Richard Florida in The Atlantic:

Kate Mossman at The Guardian:

Beck once complained that the image had him written off as a clown. Slackers became hackers, became those Silicon Valley technology nerds of indeterminate age, wearing board shorts and running Google. At 23, he had an unusually forthright clause written into his record contract with Geffen, ensuring he could make as many side projects for independent labels as he wished. “For me it was just an insurance policy,” he says. He recalls that when he finished his best-selling album Odelay: “No one at the label called me to say, ‘We are so excited to be working on this, you did a great job.’ It did well, but that was a shock to everybody.”

His words call to mind what Richard Linklater said when asked what a slacker meant to him. “Someone who’s trying to live an interesting life, doing what they want to do, and if that takes time to find, so be it.”

Perhaps to show the industry that he was not a one-hit wonder, Beck did experimental versions of “Loser”, and worked extended jazz breaks into his set. He smashed instruments on stage, set things on fire, and once employed a leaf blower.

more here.

Roger White at n+1:

THERE ARE SOME PAINTERS WHOSE INFLUENCE on the course of painting is so diffuse as to become unremarkable. This is the case with the illustrious octogenarian David Hockney. Without him, it’s hard to imagine the category of queer figurative painting, for example, or the casual semi-abstraction seen lately in much American art. The point goes double for painting in Los Angeles, the city where Hockney has made most of his work, with its cerulean swimming pools, indolent bathers, and cubist highways, and which now looks (the city, and much of its painting) like the displaced Yorkshireman’s art.

By the same token it’s also banal to note these connections, along the lines of observing that many rock bands over the years really owe a lot to David Bowie. Hockney and his work have always been admired and distributed (among living artists perhaps only William Wegman, of the trained Weimaraner dog photos, has more publications to his name) and the price of this degree of middle-class, poster-above-the-dentist’s-chair cultural saturation is the dereliction of serious critical regard. I’m not alone in having encountered and idolized Hockney during my formative years as a painter, and therefore in having spent a lot of time over the years minimizing, second-guessing, if not disavowing altogether, that early artistic crush.

more here.

Benedict Carey in The New York Times:

Scientists have developed a brain implant that noticeably boosted memory in its first serious test run, perhaps offering a promising new strategy to treat dementia, traumatic brain injuries and other conditions that damage memory. The device works like a pacemaker, sending electrical pulses to aid the brain when it is struggling to store new information, but remaining quiet when it senses that the brain is functioning well.

In the test, reported Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications, the device improved word recall by 15 percent — roughly the amount that Alzheimer’s disease steals over two and half years. The implant is still experimental; the researchers are currently in discussions to commercialize the technology. And its broad applicability is unknown, having been tested so far only in people with epilepsy. Experts cautioned that the potential for misuse of any “memory booster” is enormous — A.D.H.D. drugs are widely used as study aids. They also said that a 15 percent improvement is fairly modest. Still, the research marks the arrival of new kind of device: an autonomous aid that enhances normal, but less than optimal, cognitive function. Doctors have used similar implants for years to block abnormal bursts of activity in the brain, most commonly in people with Parkinson’s disease and epilepsy. “The exciting thing about this is that, if it can be replicated and extended, then we can use the same method to figure out what features of brain activity predict good performance,” said Bradley Voytek, an assistant professor of cognitive and data science at the University of California, San Diego. The implant is based on years of work decoding brain signals, supported recently by more than $70 million from the Department of Defense to develop treatments for traumatic brain injury, the signature wound of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

More here.

Marissa Grunes at Paris Review:

In many ways Primitive Technology is in fact deftly attuned to the logic of the Internet. Witness the number of knockoff channels: Primitive Skills, Primitive Life, Survival Skills Primitive, et cetera. With his millions of subscribers, the channel’s creator earns a comfortable sum from YouTube. (In one of those tidy ironies of the Internet, his identity as thirty-something-year-old John Plant came to light after he complained to Facebook that users who posted his videos directly to the social media site were effectively robbing him of thousands of Australian dollars in YouTube views). Nor is this seeming contradiction so surprising. The channel’s carefully edited videos are streamlined, consistently and effectively branded, and even faintly humorous in their command of comic timing. Plant is adept at wielding both primitive and contemporary technology.

As one becomes aware of these incongruities, other questions bubble up. Plant lets us know that he lives a modern life, in a modern house. He has a college degree, and has been cutting lawns for a living while creating the world of Primitive Technology. He has access to power tools, safety matches—all sorts of equipment that would make his projects easier. Does he ever “cheat” offscreen?

more here.

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

Mara Naselli in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

I recently wandered through the Art Institute of Chicago and came upon Woman in Tub by Jeff Koons. His work is recognizable from a distance, and I often don’t stop to look. This time, I paused.

The porcelain sculpture is from his 1988 Banality series. A nude figure is seated in an incongruously small tub, one knee up, the other submerged or maybe missing. In the frothy water floats a heart-shaped sponge and what might be a colorful party hat. A blue breathing tube protrudes vertically from the suds as the woman’s mouth, rimmed in red lipstick, is open in an expression of shock, or perhaps, the artist hopes, delight. She clutches her breasts with her hands. A nipple peeks out from between fingers tipped with red nail polish, and the inside of her mouth is a toothless black hole. Her head, sliced off just above the nose, forms a flat, glassy white plane. The odd arrangement, amputations, and impossible dimensions are weirdly dreamlike. “When I was a kid, my grandparents had an ashtray on a table in their television room,” reads the artist’s statement on the didactic plaque. “It was a small porcelain of a girl in a bathtub. It was white, with pink and blue details, and the legs went back and forth. As a kid I was mesmerized. My Woman in Tub[1988] comes from that, though it also references Manet and Degas. I had such an experience of awe looking at that object.”

Many artists have taken the woman at her bath as a subject. Degas, Manet, Courbet, Picasso — all painted the bathing female nude in the modern era.

More here.

Carl Zimmer in the New York Times:

Frank Lyko, a biologist at the German Cancer Research Center, studies the six-inch-long marbled crayfish. Finding specimens is easy: Dr. Lyko can buy the crayfish at pet stores in Germany, or he can head with colleagues to a nearby lake.

Wait till dark, switch on head lamps, and wander into the shallows. The marbled crayfish will emerge from hiding and begin swarming around your ankles.

“It’s extremely impressive,” said Dr. Lyko. “Three of us once caught 150 animals within one hour, just with our hands.”

Over the past five years, Dr. Lyko and his colleagues have sequenced the genomes of marbled crayfish. In a study published on Monday, the researchers demonstrate that the marble crayfish, while common, is one of the most remarkable species known to science.

Before about 25 years ago, the species simply did not exist. A single drastic mutation in a single crayfish produced the marbled crayfish in an instant.

The mutation made it possible for the creature to clone itself, and now it has spread across much of Europe and gained a toehold on other continents. In Madagascar, where it arrived about 2007, it now numbers in the millions and threatens native crayfish.

More here.

</P.

Over at The Real News, an interview with Thomas Ferguson:

Thomas Ferguson is professor emeritus of political science at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. Welcome Professor Ferguson. Before we get into the overlooked factors that you found, let's look at the dominant narrative, which is that it was indeed Russian meddling and Comey that helped sway voters to turn on Clinton, who was leading in the polls, and vote for Trump. What is your though on that?

T. FERGUSON: This is the real heart of the problem with both the Comey and the Russian internet story — it's that when you actually look at what happened, not only did Hillary dip in the polls, but at the very same time the chances of the Democrats taking the Senate collapsed. When you've got two collapses, not one, and they very closely tracked each other, as we show in a figure in our paper, so, what's going on there? Well, when you look, first of all, you can take the Senate one very straightforwardly. There's no doubt about what happened. Mitch McConnell and company were going to donors and saying, as nice articles in Bloomberg and elsewhere on this that we cite, they're saying, "You guys can't afford to lose both the presidency and the Senate. So, you better help us."

They did. An enormous wave of cash came in for the Senate and the other thing we discovered when we looked was we created a day by day … Paul Jorgensen, Jie Chan and I created a day-by-day file of contributions into the Trump campaign and included dark money. You say, how do you know it's dark money? Obviously, it's not all provided. The answer is very straightforward. We'll see this cash coming in from an entity, usually has kind of a fake charitable name attached, and then you will see the cash coming out but no cash going in.

More here.

Flower Instructions

i.
Blanket streets with plum blossoms.
Rest body against warm concrete.
Find rose petals on sidewalk.
Glimmer of the memory garden.

ii.
Follow the trail of invisible bees.
Nectar guides for the lost ones.
Fling lasso into summer darkness.
Hear whistles and megaphone.

iii.
Hold body close to body.
Breathe in the greenhouse.
Wear wet glitter and silver hose.
Lick salt on skin.

iv.
Catch whispers in libraries.
Greet strangers with acorns and grapefruit.
Remember eyes, ghosts, smoke.
Watch brothers as they disappear.

v.
Imagine a new world.
Keep sisters close.

by Maw Shein Win
from Sparkle & Blink, 2017

Editor's Note: Originally written for Megan Wilson’s Flower Interruption,
a public artwork in the Flower Power exhibition at the Asian Art Museum
of San Francisco (2017)

Julian Baggini at Literary Review:

Pinker’s version of history is somewhat simplistic. The Enlightenment did not emerge out of nothing and the role of two millennia of Christianity can’t be swept under the carpet. Much as I’d like to be able to agree with Pinker that secular humanism is one of the driving forces behind progress, since hardly anyone was a convinced atheist until recently, this can’t be quite right. Nonetheless, it can be no coincidence that the rise of trust in reason and science over religious doctrines and authority correlates with almost all the improvements Pinker charts.

Enlightenment Now is not perfect. Pinker shares a common Anglophone prejudice against modern European philosophy, lumping most of it together under the heading of ‘postmodernism’ and attacking the grotesque version of Nietzsche created by fascists and the alt-right, not the more complex and interesting figure most scholars would recognise. In a work of such breadth and scope, small lapses like this are inevitable, but are far outweighed by the clarity, force and evidential weight of his central arguments.

more here.

Joshua Rothman at The New Yorker:

When he was thirty-five, Kieran Setiya had a midlife crisis. Objectively, he was a successful philosophy professor at the University of Pittsburgh, who had written the books “Practical Knowledge” and “Knowing Right from Wrong.” But suddenly his existence seemed unsatisfying. Looking inward, he felt “a disconcerting mixture of nostalgia, regret, claustrophobia, emptiness, and fear”; looking forward, he saw only “a projected sequence of accomplishments stretching through the future to retirement, decline, and death.” What was the point of life? How would it all end? The answers appeared newly obvious. Life was pointless, and would end badly.

Unlike some people—an acquaintance of mine, for example, left his wife and children to move to Jamaica and marry his pot dealer—Setiya responded to his midlife crisis productively. In “Midlife: A Philosophical Guide” (Princeton), he examines his own freakout. “Midlife” has a self-soothing quality: it is, Setiya writes, “a self-help book in that it is an attempt to help myself.” By methodically analyzing his own unease, he hopes to lessen its hold on him.

more here.

Frederic Raphael at the TLS:

Céline saw little to relish in the human condition, even before he decided precisely whose diabolical conspiracy was responsible for its irreversible decay. A New York showgirl-cum-whore called Molly is the only character in his long novel whom the narrator, Bardamu, depicts with a trace of affection. Céline told his English translator, in 1934, “pratiquement la femme est mère ou putain”. Bardamu’s only friend, Robinson, is a revenant loner (cf. Crusoe?), who stalks rather than consoles him.

Céline’s jagged masterpiece reads like the grumpy shtick of a paranoid one-man bandsman. His disgust with human beings appears to have originated in the carnage of the Great War, in which the young Louis-Ferdinand was a teenage combatant. The brave, foolhardy colonel who literally loses his head in the early pages of Voyage has something in common with Evelyn Waugh’s biffing Brigadier Ritchie-Hook; but his creator lacks any faith in the patriotic cause, still less in the Judaeo-Christian God. Nothing on earth was worth dying or living for and there was nothing else. Bardamu’s anti-pilgrim’s progress takes him to war, to colonial Africa, to 1920s New York, then to medical practice in a slummy Parisian banlieue. The slough of despond was always his likeliest return address.

more here.

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

Natalie Angier in The New York Times:

Every night during breeding season, the male túngara frog of Central America will stake out a performance patch in the local pond and spend unbroken hours broadcasting his splendor to the world. The mud-brown frog is barely the size of a shelled pecan, but his call is large and dynamic, a long downward sweep that sounds remarkably like a phaser weapon on “Star Trek,” followed by a brief, twangy, harmonically dense chuck. Unless, that is, a competing male starts calling nearby, in which case the first frog is likely to add two chucks to the tail of his sweep. And should his rival respond likewise, Male A will tack on three chucks. Back and forth they go, call and raise, until the frogs hit their respiratory limit at six to seven rapid-fire chucks.

The acoustic one-upfrogship is energetically draining and risks attracting predators like bats. Yet the male frogs have no choice but to keep count of the competition, for the simple reason that female túngaras are doing the same: listening, counting and ultimately mating with the male of maximum chucks. Behind the frog’s surprisingly sophisticated number sense, scientists have found, are specialized cells located in the amphibian midbrain that tally up sound signals and the intervals between them. “The neurons are counting the number of appropriate pulses, and they’re highly selective,” said Gary Rose, a biologist at the University of Utah. If the timing between pulses is off by just a fraction of a second, the neurons don’t fire and the counting process breaks down.

More here.