative developmental outcome does not in itself settle the question of whether spanking has caused the outcome.

The spanking literature, however, has addressed itself to this problem in several ways.

More here.

Caroline Moorehead in The Guardian:

On 21 June 1908, half a million people gathered in Hyde Park to celebrate “Women’s Sunday”. There were 30 brass bands, bugles and 20 platforms with speakers wearing the purple, white and green colours of the votes for women campaigners. It was, for the most part, a good-humoured event, but it did not persuade the government to extend the franchise to women. Since peaceful protest had clearly failed, Christabel Pankhurst warned the prime minister, Herbert Asquith, “militant methods must once more be resorted to”. What we remember today of the suffragette movement is the image, captured on grainy film, of Emily Davison, the former governess and journalist, throwing herself under the king’s horse at the Epsom Derby on 4 June 1913, and dying four days later of a fractured skull. But as Diane Atkinson makes clear in her collective biography of the movement for women’s suffrage that took place between 1903 and 1914, this was merely the culmination of a decade of relentless confrontation, some of it extremely violent, drawing in not only the middle classes but factory workers, shop girls, teachers and housewives up and down the country, many of them prepared to go to prison again and again for acts that grew increasingly dangerous.

By 1903, seven countries, among them New Zealand and Australia, had accorded some degree of voting rights to women. In Britain, before 1832 some women had a parliamentary vote as property owners, but they were excluded in 1832 by the Reform Act, which extended the franchise to “male persons” over 21, including small landowners, tenant farmers and shopkeepers. The word “male” sparked unease: since the monarch was a woman, had the moment not come to let all women vote? A number of reformers joined forces, gathered signatures and petitioned parliament, but the “shrieking sisters” were briskly brushed aside.

More here.

More here. (Note: Throughout February, at least one post will be dedicated to honor Black History Month)

Massimo Pigliucci in Footnotes to Plato:

An anonymous poster has recently published a short essay over at the Oxford University Press philosophy blog, entitled “5 great unsolved philosophical questions.” How could I possibly resist answering them, I ask you? Presumptuous, you might say. Well, no, that would be the case if I claimed that my answers are original, or clearly the right ones. I make no such claim, I am simply offering my informed opinion about them, in my dual role of a philosopher and scientist. Of course, I’m also totally right.

Before proceeding, I need to remind readers of my take on the nature of philosophical questions, and therefore of philosophy itself. Here it is, in a nutshell. (For a much longer, and far more substantiated, though of course not necessarily convincing to everyone, answer, see here.)

Philosophy began, in the Western tradition, with the pre-Socratics, and at that time, and for many centuries afterwards, its business was all-encompassing. Pretty much every meaningful question to be asked was philosophical, or had a philosophical component. Then gradually, mathematics was spun off as one of many offsprings from Mother Philosophy, followed from the 17th century on by a succession of what today we call sciences: first physics, then chemistry, biology, and eventually psychology. That did not mean any shrinking of philosophy itself, however. The discipline retained its core (metaphysics, ethics, aesthetics, logic, epistemology, and so forth) and added just as many “philosophies of” as new disciplines originated from it (e.g., philosophy of science, of language, of mind, and so forth).

In modern times, I think the business of philosophy is no longer trying to attain empirical truths about the world (we’ve got science for that), but rather to critically explore concepts and notions informed, whenever possible, by science.

More here.

Jennifer Ouellette in Physics World:

Nicholas Ouellette likes midges. Yes, these tiny flies are infuriating and can bite, but Ouellette, who’s a physicist by training, is intrigued by how and why these insects form giant swarms, sometimes thousands strong. We know the swarms are composed entirely of male midges, which have long antennae and beat their wings at nearly twice the frequency of the females. Attracted by the high-pitched sounds, the females fly towards the swarm in the hope of reproducing, which makes swarming an elaborate midge-mating ritual.

The sensitivity of midges to sound was allegedly discovered by a Finnish ecologist in the 1960s while out walking in the woods. As he sang local folk songs, the ecologist noticed swarms of these flies being irresistibly drawn into his path, seemingly by the sound of his voice. Ouellette knew, however, that he’d need something more scientific than singing folk songs if he was to study swarming using sound. He therefore got one of the postdocs in his lab at Stanford University – Rui Ni (now at Pennsylvania State University) – to track midges with a microphone and record the beating of their wings.

When Ni and Ouellette blasted the buzzing of swarming midges back at them through a loudspeaker, they noticed some unusual things. If they alternated the level of sound played back through the speaker – loud, soft, loud, soft – the region of highest midge density shifted with the change in volume. And when they played just the sound of a female through the speaker (you can easily spot the females as they lack antennae), the entire male swarm flew over and sat on it.

More here.

Stephen T. Asma in TruthOut:

"How will you make sure the dirt stays inside the sandwich?" I asked my brother Dave. He was trying to figure out how to send a dirt sandwich to Nancy Grace, the shrieking CNN legal analyst and gossip show host. In 2005, Grace told viewers she was so convinced Jerry Hobbs killed his daughter that she would gladly eat a dirt sandwich if police failed to turn up the physical evidence. My brother Dave and a handful of public defenders finally proved that Jerry was innocent and paved the way for his release in August 2010.

On Mother's Day, May 2005, as the sun began to set in a rural part of Zion, Illinois, Jerry Hobbs grew anxious that his eight-year-old daughter Laura was not back home yet. Laura and her friend, nine-year-old Krystal Tobias, were last seen sharing a single bike around the wooded suburban community north of Chicago. But by nightfall, it became clear that both girls were missing. A frantic search ensued. Jerry and others searched throughout the night and, at daybreak, it was Jerry himself who found his daughter and her friend stabbed to death in the nearby woods of Beulah Park. Several hours later, the distraught father found himself sequestered in a legal "blacksite" – unlocatable to family, friends and legal representation – and under intense interrogation by police.

Within forty-eight hours, Jerry Hobbs, now "Monster Hobbs," was arrested for the murder of Laura and Krystal. This is the inside story of Hobbs' exoneration five years later and his drive back to Texas with my brother Dave.

More here.

Salamishah Tillet in The New York Times:

“I suppose neither of us is used to the spotlight,” a dapper T’Challa, the prince of Wakanda, says upon meeting Natasha Romanova, a.k.a. the Black Widow, in “Captain America: Civil War.” A few scenes later, a recently orphaned and vengeful T’Challa, swapping his bespoke blue suit for a full-body bulletproof one, reappears as a new Marvel movie superhero. The prince will have to live with the attention: Even before its Feb. 16 release, “Black Panther” smashed box-office records, beating out “Captain America: Civil War” on first-day advance ticket sales and surpassing “Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice” to become Fandango’s top-selling superhero movie in history. Perhaps even more impressive, the film is also outpacing its cinematic counterparts in cultural reach. “I’ve been waiting all of my life for ‘Black Panther,’” said DJ BenHaMeen, host of FanBrosShow, a weekly podcast on “urban geek” culture. “That said, I know where I was, the exact street in Houston and the exact time on Oct. 28, 2014, when Marvel officially announced that they were doing the movie.”

Not since Spike Lee’s “Malcolm X” in 1992 has there been so much hype and hope for a movie among African-American audiences. From special group outings planned by excited fans to crowdfunding campaigns to ensure children can see it, “Black Panther” is shaping up to be a phenomenon. In December, a viral video of two African-American men excited to see the movie’s poster with its all-star black cast — “This is what white people get to feel like ALL THE TIME?!!!!” one man wrote on Twittered — seemed to capture the anticipation, garnering more than 2.5 million views.

What has audiences so eager this time is in part the combination of an auteur African-American director (Ryan Coogler of “Fruitvale Station” and “Creed”), a heavyweight cast (Chadwick Boseman, Michael B. Jordan, Lupita Nyong’o, Angela Bassett and Forest Whitaker) and a soundtrack co-produced by a rap superstar (Kendrick Lamar), all working on one of the most popular franchises in Hollywood. But the excitement has also been fueled by the origin story of the African superhero. Created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, Black Panther was the first black superhero in mainstream comics, making his debut in Marvel’s Fantastic Four No. 52 in 1966. He went on to appear in Avengers titles and took his first star turn in Jungle Action No. 5 in 1973. He had his ups and downs: his own series largely penned by Kirby, a cancellation in 1979 and a return in the 1980s. From 2005 to 2009, he was the subject of another series, this one written by the filmmaker Reginald Hudlin (“Marshall”). In 2016, Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote a new series of comic books, while Joe Robert Cole and Mr. Coogler worked on the script.

More here.

More here. (Note: Throughout February, at least one post will be dedicated to honor Black History Month)

Rachel Kushner at Bookforum:

DENIS JOHNSON UNDERSTOOD the impulse to check out. He understood a lot of things, including the contradictory nature of truth. He himself was the son of a US State Department employee stationed overseas, a well-to-do suburban American boy who was “saved” from the penitentiary, as he put it, by “the Beatnik category.” He went to college, published a book of poetry by the age of nineteen (The Man Among the Seals), went to graduate school and got an MFA, but was also an alkie drifter and heroin addict: a “real” writer, in other words (who, like any really real writer, can’t be pigeonholed by one coherent myth, or by trite ideas about the school of life). Later he got clean and became some kind of Christian, published many novels and a book of outstanding essays (Seek), lived in remote northern Idaho but traveled and wrote into multiple zones of conflict—Somalia, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Afghanistan, and famously, in Tree of Smoke, wartime Vietnam. Perhaps being raised abroad, in various far-flung locations (Germany, the Philippines, and Japan), gave him a better feeling for the lost and ugly American, the juncture of the epic and pathetic, the suicidal tendencies of the everyday joe, which seem to have been his wellspring.

His connection to “people who totaled their souls,” as one character puts it in The Largesse of the Sea Maiden, his new and final contribution to literature, is a vital tenor of his work, even a central one. His passion for wrecked people certainly spawned a kind of cult status, which was rampant in the 1990s, when I was young and Johnson came into his phosphorous popularity. It was hero worship of totaled souls, by totaled souls. Hero worship isn’t malicious. No harm is meant.

more here.

Chris Ware at the NYRB:

In the summer of 1971, the painter Philip Guston, one of the greatest artists of the twentieth century, began a series of drawings under the working title of “Poor Richard” that grew out of his disgust and fascination with Richard Nixon. Philip Roth, the writer and Guston’s close friend, offered encouragement to Guston in his pursuit of Nixon-as-subject; their anger at the path America was taking and, as Roth told Charles McGrath in a recent essay about the drawings, their “shared delight” in Nixon’s “vile character” buoyed their regular conversations. Drawn in the aftermath of Guston’s critically excoriated Marlborough Gallery exhibition of paintings of cigar-smoking Klu Klux Klansmen, these genuinely weird and directly narrative drawings were so wildly out of step with the non-objective, non-narrative, non-everything of the fine art world that they ended up largely unseen and unmentioned for decades.

Did I say “narrative”? If I had in, say, art school in the 1980s, which I attended, I would’ve been laughed out of class. For those non-fine art readers for whom relating anecdotes of their supermarket trips to their spouses is second nature, I remind you of this bit of art-world history: for decades, narrative and representation were basically off the table. Around World War I, someone (was it Duchamp? McCarthy? I wasn’t paying attention) realized that the eye—formerly known as the primary means of perception—lied, and reality was really particles and uncertainty and now it was time to move along, nothing to see here.

more here.

Jeff Bursey at The Quarterly Conversation:

In 1972 an English version of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s August 1914 appeared. It is the first node (then called a “knot”) of a sequential novel with the overall title The Red Wheel. In 1989 an expanded and freshly translated edition came out in English, but it took until 1999 for the second volume, November 1916, to be published. Since then other books by Solzhenitsyn have reached English readers, most recently Apricot Jam: And Other Stories(2011), but we have had to wait until now to start reading the first book of four comprising March 1917, which will be followed by the two books that make up April 1917, thus bringing this mega-novel to a close. The books share common approaches—fictional characters mingling with historical figures, the use of actual telegrams, transcripts of State Duma debates, and newspaper accounts (when applicable, as newspapers weren’t always published), and an impressionistic screenplay treatment of mob movements—and the attempt to recapture for a wide audience (but foremost, one suspects, for Solzhenitsyn’s countrymen) the multitudinous events that culminated in the Revolution. Yet there is never one definitive story, one perspective, or one inevitable outcome.

The realms of Emperor Nikolai II and his wife Alexandra (also known as Alix and Sunny), the Duma politicians, the government, the revolutionaries, the soldiers, and the citizens, share in a profound absence of knowledge about what will occur next.

more here.

Lullaby for a Daughter

Go to sleep. Night is a coal pit
full of black water—
………………. night's a dark cloud
full of warm rain.

Go to sleep. Night is a flower
resting from bees—
………………. night's a green sea
swollen with fish.

Go to sleep. Night is a white moon
riding her mare—
………………. night's a bright sun
burned to black cinder.

Go to sleep,
night's come,
cat's day,
owl's day,
star's feast of praise,
moon to reign over,
her sweet subject, dark.
.

by Jim Harrison
from Selected and New Poems
Delacorte Press, 1982
.

Dan Piepenbring in The New Yorker:

Dreams are boring. On the list of tedious conversation topics, they fall somewhere between the five-day forecast and golf. As for writing about them, even Henry James, who’s seldom accused of playing to the cheap seats, had a rule: “Tell a dream, lose a reader.” I can remember when I accepted that my own unconscious was not a fount of fascination—I’d dreamed, at length and in detail, of owning an iPhone that charged really, really fast.

How unfair it is, then, that Vladimir Nabokov can show up, decades after his death, with a store of dreams more lush and enthralling than many waking lives. In 1964, living in opulence at Switzerland’s Montreux Palace Hotel, Nabokov began to keep a dream diary of a sort, dutifully inscribing his memories on index cards at his bedside in rubber-banded stacks. These cards, and Nabokov’s efforts to parse them, are the foundation of “Insomniac Dreams,” a recently published chronicle of the author’s oneiric experiments, edited by Gennady Barabtarlo, a professor at the University of Missouri.

Nabokov’s ambitions weren’t interpretive. He “held nothing but contempt for Freud’s crude oneirology,” Barabtarlo explains, and in tracking his dreams he wasn’t turning his gaze inward. For him, the mystery was outside—far outside. Nabokov had been reading deeply into serialism, a philosophy positing that time is reversible. The theory came from J. W. Dunne, a British engineer and armchair philosopher who, in 1927, published “An Experiment with Time,” arguing, in part, that our dreams afforded us rare access to a higher order of time. Was it possible that we were glimpsing snatches of the future in our dreams—that what we wrote off as déjà vu was actually a leap into the metaphysical ether? Dunne himself claimed to have had no fewer than eight precognitive dreams, including one in which he foresaw a headline about a volcanic eruption.

If all of this sounds too batty for a man of faculties, consider that Dunne’s “An Experiment with Time” had gained currency among a number of other writers, including James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, and Aldous Huxley. Its path to Nabokov is unclear, but, however it came to him, in its pages he recognized a fellow-traveller.

More here.

Douglas Hofstadter in The Atlantic:

One Sunday, at one of our weekly salsa sessions, my friend Frank brought along a Danish guest. I knew Frank spoke Danish well, since his mother was Danish, and he, as a child, had lived in Denmark. As for his friend, her English was fluent, as is standard for Scandinavians. However, to my surprise, during the evening’s chitchat it emerged that the two friends habitually exchanged emails using Google Translate. Frank would write a message in English, then run it through Google Translate to produce a new text in Danish; conversely, she would write a message in Danish, then let Google Translate anglicize it. How odd! Why would two intelligent people, each of whom spoke the other’s language well, do this? My own experiences with machine-translation software had always led me to be highly skeptical about it. But my skepticism was clearly not shared by these two. Indeed, many thoughtful people are quite enamored of translation programs, finding little to criticize in them. This baffles me.

As a language lover and an impassioned translator, as a cognitive scientist and a lifelong admirer of the human mind’s subtlety, I have followed the attempts to mechanize translation for decades. When I first got interested in the subject, in the mid-1970s, I ran across a letter written in 1947 by the mathematician Warren Weaver, an early machine-translation advocate, to Norbert Wiener, a key figure in cybernetics, in which Weaver made this curious claim, today quite famous:

When I look at an article in Russian, I say, “This is really written in English, but it has been coded in some strange symbols. I will now proceed to decode.”

Some years later he offered a different viewpoint: “No reasonable person thinks that a machine translation can ever achieve elegance and style. Pushkin need not shudder.” Whew! Having devoted one unforgettably intense year of my life to translating Alexander Pushkin’s sparkling novel in verse Eugene Onegin into my native tongue (that is, having radically reworked that great Russian work into an English-language novel in verse), I find this remark of Weaver’s far more congenial than his earlier remark, which reveals a strangely simplistic view of language. Nonetheless, his 1947 view of translation-as-decoding became a credo that has long driven the field of machine translation.

More here.