Jenann Ismael at the TLS:

Some claim that the idea of human freedom is built on illusions about human specialness that are a holdover from a religious conception of the world, and that they should be swept aside with the advancing tides of science. This position has been trumpeted loudly by people who present themselves as brave defenders of science: by scientists such as Einstein, Stephen Hawking and Richard Dawkins, and by philosophers including Alexander Rosenberg and Sam Harris. To most people, however, it seems literally unbelievable that the scales of fate don’t hang in the balance when making a difficult decision. And it is not just those dark nights of the soul where this matters. You think that you could cross the street here or there, pick these socks or those, go to bed at a reasonable hour or stay up, howl at the moon and eat donuts till dawn. Every choice is a juncture in history and it is up to you to determine which way to go.

Yet, if there is one foundational scientific fact, it is that things can’t happen that the laws of physics don’t allow. And the clash between these two things shows that there is something centrally important about ourselves and our position in the cosmos that we don’t understand.

more here.

Ian Martin at The New Statesman:

Fifty years ago this month, Bob Dylan played the Isle of Wight Festival. They say if you can remember 1969 you weren’t there, but I do and I was, boomerphobes. I can even tell you what half a century feels like if you’re interested, although it’s a bit layered. A bit contradictory.

In all honesty, I can just reach out and touch 1969. It’s no distance at all, like from here to the end of the garden. However, the distance between now and then is also an aeon of unfathomable space-time parameters, heavier than Jupiter’s gravity multiplied by infinity.Historically at least, it is definitely a world away. Fifty years ago we were nearing the end of the Post-Industrial Jurassic period and to be honest feeling a bit done in, a bit puffed out, what with all that dark satanic coal, tar, diesel, petrol, two-stroke and fag smoke. Our fat-marbled air, yet to comprehend an internet, held instead molecules of carbon grit, Wimpy onions and brickdust from pulverised Victorian streets.

more here.

Bernardine Evaristo in The Guardian:

It’s hard to overstate the significance of Toni Morrison in the pantheon of global black literature. For many of us she was the lodestar who inspired us to write from within our own cultures, often from female perspectives, and to dignify the heterogeneity of black experiences through literature we could call our own. As a young, aspiring writer I was enriched by her work and empowered by her words of wisdom. I read an interview with her in the seminal Black Women Writers at Work, edited by Claudia Tate, in 1984, which articulated exactly how it felt to be a young black British woman writer at that time. She and others galvanised my generation to write our stories and smash through the walls of the status quo. “There’s a notion out in the land,” Morrison said, “that there are human beings one writes about, and then there are black people or Indians or some other marginal group. If you write about the world from that point of view, somehow it is considered lesser.” Morrison, our elder stateswoman, spoke with authority on issues of race and literature, as she did for the rest of her life. We always knew she was on our side.

She wrote uncompromisingly about African American society and history, and positioned her characters on the main stage as fully fledged humans with an extensive emotional range and intellectual scope. She showed the complexity of their lives through her formidably imaginative, storytelling powers. Her books were in the tradition of a literature that stretched back to the “slave narratives” of the 19th century and she was by no means the only writer filling in the cultural absences in an American literature that too often excluded, marginalised or stereotyped her people. Writers such as Audre Lorde, Gloria Naylor, Alice Walker and Ntozake Shange were also early inspirations for me. But Morrison reigned supreme, in no small part due to her extensive output of 11 novels and three books of critical thinking, as well as works for children, opera and theatre.

More here.

From The New York Times:

Toni Morrison spoke at Harvard Divinity School on the subject of altruism in 2012. Her lecture is published here for the first time.

On an October morning in 2006, a young man backed his truck into the driveway of a one-room schoolhouse. He walked into the school and after ordering the boy students, the teacher and a few other adults to leave, he lined up 10 girls, ages 9 to 13, and shot them. The mindless horror of that attack drew intense and sustained press as well as, later on, books and film. Although there had been two other school shootings only a few days earlier, what made this massacre especially notable was the fact that its landscape was an Amish community — notoriously peaceful and therefore the most unlikely venue for such violence.

Before the narrative tracking the slaughter had been exhausted in the press, another rail surfaced, one that was regarded as bizarre and somehow as shocking as the killings. The Amish community forgave the killer, refused to seek justice, demand vengeance, or even to judge him. They visited and comforted the killer’s widow and children (who were not Amish), just as they embraced the relatives of the slain. There appeared a number of explanations for their behavior — their historical aversion to killing anyone at all for any reason and their separatist convictions. More to the point, the Amish community had nothing or very little to say to outside inquiry except that it was God’s place to judge, not theirs. And, as one cautioned, “Do not think evil of this man.” They held no press conferences and submitted to no television interviews. They quietly buried the dead, attended the killer’s funeral, then tore down the old schoolhouse and built a new one.

Their silence following the slaughter, along with their deep concern for the killer’s family, seemed to me at the time characteristic of genuine “goodness.” And I became fascinated with the term and its definition.

More here.

John Maier in Prospect:

When I met him, Bryan Magee was nearly 89, marvellously lucid, curious to hear about my time at Oxford, and paralysed from the waist down: in many ways the ideal interviewee. For a generation of young viewers, Magee’s legendary television series about philosophy were a baptism in the waters of the subject, and he the urbane and worldly gatekeeper to a realm of theoretic abstraction and grounded, vigorous discussion such as had never before been entered—a watershed moment in a primetime slot.

“I wouldn’t rely on television for my introduction to anything,” Magee confided in me, blinking from behind glasses so thick they appeared to be double-glazed for warmth. “It seems to me a completely unimportant medium.” Bryan! I wept internally… It was like being told there was really only ever one Ronnie, or watching David Attenborough kick a pigeon. But—remembering what television is generally like—it was hard to disagree. Magee smiled grand-paternally back at me from where he sat, inside a small arms-reach fortress of books and papers, wielding a copy of Dumas the size of house-brick; the television screwed to the opposite wall was, I assumed, purely ornamental.

Bryan Magee, who died last month, had a career of intimidating sweep. He came up to Oxford in 1949, a particular post-war moment when the university’s unofficial monopoly in the production of trademark-ruling-elite seems to have been a little overstretched, as Magee found he had to take up several careers almost at once. He was watched by millions as a television journalist on This Week and began his 30-book literary career, making considerable contributions to scholarship on Wagner and Schopenhauer, all the while keeping up friendships with figures like Karl Popper and Bertrand Russell.

More here.

Ali Minai in Barbarikon:

India’s decision two days ago to revoke most of Article 370 of its constitution and annex the part of Jammu & Kashmir it holds has sent Subcontinental and transcontinental punditocracy into a frenzy of analysis, interpretation, speculation, and prediction. Several scenarios have risen to the surface.

The most interesting of these, generating a lot of chatter on the Internet – and elsewhere, no doubt – is a conspiracy theory that India’s move is part of a brilliant coordinated strategy between India, Pakistan, and the US to eventually make the LoC an international border with minimal political cost to either government. There are many variations of this theory, but the basic idea is this. First, India moves into its part of Jammu & Kashmir and annexes it, allowing the BJP government to look heroic and turning the LoC into an international border, with a buffer territory – Pakistani Jammu & Kashmir – on the other side. Then, after a suitable interval of making noises and writing plaintive but futile missives to the UN, Pakistan declares that the situation is intolerable and annexes its part, thus making the LoC an actual international border. Uncle Sam rewards Pakistan for this daring act by allowing it to negotiate a favorable settlement in Afghanistan, thus fulfilling Pakistan’s dream of “strategic depth”. Some sort of free cross-border movement is negotiated for Kashmiris on either side of the border. China secures CPEC. Everyone is left happy and dreaming of visits to Oslo.

I think this scenario is extremely unlikely to be true – though it makes for a good movie plot.

More here.

C. Brandon Ogbunu and C. Malik Boykin in the Boston Review:

In recent years, biology’s “nature vs. nurture” war has reemerged with advanced weapons, although the central questions have not changed: What makes us human? Why are we different from one another? Nonetheless, the methods used to address them have undergone several revolutions. We now benefit from hundreds of twin and adoption studies, which have provided heritability estimates for dozens of characteristics relating to human behavior and wellness. Simultaneously, we are reaping the benefits of technological breakthroughs that have made it possible to screen thousands of individuals to uncover genes associated with particular traits. Thanks to this, we have been able to correlate genetic signatures with a growing list of physical (e.g., height, skin color), physiological (e.g., risk for type-2 diabetes, hypertension), and behavioral (e.g., risk for depression, autism) traits. At the same time, epidemiology, psychology, and sociology continue to demonstrate the pliability of the human experience across populations, and we continue to learn more about the social forces that create vast differences in the human experience.

In combination, work from the natural and social sciences should have fostered a golden age for the study of human behavior. And yet, conversations about how to explain differences between individuals and groups are more controversial than ever—perhaps not surprisingly, given the political implications of any answer. Recent breakthroughs in molecular biology have compounded the stakes.

More here.

David Chalmers in Edge:

We’ve got these bodies and these brains, which work okay, but we also have minds. We see, we hear, we think, we feel, we plan, we act, we do; we’re conscious. Viewed from the outside, you see a reasonably finely tuned mechanism. From the inside, we all experience ourselves as having a mind, as feeling, thinking, experiencing, being, which is pretty central to our conception of ourselves. It also raises any number of philosophical and scientific problems. When it comes to explaining the objective stuff from the outside—the behavior and so on—you put together some neural and computational mechanisms, and we have a paradigm for explaining those.

When it comes to explaining the mind, particularly the conscious aspects of the mind, it looks like the standard paradigm of putting together mechanisms and explaining things like the objective processes of behavior leaves an explanatory gap. How does all that processing give you a subjective experience, and why does it feel like something from the inside doesn’t look like it’s directly addressed by these methods? That’s what people call the hard problem of consciousness, as opposed to, say, the easy problems of explaining behavior.

Discussion can then spin off in a thousand directions. Could you explain conscious experience in terms of the brain? Does it require something fundamentally new? Does it exist at all? Lately, I’ve been interested in coming at this from a slightly different direction. We’ve got the first-order problem of consciousness, and then it’s often hard for people from AI research, or neuroscience, or psychology to say, “There’s a problem here, but I’m not quite sure what I can do with it.”

More here.

Charlie Parker (1950)

Bird is building a metropolis with his horn.
Here are the gates of Babylon, the walls of Jericho cast down.
Might die in Chicago, Kansas City’s where I was born.

Snowflake in a blizzard, purple rose before the thorn.
Stone by stone, note by note, atom by atom, noun by noun,
Bird is building a metropolis with his horn.

Uptown, downtown, following the river to its source,
Savoy, Three Deuces, Cotton Club, Lenox Lounge.
Might just die in Harlem, Kansas City’s where I was born.

Bird is an abacus of possibility, Bird is riding the horse
of habit and augmented sevenths. King without a crown,
Bird is building a metropolis with his horn.

Bred to the labor of it, built to claw an eye from the storm,
made for the lowdown, the countdown, the breakdown.
Might die in Los Angeles, Kansas City’s where I was born.

Bridge by bridge, solo by solo, set by set, chord by chord,
woodshed to penthouse, blue to black to brown,
Charlie Parker is building a metropolis with his horn.
Might just die in Birdland, Kansas City’s where I was born.

by Campbell McGrath
from Poem Hunter

Joseph O’Neill in the New York Review of Books:

“I claim the right to the United States, for myself and my children and my uncles and cousins, by manifest destiny.” The claimant is Suketu Mehta, in This Land Is Our Land: An Immigrant’s Manifesto. The reference to manifest destiny isn’t merely trolling. Mehta’s thesis is that extensive migration from poor parts of the globe to the US is as inevitable and justified as the westward migration that built this country. He goes on:

This land is your land, this land is our land, it belongs to you and me. We’re here, we’re not going back, we’re raising our kids here. It’s our country now…. We’re not letting the bastards take it back.

It’s our America now.

You’ll have spotted that Mehta isn’t asking for a benevolent, liberal-American accommodation of the immigrant. He doesn’t even mention the Declaration of Independence (though he does mention the Universal Declaration of Human Rights). Rather, he is asserting a right of migration that can override the right of nation-states to keep people out. His point of view is the migrant’s, not the native’s.

More here.

Kevin Hartnett in Quanta:

When we design a skyscraper we expect it will perform to specification: that the tower will support so much weight and be able to withstand an earthquake of a certain strength.

But with one of the most important technologies of the modern world, we’re effectively building blind. We play with different designs, tinker with different setups, but until we take it out for a test run, we don’t really know what it can do or where it will fail.

This technology is the neural network, which underpins today’s most advanced artificial intelligence systems. Increasingly, neural networks are moving into the core areas of society: They determine what we learn of the world through our social media feeds, they help doctors diagnose illnesses, and they even influence whether a person convicted of a crime will spend time in jail.

Yet “the best approximation to what we know is that we know almost nothing about how neural networks actually work and what a really insightful theory would be,” said Boris Hanin, a mathematician at Texas A&M University and a visiting scientist at Facebook AI Research who studies neural networks.

More here.

Mohammed Hanif in the New York Times:

The cheerleaders for Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India are cheering for Partition redux, a world-class massacre, ethnic cleansing. The brute power of Hindu supremacy has its own logic, and it requires not only that Kashmiris be denied a future but also that they be humiliated and punished for their past sin of not being grateful Indians. While individual Indian Muslims across the country are being lynched for trading beef or forced to chant Hindutva slogans, Kashmiris are locked up en masse. Thank you, we don’t need collaborators anymore.

When some years ago a leader of Mr. Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party said during an election rally that Muslim women should be dug from their graves and raped, he sounded like a deranged fanatic. But increasingly that outburst sounds like one more action point on a Hindu nationalist’s to-do list. Early this week, there were videos of young Hindus claiming that now they can get themselves Kashmiri girls. Many victims of the original Partition were women who were raped or who jumped into wells to avoid being raped. Now young Indian men seem to think another historic opportunity has opened up.

More here.

Helen Pearson at Literary Review:

The authors find little proof of increasing busyness among the population. Yes, as expected, people were spending far more time on digital devices in 2015 than they were in 2000. But the data provides little evidence that people now spend more time multitasking or that they’re switching more often from one activity to another, which might make our time seem fragmented and frantic.

The perception that we’re all super busy might have grown, the authors say, because of the way that certain subgroups of the population who have seen an increase in their workloads – those who are highly educated, in higher-status jobs and in dual-career households with small children – are more likely to have an influential voice in society and the media and so might have helped to create an impression that everyone is now busier.

more here.

Peter E. Gordon at the NYRB:

The German philosopher and social theorist Theodor W. Adorno died fifty years ago this week, in the late summer of 1969. Even at the time of his death, he was entangled in controversy. Student militants, many of them aligned with the so-called “extra-parliamentary opposition,” had once seen him as a political ally. But when they occupied the Institute for Social Research at the Goethe–University Frankfurt, where Adorno kept his office, he called in the police, an act that was seen as unforgivable by the student radicals: How could a theorist of anti-fascism side with the authorities?

Adorno’s decision opened a bitter divide between the so-called Frankfurt School and the more militant members of the student movement that would never truly heal. In late April 1969, when Adorno commenced the first of his lectures on “An Introduction to Dialectical Thinking,” two students rushed the podium, demanding that Adorno engage in a public act of self-criticism.

more here.

Michiko Kakutani in The Guardian:

In novels spanning several hundred years of history, Toni Morrison used her historical imagination and her remarkable gifts of language to chronicle the horrors of slavery and Jim Crow, and their continuing fallout on the everyday lives of black Americans. Violent, heart-wrenching events occur in her fiction: a runaway slave named Sethe cuts the throat of her baby daughter with a handsaw to spare her the fate she suffered herself as a slave (Beloved); a cosmetics salesman hunts down his lover and shoots her dead (Jazz); a woman pours kerosene on her drug-addicted son and sets him on fire (Sula). Such horrifying events are acts of desperation that can be comprehended only in the context of the earlier tragedies these characters or their families have suffered. In fact, if there is one insistent theme in Morrison’s novels, it’s the ways in which the past inexorably shapes the present, erasing innocence, cutting off options of escape, and warping relationships between women and men, parents and children.

As in William Faulkner’s work, the past is never dead for Morrison’s people – it’s not even past. Faulkner was clearly an influence on Morrison’s writing, as were Ralph Ellison, Virginia Woolf, Gabriel García Márquez and African American folklore. But Morrison forged from such disparate sources a voice that was all her own – fierce, poetic and Proustian in its ability to fuse time present and time past.

Her 1987 masterpiece Beloved created a harrowing portrait of slavery that possesses all the resonance of a classical myth, while remaining grounded in the awful particulars of American history.

More here.

The Blades

In the new world, as the goddess dictated,
each time a man touched a woman against
her will, each time he exposed himself,
each time he whistled, dropped something
in her drink, photographed her in secret

Jon Cohen in Science:

Drugs work stunningly well to control HIV—but not in everyone, and not without side effects. That’s why a small cadre of patients known as elite controllers has long fascinated researchers: Their immune system alone naturally suppresses HIV for decades without drugs. Now one team, inspired by success in mice, hopes to endow HIV-infected people with tailormade immune cells that target HIV, in effect creating elite controllers in the clinic. The immune strategy has risks, but it builds on increasingly popular cancer treatments with T cells engineered to have surface proteins, called chimeric antigen receptors (CARs), that can recognize markers on the surfaces of tumor cells and destroy the cancer. Such CAR T cells can also be tailored to identify and eliminate HIV-infected cells. This approach was tested in HIV-infected humans long before CAR T cells proved their worth against cancer, but it roundly failed. The field wants “to move what’s been learned from cancer back to HIV, completing the circle,” says Steven Deeks, an HIV/AIDS clinician at the University of California, San Francisco, who first tested a CAR T cell against the virus in the late 1990s.

The new study—conducted by researchers from the University of Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania; the biotech company Lentigen in Gaithersburg, Maryland; and the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City—uses a far more sophisticated CAR approach than the one Deeks tested. “It’s promising and seems to be more potent than what’s been tried in the past,” says stem cell biologist Hans-Peter Kiem, who has tested CAR T cells in leukemia and lymphoma patients at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, Washington. For the new work, published online this week in Science Translational Medicine, the researchers engineered T cells to include genes encoding two kinds of CARs, each targeting a different part of HIV’s surface protein. In test tube studies, this “duoCAR T” cell powerfully killed white blood cells infected with a diverse array of HIV variants, the group reports. The team also gave near simultaneous injections of CAR T cells and HIV-infected human cells to the spleens of mice with a “humanized” immune system. (Rodents cannot normally be infected with the AIDS virus.) When the group harvested spleens from the mice a week later, five of six mice had no detectable HIV DNA and their average viral levels had dropped 97.5%.

More here.

Paula Erizanu at the IAI:

What is your view regarding the idea that there might be a subjective or objective morality?

I think it’s very difficult to make the case for an objective morality if you’re using the word ‘objective’ in a strong sense, either to mean a universal morality or a foundational morality that all people everywhere understand and accept in a globalising world.

Ironically, I think the issue arises because individuals and institutions are aware of the existence of conflicting, even incommensurable, moral values and normative orders – subjective and objective, private and public –  but, for a range of strategic or exigent reasons, they want to normalize them, render them congruent or consensual.

By talking about “individuals and institutions”, I suppose I am already blurring the line between public and private, “subjective” and “objective”. Many of the pressing political movements of our times – Black Lives Matter, MeToo – display the problematic moral balance between personal morality and public, professional ethics. When there is a vast imbalance in gender power, when a person is in a position to alter the circumstances of another, sexual “consent” is a very problematic issue. You do not have to be a crass predator to be aware, even in the “heat” of the moment, that you are taking undue advantage of a colleague or a client or a friend, and putting them in an “impossible” situation. Institutional power is being deployed, however subtly or significantly, to achieve a coerced compliance or an exploitative outcome.

More here.