A. P. Joyce in Mic:

Less than a week after President Donald Trump gave his State of the Union address touting the strength of the American economy under his presidency, the stock market saw one of its worst trading days in recent history, with stocks falling by about 1,175 points.

With the markets in turmoil and the fate of the U.S. economy under Trump looking more uncertain than ever, a new report has given lawmakers an easy guide on how to alleviate the economic pressure on 44 million Americans, while also lowering unemployment and growing the economy with one painfully simple policy. The answer: cancel all student debt.

A report from a group of economists at the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College finds that there would be huge benefits if the federal government were to forgive all existing student debt. This would ripple out from young people struggling to pay off massive college loans to the economy as a whole, according to the report.

“The idea of canceling student debt is not just some crazy idea out of left field, but is actually something that could be done, and done in a way that has a moderately positive economic impact,” Marshall Steinbaum, a fellow and research director at the Roosevelt Institute and a coauthor of the report said in an interview.

“The way this and similar polices are often discussed is in a mode of ‘well can we really afford this?’ and the answer is definitely yes,” he added.

More here.

Christopher Turner at Cabinet Magazine:

In Aldous Huxley’s dystopian novel, Brave New World (1932), the Bureau of Propaganda has invented the “feelies,” which bring tactile effects to popular entertainment. By holding special knobs on their chairs, audience members could enjoy titillating experiences such as “a love scene on a bearskin rug” between “a gigantic negro and a golden-haired young brachycephalic Beta-Plus female,” almost as if they were there. In 1929, Huxley had seen his first talkie, The Jazz Singer (1927), which he described as “the latest and most frightful creation-saving device for the production of standardized amusement.” He was dismissive of the movies, believing cinemas were great factories of political distraction, where crowds soaked in “the tepid bath of nonsense. No mental effort is demanded of them, no participation; they need only sit and keep their eyes open.”

In the novel, Huxley’s central character attends a screening of the feely Three Weeks in a Helicopter, billed as: “AN ALL-SUPER-SINGING, SYNTHETIC-TALKING, COLOURED, STEREOSCOPIC FEELY WITH SYNCHRONISED SCENT-ORGAN ACCOMPANIMENT.” This introduction of smell into theater was not without precedent.

more here.

Anthony Lane at The New Yorker:

This year marks the centenary of the birth of Ingmar Bergman, and, for any New Yorkers keen to pay homage, the journey starts now. Over the next five weeks, starting on Thursday with “The Seventh Seal” (1957), Film Forum will be showing forty-seven films. One of Bergman’s most appealing traits is that, though the mood of his movies could be famously difficult and fraught, they poured forth in generous profusion, as if he could hardly help himself, and knew no other release. He dreamed, drew, pondered, probed, and agonized on film, and what resulted, more often than not, bore the grip of a thriller and the elegance of a waltz. If you wish to be reminded of what the medium can do, or if you doubt the depths that lurk beneath the flat skin of celluloid, waiting to be fathomed, Bergman is your man.

Not the least of the pleasures, for anyone with the stamina for the complete retrospective, will be the chance to make connections. As the flighty heroine of “Dreams” (1955), for instance, Harriet Andersson explores a row of gramophone records in the house of an ageing roué, plucks one out, and reads the label aloud, saying “Saraband” and “Bach” (which she pronounces “batch”). For a second, our minds are spirited forward to “Cries and Whispers” (1972), in which the mournful saraband, a movement from Bach’s fifth cello suite, is heard during a scene of reconciliation—as it is, once again, during one of Bergman’s final works, made for Swedish television in 2003, and simply titled “Saraband.”

more here.

Lucy Lethbridge at Literary Review:

Laura Ingalls Wilder’s captivating autobiographical novels may have been written for children, but they have become primers for mid-19th-century pioneer American history and the hard-won creation myth of a new nation. Even their titles – Little House in the Big Woods, Little House on the Prairie, By the Shores of Silver Lake – bring with them the wholesome whiff of self-reliance in rural isolation, of the ingenuity of poor people struggling against the mighty vicissitudes of the natural world. Above all, they are about the comfort of the log cabin and of home, the final destination after an arduous journey into the unknown. In the many places associated with Wilder, a tourist industry has flourished: visitors can see a restored log cabin and try spinning or making butter – a frisson of hardship for a generation nostalgic for a world without choices.

Prairie Fires celebrates this aspect of Wilder’s appeal, but it also explores less straightforward aspects of the author’s life, particularly her relationship with her daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, a successful author herself and a leading proponent of Ayn Randian libertarianism. Laura Ingalls Wilder was no more an untutored ‘hedgerow scribe’ than her British counterpart Flora Thompson.

more here.

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

Adam Piore in Nautilus:

For weeks I had been researching what science has to say about the power of charisma. Why do some people so clearly have it and others don’t? Why do we fall so easily under its influence? Charismatics can make us feel charmed and great about ourselves. They can inspire us to excel. But they can also be dangerous. They use charisma for their own purposes, to enhance their power, to manipulate others. Scientists have plenty to say about charisma. Individuals with charisma tap our unfettered emotions and can shut down our rational minds. They hypnotize us. But studies show charisma is not just something a person alone possesses. It’s created by our own perceptions, particularly when we are feeling vulnerable in politically tense times. I’m going to tell you about these studies and spotlight the opinions of the neuroscientists, psychologists, and sociologists who conducted them. But first I want to tell you about a magnetic preacher who spent decades wowing audiences in churches across America with the holy words of Jesus. Then he lost his faith and now preaches about how to live happily without God. What scientists study about charisma, Bart Campolo lives.

I first read about the newly non-believing Campolo in The New York Times Magazine last December. “An extreme extrovert, he was brilliant before a crowd and also at ease in private conversations, connecting with everyone from country-club suburbanites to the destitute souls he often fed in his own house,” wrote Mark Oppenheimer. Campolo’s father is Tony Campolo, one of America’s superstar evangelists for the past 50 years, who counseled Bill Clinton through the Monica Lewinsky scandal, and today continues to mobilize people into a movement for Jesus’ messages of love and redemption. Who would know more about the power of charisma to both charm and deceive than a preacher’s son gone rogue? Campolo, 53, who today volunteers counseling young people as a “humanist chaplain” at the University of Southern California, didn’t disappoint. He was wonderfully frank and engaging, energetic and insightful, just like a, well, evangelical preacher.

More here.

Yasha Levine at The Baffler:

I looked around the room in amazement. This was the heart of a supposedly progressive San Francisco Bay Area, and yet the city planned on partnering with a powerful intelligence contractor to build a police surveillance center that, if press reports were correct, officials wanted to use to spy on and monitor locals. Something made that scene even stranger to me that night. Thanks to a tip from a local activist, I had gotten wind that Oakland had been in talks with Google about demo-ing products in what appeared to be an attempt by the company to get a part of the DAC contract.

Google possibly helping Oakland spy on its residents? If true, it would be particularly damning. Many Oaklanders saw Silicon Valley companies such as Google as being the prime drivers of the skyrocketing housing prices, gentrification, and aggressive policing that was making life miserable for poor and low-income residents. Indeed, just a few weeks earlier protesters had picketed outside the local home of a wealthy Google manager who was personally involved in a nearby luxury real estate development.

more here.

Michael Caines at the TLS:

While some have struggled to define “literary fiction” as a marketable genre of its own, or as writing that calls attention to form, today is apparently a time of a revived appetite for avant-garde writing – writing that, if it does nothing else, calls all assumptions about form into question. And with this renewed focus comes a renewed sense of the importance of 1960s attempts to do something not entirely dissimilar – whether that was the typographical devices of Brooke-Rose, a book in a box (The Unfortunates by Johnson) or the “increasing daring”, as Julia Jordan has called it, of Quin’s novels. The publication of a new volume of Quin’s “stories and fragments”, The Unmapped Country, edited by Jennifer Hodgson, has coincided with a conference held at the University of East Anglia, “In Search of a New Fiction?: British avant-garde writing of the 1960s”. The conference anticipates the publication by Edinburgh University Press, later in the year, of a collection of essays under the same title, but minus the question mark. Nonia Williams and Kaye Mitchell, the conference’s organizers, are also that volume’s co-editors; and they have further raised the idea of setting up a new network for those who are interested in the field. Gathering forty-odd people at UEA, for a “discursive” day of well-informed and engaging conversation, seems like a good start.

The first session about Johnson and Christine Brooke-Rose immediately raised the kind of questions that academics must ask. To what extent is it helpful to consider Brooke-Rose (who spent much of her life in France, under French literary influences) as a “British” writer? What about politics – did “progressive” tendencies as a writer go hand in hand with “progressive” politics?

more here.

Julie Phillips in 4 Columns:

Introverted. Tentative. Tongue-tied. I don’t want to walk on tiptoe, but what’s a woman to do? If I’m cautious, I don’t get the gig; boldness feels unnatural. A while back, after I did a proposal for a writing assignment I wanted very much, I asked a friend for ideas on how to approach the people involved. “Be less self-effacing,” he suggested. “Just act like a person with a penis.”

I could see his point, so I did my best to put my affect on testosterone. I wasn’t chosen—an actual penis person landed the job instead, c’est la vie—but I haven’t stopped thinking about the advice. There can’t be a vagina person alive, particularly one who writes or speaks in public, who doesn’t question her relationship to authority, and who doesn’t sometimes experience her voice as something borrowed or strapped on.

The willingness to expose that clumsy, artificial join—to be a public intellectual without glossing over the awkwardness of being female—is what distinguishes the outspoken British academic Mary Beard, author of the slim, forthright, and rousing essay Women & Power. She’s known as a Cambridge classics professor, documentary presenter, blogger, and Twitter presence, rather than specifically a feminist thinker, and at first I doubted the continued relevance in the #metoo era of examples from antiquity. I needn’t have. Women & Power, originally two lectures given in 2014 and 2017, begins with the compelling observation that at the opening of the Odyssey, right at the start of the Western literary tradition, is a scene of a man telling a woman to shut up.

More here.

Sean Carroll in Scientific American:

I first heard of Joe Polchinski in 1988, when I was applying to various graduate schools in physics. During a visit to Harvard, I talked with Sidney Coleman, one of the leading thinkers in the esoteric world of quantum field theory. Although he was happy to sing the praises of his own institution, Sidney couldn’t help but add, “But I wouldn’t blame you if you went to the University of Texas. Whoever gets Joe Polchinski as an advisor will be fortunate indeed.”

I didn’t follow the advice, but I remembered the name, and a few years later I had the wonderful good fortune of being a postdoctoral researcher at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics in Santa Barbara. Joe had moved there in 1992, and my office was just down the hall from his. I can’t tell you how often I would knock on his door to ask a question about physics. In a milieu packed with very smart people, he was the go-to guy, renowned for his carefulness and open-mindedness to new ideas. It wasn’t just me, either; countless students and colleagues sought out just a bit of his time. Eventually, as he worked to finish his giant two-volume textbook on string theory, he took to simply closing his door and pretending he wasn’t in the office. Once the book was finished, however, the door was open again, and the constant stream of visitors resumed.

Joe died at his home last week, age 63, after having been treated for brain cancer for a few years. His passing leaves a hole in the physics community, as his research was as innovative and impactful as ever. Looking over the countless memories and sympathies posted online, I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a large and heartfelt outpouring of grief at the passing of a great physicist.

More here.

Guy Kahane, Jim A.C. Everett, Brian D. Earp, Lucius Caviola, Nadira Faber, Molly Crockett, and Julian Savulescu in Practical Ethics:

Last week, we invited people to find out “How Utilitarian Are You?” by filling out our newly published Oxford Utilitarianism Scale. The scale was widely shared – even by Peter Singer (who scored predictably highly). The Oxford Utilitarianism Scale does a pretty good job of measuring how well people’s views match up with “classical” utilitarians (think Bentham and Singer), which is the form of utilitarianism we used to anchor the scale. But that’s not all it does. It also teases apart two different dimensions of utilitarian thinking, tracking two ways in which utilitarianism departs from common-sense morality. Our new research recently published in Psychological Review links these two factors to distinct components of human psychology.

The first peculiar aspect of utilitarianism is that it places no constraints whatsoever on the maximization of aggregate well-being. If torturing an innocent person would lead to more good overall, then utilitarianism, in contrast to commonsense morality, requires that the person be tortured. This is what we call instrumental harm: the idea that we are permitted (and even required) to instrumentally use, severely harm, or even kill innocent people to promote the greater good.

The second way that utilitarianism diverges from common-sense morality is by requiring us to impartially maximize the well-being of all sentient beings on the planet in such a way that “[e]ach is to count for one and none for more than one” (Bentham, 1789/1983), not privileging compatriots, family members, or ourselves over strangers – or even enemies. This can be called the positive dimension of utilitarianism, or impartial beneficence.

What are the psychological roots of utilitarianism? Why does utilitarianism attract some people but strongly repel so many others? Psychologists have tried to answer these questions by using the now famous (or infamous, depending on your perspective) ‘trolley problems’.

More here.

Christian G. Appy in The Boston Review:

Exactly a year before he was murdered, Martin Luther King, Jr., gave one of the greatest speeches of his life, a piercing critique of the war in Vietnam. Two thousand people jammed into New York’s Riverside Church on April 4, 1967, to hear King shred the historical, political, and moral claims that U.S. leaders had invoked since the end of World War II to justify their counterrevolutionary foreign policy. The United States had not supported Vietnamese independence and democracy, King argued, but had repeatedly opposed it; the United States had not defended the people of South Vietnam from external communist aggression, but was itself the foreign aggressor—burning and bombing villages, forcing peasants off their ancestral land, and killing, by then, as many as one million Vietnamese. “We are on the side of the wealthy, and the secure,” King said, “while we create a hell for the poor.”

The war was an “enemy of the poor” at home as well. Not only were poor black and white boys sent “to kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools,” but the vast expense required to obliterate an impoverished, nonwhite nation 8,000 miles away eviscerated the domestic social programs that had promised to narrow economic and racial inequalities at home. The military draft, for instance, offered deferments and exemptions that favored the privileged while programs such as Project 100,000 enlisted men from “the subterranean poor”—men so badly educated they would once have been rejected for military service. Project 100,000 was touted as a program of social uplift, but in reality, it sent poor men to the front lines as cannon fodder, further proving King’s point that the promises of the Great Society were “shot down on the battlefield of Vietnam.”

The Riverside Church speech alone should place King in the pantheon of 1960s antiwar activists. Yet in public memory, his opposition to the Vietnam War is largely forgotten. Why?

More here.

Victor Gomes in Nautilus:

Part of Vittorio Sebastiano’s job is to babysit a few million stem cells. The research professor of reproductive biology at Stanford University keeps the cells warm and moist deep inside the Lorry I. Lokey Stem Cell Research Building, one of the nation’s largest stem cell facilities. He’s joined there by an army of researchers, each with their own goals. His own research program is nothing if not ambitious: He wants to reverse aging in humans. Stem cells are the Gary Oldman of cell types. They can reprogram themselves to carry out the function of virtually any other type of cell, and play a vital role in early development. This functional reprogramming is usually accompanied by an age reset, down to zero. Sebastiano figures that if he can separate these different kinds of reprogramming, he can open up a whole new kind of aging therapy. Nautilus caught up with him last month.

What impact will your work have on aging research?

I’m studying whether we can separate the process of functional reprogramming of cells from the process of aging reprogramming of cells. Typically these two processes happen at the same time. My hypothesis is that we can induce cellular rejuvenation without changing the function of the cells. If we can manage to do this, we could start thinking about a way to stall aging.

What is the difference between functional and aging reprogramming?

The function of a skin cell is to express certain proteins, keratins for example that protect the skin. The function of a liver cell is to metabolize. Those are cell-specific functions. Reprogramming that function means that you no longer have a liver cell. You now have another cell, which has a totally different function. Age, on the other hand, is just the degree of usefulness of that cell, and it’s mostly an epigenetic process. A young keratinocyte cell is younger than an older keratinocyte but it is still a keratinocyte. The amazing thing is that if you take an aged cell that is fully committed to a certain function, and you transplant its nucleus into an immature egg cell called an oocyte, then you revert its function to a pluripotent, embryonic one, which means it can become any other cell of the body—and you also revert the age of that cell to the youngest age possible. It’s mind-blowing to me.

More here.

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

Sedition — a letter to the writer from Meri Mangakāhia

Here’s what I had in mind, kōtiro, this
clipping at words like overgrown maikuku — 
return the blankets of domestic life; don’t fold
washing or wear shoes, polish these rerenga kē.

Eh. But this world.
I s’pose neither of us planned to be in politics,
never did do what others told us to — 
wahanui though, go on, get

your sedition on girl,
your agitator, your defiant speak
to each other eye to eye — 
Māori been jailed for nouns, phrases;

butcher up a clause, get buried
in Pākehā kupu, then dig that
out like the old people. No one approved
of their language either.

by Anahera Gildea
from Poetry (February 2018)

David Marchese in New York Magazine:

In both music and manner, Quincy Jones has always registered — from afar, anyway — as smooth, sophisticated, and impeccably well-connected. (That’s what earning 28 Grammy awards and co-producing Michael Jackson’s biggest-selling albums will do.) But in person, the 84-year-old music-industry macher is far spikier and more complicated. “All I’ve ever done is tell the truth,” says Jones, seated on a couch in his palatial Bel Air home, and about to dish some outrageous gossip. “I’ve got nothing to be scared of, man.”

Currently in the midst of an extended victory lap ahead of his turning 85 in March — a Netflix documentary and a CBS special hosted by Oprah Winfrey are on the horizon — Jones, dressed in a loose sweater, dark slacks, and a jaunty scarf, talks like he has nothing to lose. He name-drops, he scolds, he praises, and he tells (and retells) stories about his very famous friends. Even when his words are harsh, he says them with an enveloping charm, frequently leaning over for fist bumps and to tap me on the knee. “The experiences I’ve had!” he says, shaking his head in wonder. “You almost can’t believe it.”

You worked with Michael Jackson more than anyone he wasn’t related to. What’s something people don’t understand about him?

I hate to get into this publicly, but Michael stole a lot of stuff. He stole a lot of songs. [Donna Summer’s] “State of Independence and “Billie Jean.” The notes don’t lie, man. He was as Machiavellian as they come.

How so?

Greedy, man. Greedy. “Don’t Stop ’Til You Get Enough” — Greg Phillinganes wrote the c section. Michael should’ve given him 10 percent of the song. Wouldn’t do it.

I used to kill him about the plastic surgery, man. He’d always justify it and say it was because of some disease he had. Bullshit.

More here.

Charles C. Mann in Breakthrough Journal:

On June 30, 1860, Samuel Wilberforce, DD, 36th Bishop of Oxford, attended the 30th annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, held at Oxford University. Countless students have been taught that during the meeting, Wilberforce attacked evolution, setting off an impromptu debate which became a “tipping point” in the history of thought. I was one of those students. The debate, my biology professor explained, was the opening salvo of the war between Science and Religion — and Religion lost. My textbook backed him up. Wilberforce’s anti-evolution assault, it said, was swept aside by researchers’ “careful and scientific defense.” In a flourish unusual in an undergraduate text, it boasted that the pro-evolution arguments “neatly lifted the Bishop’s scalp.” That day the forces of empirical knowledge had beaten back the armies of religious ignorance.

None of this is accurate. There was no real debate that day in Oxford. Nor was there a clear victor, still less a scalping. Not that many people were paying attention; the “debate” was not mentioned by a single London newspaper. Still, the exchange was important, though the quarrel was less between scientific theory and religious faith than between two conceptions of humankind’s place in the cosmos. And far from being an enduring victory for rationality over faith, the debate inaugurated a conflict which continues to the present day, and is less about the past than about the future.

In 1860 science was not assumed to be inaccessible to ordinary people; the attendees at the Advancement of Science meeting included many ordinary, middle-class Britons, as well as Oxford students and faculty. The crowd packed a hall at the university’s new museum, standing in aisles and doorways. In that jammed, sweltering space, the subject on attendees’ minds was On the Origin of Species, by Charles Darwin. Published just seven months before, the book had created a public uproar, dividing educated Britons into pro- and anti-evolution camps.

More here.