by Bill Murray

This column is about travel to less understood parts of the world. In yet another travel constrained month, how about a little political tourism here in Georgia, where none of us really understands the sordid late-Trump morality play swirling around our dual Senate runoffs. We still have thirty days to go. Unlikely circumstance offered our state the fate of the Senate and we are shaky stewards.

Beware pundits bearing wisdom. All their elaborate, self-assured opinions at this early stage tell me that when the national press comes to your town with instant, penetrating analysis of, say, Flint’s municipal water supply, or that crazy Sturgis biker thing, be careful. They bring to mind Emerson’s “the louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons.”

All punditry has right now is conventional wisdom. Here on the actual battlefield, candidates compete against one another, the Republican party competes against itself, dark money scurries in the shadows, QAnon jeers from the sidelines and the truth is, nobody has any idea what’s going to happen. Read more »

The leaves have all fallen off this wild tree but some apples still cling to it for dear life, in Franzensfeste, South Tyrol, in December of 2020.

by Philip Graham

Back in 1971, I couldn’t have predicted that the release of Joni Mitchell’s fourth album, Blue, would mark the beginning of the end of a friendship.

During my college years, Donald and I had bonded over a love of literature and a shared ambition to become, some day, actual writers. While I chose the route of fiction, Donald wrote song lyrics, taking poetry classes to hone his craft.

The great songwriter love of his life was the Joni Mitchell of her first albums, Song to a Seagull, Clouds, and Ladies of the Canyon. But then Blue dropped, and it crushed Donald. He believed the new, conversational quality of Mitchell’s lyrics betrayed her past poetic strengths. While we sat in the college coffee shop he quoted a few lines from the song “California”:

So I bought me a ticket
I caught a plane to Spain
Went to a party down a red dirt road

and then protested with real hurt in his voice, “How could she write something so ordinary?”

I didn’t mind that Mitchell had moved away from her lyrical era of “mermaids live in colonies” and “sweet well water and pickling jars.” I thought she fully lived and breathed in her new songs, became more approachable as a fellow vulnerable human. Donald remained unmoved. I suggested that at least we still had her exquisite voice, her gift for melody, and her guitar playing—what haunted tunings!

He insisted he couldn’t listen to any song, no matter how beautiful, if he didn’t first respect the lyrics. I countered that no matter how well-composed a lyric, if the melody was a clunker I wouldn’t listen twice. The beauty of the music came first. If the words reflected that beauty? Bonus. Read more »

by Dave Maier

2020 has been a wild ride, but it’s almost over, and I’m here to tell you it wasn’t all bad, as some great music came out this year – so much, in fact, that we’ll have to have two or even three podcasts this time even for the small taste which is our annual year-end review. Here’s part 1 (widget and link below).

Jonathan Fitoussi – Soleil de Minuit

We heard a great track from this guy in a recent set, and here he is again with a terrific new album of unashamedly retro space music. “Soleil de Minuit” (“Midnight Sun”), for example, performed on a Buchla modular system, electric organ, and electric bass, sends off a distinctly Michael Hoenig vibe to my ear. Keep ‘em coming, Jonathan, we love it. Read more »

by Ali Minai

Given where we find ourselves in this late November of 2020, it is hard to think of a book more relevant or timely than The Hype Machine by Sinan Aral. The author is the David Austin Professor of Management and Professor of Information Technology and Marketing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. As one of the world’s foremost experts on social media and its effects, Prof. Aral is the perfect person to look at how this phenomenon has changed the world and the human experience. This is what he sets out to do in his new book, The Hype Machine, published under the Currency Imprint of Random House this September, and with considerable success.

The book provides an excellent overview of where things stand with social media, its promise and its peril. For anyone looking for a single, accessibly non-technical source of information and insight on these important issues, this book is essential reading. The book is very well-organized, and the logical flow – both across and within chapters – is remarkably smooth. Overall, the book is an easy read that informs and educates the reader without getting mired in technical jargon – no mean feat for a book about a technical field that is rife with jargon. And, while a large proportion of the book simply communicates information on where things stand and how different social media platforms are shaping the lives of their users, Prof. Aral does not shy away from building a useful abstract framework in which to place all this, and to address the complex issues raised as a result. Read more »

Dylan Kwait. Surfers by Plum Island, October 2020.

Drone photograph.

With permission … thanks Dylan!

by Claire Chambers

This has been a terrible year with almost no redeeming features. I have written elsewhere about Covid-19’s hardships, both personal and political. Today, with a vaccine on the horizon and Trump defeated, I want to find some other crumbs of comfort that, as with Hansel and Gretel, might take us somewhere.

I am privileged to live with my husband Rob and two sons in our own house with a garden, and to hold down a lecturing job which is pretty secure. Rob is even more financially stable in his career, working as he does in a growth industry this pestilent year: he’s a family doctor.

But of course being a GP has brought its own share of unexpected stresses recently. In March when the UK government spectacularly failed to get PPE for medical professionals and disaster capitalists were circling, Rob bought some pyjamas from Marks and Spencer for turning into improvised surgical scrubs. He even fashioned his own visor using a piece of sponge, some plexiglass, and a coat hanger. Although he never had to use it, I won’t forget that time of helpless, abandoned terror.

Nigerian-American author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie posted a microblog to Instagram early into this crisis about her fears around the pandemic. When I read these terse words, I nodded vigorously:

My husband is a doctor and each morning when he leaves for work, I worry. My throat itches and I worry. On Facetime I watch my elderly parents. I admonish them gently: Don’t let people come to the house. Don’t read the rubbish news on WhatsApp.

Out of the two vulnerable parents Adichie was worrying about in this essay from April, it is poignant to realize that her father was to die just two months later. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Adele A Wilby

Recent protests in the US by Trump supporters since the election of Joe Biden, highlight just how political ideologies have the potential to tear seemingly ‘stable’ societies apart. A political divide however cannot always be seen as a clear-cut contradiction between the right and the left, as, for example, the way Trump supporters might assert; Biden, and Democrats more broadly, could hardly be seen to represent the left. Likewise, the right has it shades of commitment to conservatism. However, Trump’s 70 million supporters represent a congealing of far-right politics in America identifiable by the policies articulated by Trump that they endorse: anti- immigration, racism, a resurgent nationalism. While there is little doubt that such policies have been magical music to the ears of many right wingers,  for others Trump and the Republican Party do not go far enough, and it is these extreme right-wing groups that are the subject of Talia Lavin’s book Culture Warlords: My Journey into the Dark Web of White Supremacists.

Lavin opens her book with an explicit acknowledgement of her politics. She admits that she is ‘to the left of Medicare for All’. Thus, there is no pretence of ‘objectivity’ in the subject of her research and analysis: the book is an account of her one year internet engagement with a ‘sliver of a movement’ of the right-wing spectrum. Her research though adds up to a shocking yet thought provoking first-hand account of the thinking that underpins the deep hate and the almost godlike worship of violence that white supremacists profess. Read more »

A lamp lighting a storefront in Vahrn, South Tyrol, in November of 2020. And sky.

by David Kordahl

When I was seventeen years old, I took my first college science course, a summer class in astronomy for non-majors. The professor narrated his wild claims in an amused deadpan, calmly showing us how to reconstruct the life cycle of stars, and how to estimate the age of the universe. This course was at the University of Iowa, and I imagine that the professor was accustomed to intermittent resistance from students like me, whose rural, religious upbringing led them—led me—to challenge his claims. Yet I often found myself at a loss. The professor used a soft sell, and his claims seemed somewhere beyond the realm of mere politics or belief. Sure, I could spot a few gaps in his vision (he batted away my psychoanalytic interpretation of the Big Bang by saying he had never heard of Freud), but I envied him. I wished that my own positions were so easy to defend.

Seventeen years later, I’m now in the professor’s position, defending physics to doubting undergraduates. My views now are mostly easy to defend. Yet as someone who never progressed much beyond an undergrad knowledge of astronomy (I took one graduate cosmology course and left it at that), I’ll admit that some of the things that bothered me back then still bother me today. Some of the grandest claims in physics are based almost solely on astrophysical evidence, including the assertion that our standard physics accounts for less than 5% of what’s really there, with the other 95+% of mass-energy in the woolly categories of “dark energy” and “dark matter.” Such views are mainstream enough now to invite few scientific naysayers. Read more »

by Tim Sommers

Cosmology is a young science. Maybe the youngest. Some people say it started in the 1920’s when these little glowing clouds visible at certain points in the sky were found, by better and better telescopes, to be composed of billions and billions of stars, just like our own galaxy – the Milky Way – and it was then discovered that no matter what direction you looked they were all rushing away from us. More than one cosmologist has wondered if these galaxies know something that you and I don’t.

On the other hand, maybe, cosmology is the oldest science – if looking up at the stars counts. Anyway, well before the discovery of other galaxies we knew that the universe was very old and very large, but, boy, we had no idea.

Other people say cosmology began when Einstein’s General Relativity gave us some of the math we needed to talk about the universe as a whole for the first time and began to raise questions about its shape.

For me, I say, cosmology didn’t really start until the 1960s when satellites designed to detect tiny amounts of microwave radiation mapped what we now call the “cosmic microwave background radiation”. Here’s the thing that we had missed for so long, the thing that is so hard to believe that we all take for granted now – hardly worth talking about. If the galaxies are all very far apart and getting further apart all the time, doesn’t it follow that there was a time when they were all very close together? Doesn’t it follow, in fact, as most likely, that there was a starting point? Isn’t this, for the first time in the history of humanity, empirical evidence that the universe had a beginning? And if there was such a beginning would it make a sound even if no one was around to hear it? The answer is, yes, yes, and it would make a sound, it does. If you have an old radio or tv, detune it or stop between stations and hear the static, the fuzz. That’s it. That’s the sound of the cosmic microwave background radiation. It’s been there since the beginning of time.

But if the universe has a beginning, will it have an end? And how will it end? Read more »

by Pranab Bardhan

Many decades back when I was teaching at MIT, a senior colleague of mine, Paul Rosenstein-Rodan, a famous development economist, asked me at the beginning of our many long conversations what my politics was like. I said “Left of center, though many Americans may consider it too far left while several of my Marxist friends in India do not consider it left enough”. As someone from ‘old Europe’ he understood, and immediately put his hand on his heart and said “My heart too is located slightly left of center”. A 2015 study by psychologist Jose Duarte and his co-authors found that 58 to 66 per cent of social scientists in the US are ‘liberal’ (an American word, which unlike in Europe or India, may often mean ‘left of center’), and only 5 to 8 per cent are conservative. If anything, social scientists in the rest of the world are on average probably somewhat to the left of their American counterparts. If that is the case, for the world in general social democracy is likely to be an important, though not always decisive, ingredient of their ideology. In European politics and intellectual circles there was a time when social democrats were considered the main enemy of the communists, at least in their rivalry to get the attention of working classes, but now with the fading away of old-style communists, social democrats have a larger tent, which includes some socialists of yesteryear as well as liberals, besieged as they both now are by right-wing populists.

In an earlier column on “Prospects of Social Democracy in a Post-Pandemic World” I have discussed how in general the actual or potential strength of social democratic parties may change with the constraints and opportunities of such a world. In this article I go beyond the modalities of actually functioning political parties to a somewhat deeper analysis of the social democratic idea as a balance between some conflicting but also potentially complementary social values, and how this balance may be shifting in our complex world and difficult time, and how that influences the ideological positions of social scientists.

Let us go beyond the over-simple and amorphous left-right distinction (historically originating in particular ways of seating in the French National Assembly) which over the years has become quite misleading, particularly in failing to capture the multi-dimensionality of ideological positions. Let us instead start with the old-style foundational values of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity. The old simple categorization used to be that those who particularly emphasize the primacy of liberty as a social value were called liberals; socialists used to be associated with belief in the primacy of equality or ‘social justice’; and belief in the primacy of fraternity or community solidarity lent to the description of one’s being a communitarian. But things get complicated as there are multiple layers in that trinity of social values, and people, particularly social scientists, in their belief system usually mix the different ingredients of all the three in markedly varying proportions to concoct a smorgasbord that passes for their ideology. Read more »

by Ashutosh Jogalekar

I shamelessly borrow the title of this essay from my mentor and friend Freeman Dyson’s marvelous talk on birds and frogs in mathematics. Birds are thinkers who look at the big picture and survey the landscape from a great height. Frogs are thinkers who love playing around in the mud of specific problems, delighting in finding gems and then polishing them so that they become part of the superstructure that birds survey. Einstein was a bird, Hubble was a frog. Science needs both birds and frogs for its progress, but there are cases in which one kind of creature is more important than another.

Most of the great thinkers in physics of ancient times were birds. They went by the name of natural philosophers. The fact that they were birds speaks both to the raw state of scientific knowledge at that time and the attitude that these thinkers had toward what we call science, an attitude that we should resurrect. Aristotle, Plato, Newton and Kepler saw science as a seamless part of a worldview that included religion. Many of them were alchemists and astrologers. Unlike many scientists today, they saw no conflict between science and mysticism and believed both to be created by God for man to study. Newton was a supreme bird, seeing Nature as a book written by God, a puzzle whose solutions had room for both calculus and alchemy, both gravitation and an Arian rejection of the Holy Trinity. Newton kept his Arian convictions secret for fear of persecution, but there is no doubt in his own mind that they were as legitimate as his scientific inquiries. At the beginning of the third volume of his famous Principia, Newton said, “It remains that, from the same principles, I now demonstrate the system of the world”, leaving no doubt either about his ambition or his grand birdlike worldview.

Even before Newton, Francis Bacon who can rightly be called the father of the modern scientific method of fact-finding and theorizing was a superb frog. Bacon rejected the Aristotelian theorizing that had characterized much of the history of science before him and said, “All depends on keeping the eye fixed upon the facts of Nature, for God forbid that we may give out a dream of our own imagination for a pattern of the world.” Read more »

Everything passes and everything changes,
just do what you think you should do
…………………………………….… —Bob Dylan

Flux You, Heraclitus!

…. —for Brian

Another lifelong friend has died
Sunday
part of me again has vanished too

We were young together building things, partners,
carpenters in sync we drove spikes through joists
hammering steel to steel. You once exclaimed,
laughing when a shifty wind came up
snatching a sheet of ply from grips,
 “Flux you, Heraclitus!”
………………………..……… and here
that philosopher’s hard truth is word
slipping through my lips

Now I want to run my car
down the narrow sloped cleft of Main again,
windows open wide, slow roll in low
coasting as a hawk on thermals might,
to hear it’s muffler throb, hear its stutter
bouncing off stone façades
and plate glass storefronts,
shattering silence in the dark,
racket-making louder than
mere mutter

Jim Culleny
11/16/20

by Paul Braterman

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. The authors have read widely and deeply over an enormous range of topics, and blended their insights into a coherent unified account covering subjects as diverse as genetics, stratigraphy, and the fine details of chemical bonding. The result is an overview stretching from ancient foreshadowings, through Enlightenment era explorations, to the crucial developments of the mid-19^th and early 20^th-centuries, which gave us evolution science in something very close to its present form, and beyond that to the 20^th-century discoveries of the molecular basis of inheritance, and the more recent discoveries made possible by genome sequencing. Throughout, complex topics are clearly explained to a high level of technical accuracy, without oversimplification or obscurantism. The work is enlivened throughout with well-judged quotations from the scientists involved in these discoveries, including contributions often overlooked. I found two small errors¹, but these are of no importance to the narrative. I also had problems with the title and emphasis of the final chapter, The New Lamarkism; more on this later.

The authors will already be familiar to many readers. John Gribbin holds a Ph.D. in astrophysics from Cambridge, where he was part of Fred Hoyle’s research group. He is a prolific and highly successful writer on scientific topics, with In Search of Schrodinger’s Cat and its successor, Schrödinger’s Kittens and the Search for Reality among his best-known works. He and his wife Mary are both Visiting Fellows at the University of Sussex, and have written several books together regarding the history of science, including The Fellowship and Out of the Shadow of a Giant. Those last two both feature Robert Boyle and Robert Hooke, who also make short appearances here.

Evolution is a fact. Those are the, to me, very welcome first words of the Introduction. Later in the paragraph, the authors state their view that the most successful theory of evolution is that of natural selection. I prefer to refer to our understanding of evolution, avoiding the blanket expression “theory of evolution” altogether. This is not just because the word “theory” can bring with it a suggestion of uncertainty, but because there are many partial theories, including notably neutral drift in addition to natural selection, and because evolution intersects with so many other different topics, as the book itself makes clear, from molecular biology to Earth sciences. Read more »