Massimo Pigliucci in Footnotes to Plato:

The string and multiverse wars are going strong in fundamental physics! And philosophy of science is very much at the center of the storm. I am no physicist, not even a philosopher of physics, in fact (my specialty is evolutionary biology), so I will not comment on the science itself. I take it that the protagonists of this diatribe are more than competent enough to know what they are talking about. But they keep bringing in Karl Popper and his ideas on the nature of science, as well as invoke — or criticize — Richard Dawid’s concept of non-empirical theory confirmation, so I feel a bit of a modest commentary as a philosopher of science is not entirely out of order.

Let me begin with two caveats: first, there are many people involved in the controversy, including Sean Carroll, Peter Woit, Sabine Hossenfelder, George Ellis, and Joe Silk (not to mention astute commentators such as Lee Smolin and Jim Baggott). Refreshingly, almost all of them have respect for philosophy of science, unlike ignorant (of philosophy) physicists like Lawrence Krauss and Stephen Hawking. So, who knows, some of them may even read the following with some interest. Second, I actually know most of these people, obviously some better than others. I like and respect them all, even though — as we shall see — in this post I will come squarely down on one side rather than the other.

And what are these sides? For this round, I’ll focus on an exchange between Sean Carroll and Peter Woit on the specific issue of multiverse theory, though the two disagree — for the same reasons — also about the status of string theory.

More here.

Masha Gessen in the New York Review of Books:

The topic of my talk was determined by today’s date. Thirty-nine years ago my parents took a package of documents to an office in Moscow. This was our application for an exit visa to leave the Soviet Union. More than two years would pass before the visa was granted, but from that day on I have felt a sense of precariousness wherever I have been, along with a sense of opportunity. They are a pair.

I have emigrated again as an adult. I was even named a “great immigrant” in 2016, which I took to be an affirmation of my skill, attained through practice—though this was hardly what the honor was meant to convey. I have also raised kids of my own. If anything, with every new step I have taken, I have marveled more at the courage it would have required for my parents to step into the abyss. I remember seeing them in the kitchen, poring over a copy of an atlas of the world. For them, America was an outline on a page, a web of thin purplish lines. They’d read a few American books, had seen a handful of Hollywood movies. A friend was fond of asking them, jokingly, whether they could really be sure that the West even existed.

Truthfully, they couldn’t know. They did know that if they left the Soviet Union, they would never be able to return (like many things we accept as rare certainties, this one turned out to be wrong). They would have to make a home elsewhere. I think that worked for them: as Jews, they never felt at home in the Soviet Union—and when home is not where you are born, nothing is predetermined. Anything can be. So my parents always maintained that they viewed their leap into the unknown as an adventure.

I wasn’t so sure. After all, no one had asked me.

More here.

Andy Hines at Public Books:

Three new histories of literary study draw attention to the critic’s material life. Literary Criticism: A Concise Political History, by Joseph North, Paraliterary: The Making of Bad Readers in Postwar America, by Merve Emre, and Poet-Critics and the Administration of Culture, by Evan Kindley, all portray critics and readers subject to global capital flows, geopolitical shifts, and institutional administration. Each widens the range of sites where we can see criticism taking place: a grant-making foundation office (Kindley), an American Express storefront (Emre), and a web page like the one you’re reading right now (North).

Methodologically, too, each departs from what Jeffrey Williams three years ago dubbed “the new modesty in literary criticism.” In the wake of Sharon Marcus and Stephen Best’s 2009 essay “Surface Reading,” critics increasingly feel compelled to describe rather than diagnose. These books, instead, do both. Take a sentence from North’s book: “It is then merely to state the obvious to observe that the discipline’s future shape will depend most of all on the character of whatever new period of capital [emerges] in the wake of the current crisis.”

more here.

Robert Bird at the TLS:

Dostoevsky’s gateless fortress also reminds us that, as a trained draughtsman, he thought in images no less than in words. He wrote frequently about painting, and many of his key terms suggest visual, rather than verbal communication, from “impression” (vpechatlenie) to “disfiguration” (bezobrazie). In his novels major characters first emerge as faces, and then persist as gazes; think of the self-sacrificing prostitute Sonya Marmeladova staring silently at Raskolnikov in her squalid room, and then at the crossroads. Countless artists and film­makers have been moved to transpose Dostoevsky’s fictions into new works of visual art. It is no great surprise, then, that his manuscripts teem with calligraphic exercises and graphic doodles.

As the culmination of decades of pioneering research, Konstantin Barsht has produced a comprehensive dictionary of graphic devices in Dostoevsky’s manuscripts. The Drawings and Calligraphy of Fyodor Dostoevsky is published in three languages (English, Italian and Russian) as the first entry in a new series, Calligrammes, dedicated to the intersection of graphic art and literature.

more here.

T.J. Clark at the LRB:

So finally I am on the side of the extremists, the Becketts and Sedlmayrs. ‘Loss of world’ is in question in Cézanne’s art, because – Lawrence in particular insists on this – the artist knows that ‘world’ has become, or is fast becoming, a cliché. The more talk of Gemeinschaft, the deeper each individual’s isolation. There seems, to put it baldly, no good alternative to the Sedlmayr view, or at least to its basic assumption. Certainly the idea that Cézanne’s approach to picture-making is essentially technical and ‘objective’, locked in a painter’s preserve (the Charles Morice proposal, which will never die), is useless. It offers false comfort. Cézanne is not in the least ‘detached’ from his sitters, he is relentlessly intimate with them. It is what he proposes intimacy to be that is the terror. He seems to have wanted, maybe to have achieved – with Madame Cézanne, whom he did not live with, with the various Parisian men he distrusted, with the Aixois peasants he paid to sit still – an existence with others that did not depend on an exchange of insides. A behaviour without the pejorative ‘behaviourism’ attached to it. ‘Material of a strictly peculiar order, incommensurable with all human expressions whatsoever.’

There is a cluster of poems by Wallace Stevens, mostly from the 1940s, that seems to me helpful. I think they were written with Cézanne in mind. ‘Less and Less Human, O Savage Spirit’ is central, and especially the poem’s conviction that ‘It is the human that is the alien,/The human that has no cousin in the moon.

more here.

"As long as homo sapiens are involved you'll never remove
the static stain of history." — Alle Zwecklos

Homework
—Homage Kenneth Koch

If I were doing my laundry I'd wash my dirty Iran
I'd throw in my United States, and pour on the Ivory Soap,
scrub up Africa, put all the birds and elephants back in
the jungle,
I'd wash the Amazon river and clean the oily Carib & Gulf of Mexico,
Rub that smog off the North Pole, wipe up all the pipelines in Alaska,
Rub a dub dub for Rocky Flats and Los Alamos, Flush that sparkly
Cesium out of Love Canal
Rinse down the Acid Rain over the Parthenon & Sphinx, Drain the Sludge
out of the Mediterranean basin & make it azure again,
Put some blueing back into the sky over the Rhine, bleach the little
Clouds so snow return white as snow,
Cleanse the Hudson Thames & Neckar, Drain the Suds out of Lake Erie
Then I'd throw big Asia in one giant Load & wash out the blood &
Agent Orange,
Dump the whole mess of Russia and China in the wringer, squeeze out
the tattletail Gray of U.S. Central American police state,
& put the planet in the drier & let it sit 20 minutes or an
Aeon till it came out clean

Alan Ginsberg
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Jane E. Brody in The New York Times:

Marriages fall apart for many different reasons, but one of the most common and most challenging to overcome is the discovery that one partner has “cheated” on the other. I put the word cheated in quotes because the definition of infidelity can vary widely among and within couples. Though most often it involves explicit sexual acts with someone other than one’s spouse or committed partner, there are also couples torn asunder by a partner’s surreptitious use of pornography, a purely emotional relationship with no sexual contact, virtual affairs, even just ogling or flirting with a nonpartner. Infidelity is hardly a new phenomenon. It has existed for as long as people have united as couples, married or otherwise. Marriage counselors report that affairs sometimes occur in happy relationships as well as troubled ones. According to the American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy, national surveys indicate that 15 percent of married women and 25 percent of married men have had extramarital affairs. The incidence is about 20 percent higher when emotional and sexual relationships without intercourse are included. As more women began working outside the home, their chances of having an affair have increased accordingly. Volumes have been written about infidelity, most recently two excellent and illuminating books: “The State of Affairs: Rethinking Infidelity” by Esther Perel, a New York psychotherapist, and “Healing from Infidelity” by Michele Weiner-Davis, a psychotherapist in Boulder, Colo. Both books are based on the authors’ extensive experience counseling couples whose relationships have been shattered by affairs.

The good news is, depending upon what caused one partner to wander and how determined a couple is to remain together, infidelity need not result in divorce. In fact, Ms. Perel and other marriage counselors have found, couples that choose to recover from and rebuild after infidelity often end up with a stronger, more loving and mutually understanding relationship than they had previously. “People who’ve been betrayed need to know that there’s no shame in staying in the marriage — they’re not doormats, they’re warriors,” Ms. Weiner-Davis said in an interview. “The gift they provide to their families by working through the pain is enormous.” Ms. Perel concedes that “some affairs will deliver a fatal blow to a relationship.” But she wrote, “Others may inspire change that was sorely needed. Betrayal cuts to the bone, but the wound can be healed. Plenty of people care deeply for the well-being of their partners even while lying to them, just as plenty of those who have been betrayed continue to love the ones who lied to them and want to find a way to stay together.”

More here.

James A. Marcum in the Times Literary Supplement:

Thomas Kuhn’s influence on the academic and intellectual landscape in the second half of the twentieth century is undeniable. It spans the natural sciences, and the historical and philosophical disciplines that examine them, through to the fine arts and even to business. But what did Kuhn espouse? In brief, he popularized the notions of the paradigm and the paradigm shift. A paradigm for Kuhn is a bundle of puzzles, techniques, assumptions, standards and vocabulary that scientists endorse and employ to undertake their day-to-day activities and thereby make remarkable advances in understanding and explaining the natural world. What Kuhn unintentionally achieved, however, was to open the epistemic floodgates for non-scientific disciplines to rush through. Justin Fox, in a 2014 Harvard Business Review article, to take a single example, queries whether economics is on the verge of “a paradigm shift”. Kuhn has his detractors and critics, of course – those who charge him with almost every conceivable academic failing, especially the promotion of relativism and irrationalism.

More here.

Pardis Sabeti in the Boston Globe:

EVEN IN SCIENCE, revolutions often go far beyond reason. This year, let’s hope that scientists of all stripes — but especially social psychologists — will slow down and start approaching one another with greater respect.

For decades, the field of social psychology has captured the public imagination with high-profile research into how humans interact. Will people obey authority figures even when it involves hurting others? How do stereotypes shape human interactions? Are facial expressions of emotion universal across cultures? All of these are questions that social psychology tries to answer. But the field is in the midst of a revolution that could end up destroying new ideas before they are fully explored — a cautionary tale not just for this field, but for all of science.

Spurred by new methods and statistical techniques, a group of “revolutionaries” — scientists and Internet bloggers both inside and outside the field — have taken it upon themselves to weed out “faulty” science. In forums such as the websites Data Colada, Replicability-Index, and Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science, scholars are being urged to focus on replicating the results of past studies and to reconsider their own findings if subsequent research undercuts them. Done responsibly, the revolution is something all scientists could agree is fundamental to advance the field, enabling robust and verifiable discoveries about human psychology, behavior, and biology.

Like many revolutions, however, it has not been a peaceful one.

More here.

David Robson in The Atlantic: