Elisa Wouk Almino at Hyperallergic:

As early as the mid-1950s, the art critic John Berger complained about the ways in which art was shown, taught, and written about. The art world — a term he deplored — was too insular, and the art historians and critics did very little to mitigate this. Perhaps most crucially, they failed to share art’s profound connections to human experience. It was no wonder that people expressed little interest in artworks, Berger said in a 1956 article for the New Statesman, because they’ve been led to believe “that such works as do exist have nothing to say to them.” Today, Berger’s demands appear more urgent and his criticisms only truer.

A new biography on Berger — the first published since his death in January of 2017 — reveals a writer who to this day speaks most eloquently and passionately to our frustrations, fears, hopes, and desires. The book, authored by Joshua Sperling and published by Verso, is titled A Writer of Our Time: The Life and Work of John Berger. At Sperling’s Los Angeles book launch, where I led a conversation with him, he explained that the title is a riff on Berger’s first novel, A Painter of Our Time. But the label of “a writer of our time” is also earned.

More here.

Valentin Amrhein, Sander Greenland & Blake McShane in Nature:

When was the last time you heard a seminar speaker claim there was ‘no difference’ between two groups because the difference was ‘statistically non-significant’?

If your experience matches ours, there’s a good chance that this happened at the last talk you attended. We hope that at least someone in the audience was perplexed if, as frequently happens, a plot or table showed that there actually was a difference.

How do statistics so often lead scientists to deny differences that those not educated in statistics can plainly see? For several generations, researchers have been warned that a statistically non-significant result does not ‘prove’ the null hypothesis (the hypothesis that there is no difference between groups or no effect of a treatment on some measured outcome)¹. Nor do statistically significant results ‘prove’ some other hypothesis. Such misconceptions have famously warped the literature with overstated claims and, less famously, led to claims of conflicts between studies where none exists.

We have some proposals to keep scientists from falling prey to these misconceptions.

More here.

James Meadway in Open Democracy:

There is a wonderful metaphor in Alastair Macintyre’s After Virtue, in which the philosopher asks us to imagine a world hit by some terrible calamity that caused scientific and technical knowledge to be almost destroyed. What was left was smashed into thousands upon thousands of disconnected pieces, and the inhabitants of this world had to piece together their understanding of science and technology from what was lost, trying to line up the remnants of the earlier age as best they could.

Scrabbling, ignorant, and in the darkness, they would sometimes get things right. More often, however, they would get things seriously wrong. Most of all, they had lost any sense of science as a system, depriving them not only of the existing knowledge, but how to generate new ideas and make new discoveries.

It’s an image that haunts me, repeatedly, when surveying the state of the left today.

More here.

The Delight Song of Tsoai-Talee

I am a feather on the bright sky
I am the blue horse that runs in the plain
I am the fish that rolls, shining, in the water
I am the shadow that follows a child
I am the evening light, the lustre of meadows
I am an eagle playing with the wind
I am a cluster of bright beads
I am the farthest star
I am the cold of the dawn
I am the roaring of the rain
I am the glitter on the crust of the snow
I am the long track of the moon in a lake
I am a flame of four colors
I am a deer standing away in the dusk
I am a field of sumac and pomme blanche
I am an angle of geese in the winter sky
I am the hunger of a young wolf
I am the whole dream of these things

You see, I am alive, I am alive
I stand in good relation to the Gods
I stand in good relation to the earth
I stand in good relation to everything that is beautiful…
You see, I am alive, I am alive

by Navarre Scott Momaday
from Modern American Poetry

**
“My name is Tsoai‐talee. I am, therefore, Tsoai‐talee; therefore I am. The storyteller Pohd‐lokh gave me the name Tsoai‐talee. He believed that a man’s life proceeds from his name, in the way that a river proceeds from its source.” —Scott Momaday

Shaj Mathew in The New Yorker:

The Twice-Born,” a new memoir by Aatish Taseer, is troubled by a single plaintive question: Does a city steeped in tradition have a future in modern India? The setting is Benares, the spiritual capital of Hinduism, where more than five million pilgrims flock each year to worship, bathe, and burn their dead. Dying while in Benares, it is said, will release a Hindu from the cycle of reincarnation, and Taseer discovers an industry of death that’s alive and well in the city. He describes corpses that “sizzled away on funeral pyres,” as dinghies drifted on the Ganges amid smoke and marigolds. Taseer, to be clear, has not come to Benares to die. He’s in his thirties for most of the memoir, and, anyway, he’s not religious. His pilgrimage is secular; he seeks to filter the contradictions of present-day India through his life story. In the process, “The Twice-Born” becomes a moving, if maundering, riff on what it means to be modern. For Taseer, Benares incarnates a curious quality of modernity: the city makes anthropologists of the devout and believers of the skeptical. The book’s charm resides in the way the author orbits this tension between faith and rationality. He yearns to make sense of how “the laws of reason and the laws of magic . . . reached an easy harmony” in contemporary India.

Taseer attempts to focus the book on his interactions with Brahmins, Hinduism’s priestly caste. (They are the twice-born of the memoir’s title, because they are considered to be born a second time upon their scholarly initiation.) But Taseer is foremost a wanderer, and the roving form of the book echoes his penchant for circularity. He writes as though Benares, in all its many dimensions, can be apprehended only through overlapping, fractal perspectives, one of which is his own.

Taseer’s relationship to himself is distinctly spectatorial; he cannot stop looking at himself looking at himself. “I saw everything as an Anglicized Indian watching an imaginary European or American visitor watch India,” he writes. “I wished I had a more direct relationship with my country. But any attempt to do so only made the self-observing selves multiply.”

More here.

Olivia Goldhill in Quartz:

For all their pontificating and complex moral theories, ethicists are just as disappointingly flawed as the rest of humanity. A study of 417 professors published last week in Philosophical Psychology found that, though the 151 ethics professors expressed stricter moral views, they were no better at behaving ethically.

The paper, by philosophy graduate student Philipp Schönegger from the University of St Andrews in Scotland and philosophy professor Johannes Wanger from the University of Graz in Austria, surveyed professors’ views on a range of moral topics, including organ donation, charitable giving, and even how often they called their mother. They then asked the professors about their own behavior in each category.

More here.

Larry Cahill in Quillette:

Imagine your response to picking up a copy of the leading scientific journal Nature and reading the headline: “The myth that evolution applies to humans.” Anyone even vaguely familiar with the advances in neuroscience over the past 15–20 years regarding sex influences on brain function might have a similar response to a recent headline in Nature: “Neurosexism: the myth that men and women have different brains” subtitled “the hunt for male and female distinctions inside the skull is a lesson in bad research practice.”

Turns out that yet another book, this one with a fawning review in Nature, claims to “shatter” myths about sex differences in the brain while in fact perpetuating the largest one. Editors at Nature decided to give this book their imprimatur. Ironically, within a couple of days of the Nature review being published came a news alert from the American Association for the Advancement of Science titled, “Researchers discover clues to brain differences between males and females,” and a new editorial in Lancet Neurology titled “A spotlight on sex differences in neurological disorders,” both of which contradict the book’s core thesis. So what in the name of good science is going on here?

More here.

Matthew Yglesias in Vox:

Boeing executives are offering a simple explanation for why the company’s best-selling plane in the world, the 737 MAX 8, crashed twice in the past several months, leaving Jakarta, Indonesia, in October and then Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in March. Executives claimed Wednesday, March 27, that the cause was a software problem — and that a new software upgrade fixes it.

But this open-and-shut version of events conflicts with what diligent reporters in the aviation press have uncovered in the weeks since Asia, Europe, Canada, and then the United States grounded the planes.

The story begins nine years ago when Boeing was faced with a major threat to its bottom line, spurring the airline to rush a series of kludges through the certification process — with an under-resourced Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) seemingly all too eager to help an American company threatened by a foreign competitor, rather than to ask tough questions about the project.

More here.

Gary Greenberg in The Atlantic:

In 1886, Clark Bell, the editor of the journal of the Medico-Legal Society of New York, relayed to a physician named Pliny Earle a query bound to be of interest to his journal’s readers: Exactly what mental illnesses can be said to exist? In his 50-year career as a psychiatrist, Earle had developed curricula to teach medical students about mental disorders, co-founded the first professional organization of psychiatrists, and opened one of the first private psychiatric practices in the country. He had also run a couple of asylums, where he instituted novel treatment strategies such as providing education to the mentally ill. If any American doctor was in a position to answer Bell’s query, it was Pliny Earle.

Earle responded with a letter unlikely to satisfy Bell. “In the present state of our knowledge,” he wrote, “no classification can be erected upon a pathological basis, for the simple reason that, with slight exceptions, the pathology of the disease is unknown.” Earle’s demurral was also a lament. During his career, he had watched with excitement as medicine, once a discipline rooted in experience and tradition, became a practice based on science. Doctors had treated vaguely named diseases like ague and dropsy with therapies like bloodletting and mustard plasters. Now they deployed chemical agents like vaccines to target diseases identified by their biological causes. But, as Earle knew, psychiatrists could not peer into a microscope to see the biological source of their patients’ suffering, which arose, they assumed, from the brain. They were stuck in the premodern past, dependent on “the apparent mental condition [his emphasis], as judged from the outward manifestations,” to devise diagnoses and treatments.

More here.

Salman Rushdie in The New York Times:

Something is happening in African literature: The women are coming. For decades now, a river of original and important writing by female authors has been flowing out of that continent — books by writers such as Marlene van Niekerk, of whose second novel Liesl Schillinger wrote in these pages, “books like ‘Agaat’ … are the reason people read novels”; Tsitsi Dangarembga (“Nervous Conditions”); and, of course, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Now that river has burst its banks and become a flood. Namwali Serpell’s extraordinary, ambitious, evocative first novel, “The Old Drift,” contributes powerfully to this new wave.

Interestingly, many of the contemporary books overlap with and even echo one another. Petina Gappah’s forthcoming novel, “Out of Darkness, Shining Light,” takes on the subject of the explorer David Livingstone and his African companions; “The Old Drift” also begins with Livingstone (but then moves on). Serpell’s novel is a multigenerational exploration of Zambia’s past, present and even its near future; another recent debut, “Harmattan Rain,” by Ayesha Harruna Attah, looks at the story of Ghana through the lives of three generations of women. And in September Maaza Mengiste’s “The Shadow King” will take on the subject of the Italian invasion of Ethiopia, moving beyond history to a kind of modern mythmaking, and looking at history primarily through the eyes of its female characters. “The Old Drift,” too, incorporates elements of fabulism into the history of Zambia, and, again, sees that history mostly through women’s eyes. Novuyo Rosa Tshuma’s “House of Stone,” published in the United States in January, has already been highly praised in The Guardian for summing up “not only … Zimbabwean history, but also all of African colonial history” — a large claim on behalf of any novel. Equally large claims have already been made for “The Old Drift,” which early reviewers have garlanded with comparisons to Toni Morrison and Gabriel García Márquez. Meanwhile, another recent novel, Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi’s “Kintu,” has been called a Ugandan “One Hundred Years of Solitude.” Trailing clouds of glory do they come.

More here.

At the Crossing

The tall guy in a green T-shirt,
vanishing past me as I cross
in the opposite direction,
has fairy wings on his shoulders:
toy ones, children’s fancy-dress wings,
cartoonish butterfly cut-outs.

Do they say gay? No time for that.
He flickers past the traffic lights –
whoosh! gone! – outside categories.
Do they say foreign? They say young.
They say London. Grab it, they say.
Kiss the winged joy as it flies.

Traffic swings around the corner;
gusts of drizzle sweep us along
the Strand in the glittering dark,
threading to and fro among skeins
of never-quite-colliding blurs.
All this whirling’s why we came out.

Those fragile flaps could lift no one.
Perhaps they were ironic wings,
tongue-in-cheek look-at-me tokens
to make it clear he had no need
of hydraulics, being himself
Hermes.
Wings, though; definite wings.

by Fleur Adcock
from Glass Wings
publisher: Bloodaxe, Newcastle, 2013

Brian Glavey in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

Is confessional poetry still interesting in our age of oversharing? Is it even confessional? If my students are any indication, readers immersed in multiple platforms of never-ending self-disclosure might not find the poetry of Robert Lowell or Anne Sexton particularly exhibitionist. Lowell’s Life Studies is personal, certainly, but not nearly as personal as your average Instagram story, not as revealing as the anecdotes my students are apt to volunteer in and after class, maybe not as real as the Real Housewives. Lowell famously described his turn toward the personal as a movement away from a rarefied and bloodless commitment to craft, “a breakthrough back into life” that promised to reenergize the writers of an entire generation. A half-century on, the subversions of their self-exposure can be harder to recognize. In the full thrall of TMI, it might be that the strangeness of confessional poetry has more to do these days with its being poetry than its being confessional. This development is not necessarily a bad thing. Indeed, I often try to highlight something like this dynamic by playing for my classes a recording of Sylvia Plath reading “Daddy” a few months before her death. It is an electrifying performance that completely reconfigures the way my students approach her poems. Plath brings to the text a theatrical intensity far flung from the rhetoric of therapeutic unburdening that the “confessional” label seems to suggest. As Plath declaims it, “Daddy” sounds more like the soliloquy of an Elizabethan villain than a straightforward exercise in self-expression. It is not so clear that such words unearth any sort of inner truth about the speaker, but they are certainly dramatic.

In The Art of Confession: The Performance of Self from Robert Lowell to Reality TV, Christopher Grobe makes a powerful case that this connection between confession and performance is no coincidence.

More here.

Rebecca Earle in Literary Hub:

All 4,500 named varieties of potatoes trace their ancestry to the Americas. Wild potatoes grow along the American cordillera, the mountains that run from the Andes to Alaska. People living on its slopes have been eating potatoes for time out of mind. Stone tools and preserved potato peels show that wild potatoes were being prepared for food in southern Utah and south-central Chile nearly 13,000 years ago; similar evidence dates their domestication from at least 7800 BCE on the northern coast of Peru. They formed an important part of the diet of many of the cultures inhabiting the 9000 kilometers between Utah and Chile.

Together with foods such as quinoa and maize, they provided a robust, starchy backbone to cuisines also enriched with chile peppers, beans and other vegetables. Each variety can be propagated from a “mother potato.” She sounds like an ancient deity but in botany the term refers to the mundane tuber or seed potato that provides the genetic material from which additional plants are cultivated.

One difficulty with potatoes is that they are difficult to store. Anyone who has ever lost track of a bag of potatoes knows this.

More here.

Eric Kaufmann in the New York Times:

Amid the uproar over the Ralph Northam blackface photograph, a Washington Post poll asked Virginians if he should remain governor. The results were striking: Only 48 percent of whites felt that he should stay in office. That percentage was exceeded by the nearly 60 percent of black Virginians who thought Mr. Northam should remain.

In another survey, part of my own research, I asked Americans whether President Trump’s wall is racist. White Democrats overwhelmingly said it was, virtually no Republicans did — and minorities placed in the middle.

We find this pattern across numerous issues. And taken as a whole, it reveals something about the United States in the Trump era: The country is not divided by racial conflict, but by conflict over racial ideology. This is a crucial difference — and it is also grounds for optimism.

More here.

Fabio Bergamin in Phys.Org:

Medicine has great hopes for personalised cancer immunotherapy. The idea is to have a vaccine prompt the immune system to fight a tumour. Scientists at ETH Zurich have developed a method that allows them to determine which molecules are suited to patient-specific immunisation. Cells belonging to the body’s own immune system can help fight tumours. For several years now, this has allowed oncologists to use medications known as checkpoint inhibitors to encourage T cells to eliminate tumour cells. Last year the two scientists who discovered this therapeutic approach were awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine.

While doctors are enjoying some initial successes with this method, especially with regard to melanomas and several other types of cancer, immunologists and cancer researchers are working to develop the approach further. What they have in mind is a vaccine that would cause cancer-repelling T cells to multiply in the body, thereby strengthening the body’s immune defences. The big question is which molecules are suitable for a vaccine? Researchers working in the team of Manfred Kopf, Professor of Molecular Biomedicine, have now developed a method for identifying such molecules. Since on the one hand tumours differ greatly from patient to patient, and on the other no two people (except identical twins) have the same immune system, future immunisation against cancer is a complex example of personalised medicine. The goal is to develop an individual vaccine for each patient.

More here.

The Birth of Guam, a Poem

Guam was born on March 6, 1521, when Ferdinand Magellan arrived in the womb of Humåtak Bay and delivered [us] into the calloused hands of modernity. “Guam is Where Western Imperialism in the Pacifc Begins!” St. Helena Augusta, tayuyute [ham] : pray for [us]. The annual reenactment of “Discovery Day” is a must see for all tourists: Chamorros-dressed-as-our- ancestors welcome Chamorros-dressed-as-the-galleon-crew. After the bloody performance, enjoy local food, walking tours, live reggae bands, and fireworks! Guam was adopted on December 10, 1898, when the Treaty of Paris was signed, and Spain ceded [us] to the United States. “Guam is Where America’s Western Frontier Begins!” Guam was declared an “unincorporated territory” on May 27, 1901, when the Supreme Court Insular Cases decided that the U.S. constitution does not follow its flag. “Guam is Where America’s Logic of Territorial Incorporation Ends!” Guam was kidnapped on December 8, 1941, when Japan bombed, invaded, and occupied [us]. “Guam is Where the Greater East Asia Co- Prosperity Sphere Begins!” On July 21, 1944, the U.S. armed forces returned and defeated the Japanese military. Guam was naturalized on August 1, 1950, when the Organic Act bestowed U.S. citizenship upon [us]. “Guam is Where America’s Passports Begin!” Guam was pimped out on May 1, 1967, when Pan American World Airways arrived with the first 109 Japanese tourists. The Guam Visitors Bureau birthed a new marketing slogan: “Guam is Where America’s Day Begins!” Since Guam is located 2,000 miles west of the international dateline, [we] instagram the sunrise before anyone in the fifty states. For the past 30 years, a straw poll on Guam has accurately predicted U.S. presidential elections, even though our votes don’t actually count in the electoral college. “Guam is Where America’s Voting Rights End!” This ironic streak ended in 2016, when Hillary Clinton received 70% of the ballots cast on Guam, yet Donald Trump still won #notmycolonizerinchief. St. Thomas More, tayuyute [ham]. After the election, [we] begin the countdown to Super Bowl Monday, a sacred day when all Chamorros leave work and school in procession to the altar of the television. St. Sebastian, tayuyute [ham]. I attended George Washington High School on Guam, but I often skipped “English” class because the haole teacher made [us] memorize boring, canonical verse. “Guam is Where America’s Poetry Begins!” Sorry not sorry if I threw everyone’s rhyme and meter off.

by Graig Santos Perez

Caitlin Flanagan in The Atlantic:

“What the hell is wrong with Michael?” Chris Rock asked in Never Scared, which was filmed in 2004, the same year the pop star was indicted on a second child-molestation charge. “Another kid?” he asked, stunned, before summing up the situation perfectly: “We love Michael so much, we let the first kid slide.” In 1993, the parents of a boy named Jordan Chandler filed a civil suit against Jackson, which the entertainer settled for an estimated $25 million. The 2004 molestation charge against him was supported by evidence gained during a 2003 police raid on Neverland Ranch, including photographs of a hidden closetoutfitted with multiple deadbolts and a bed, life-size mannequins of children that could be bent into various positions, and enough children’s toys to fill the lair of a figure from Grimm’s Fairy Tales. In 2005, Jackson was found not guilty of the molestation charge, and other charges against him. But the photographs and their terrible implications lived on, even as Jackson’s true believers insisted he was an innocent man.

Like Hannibal Buress’s bit about Bill Cosby raping women, Leaving Neverland is what finally got many people to admit to themselves what they already believed. The testimony of the two men is so intimate, so drenched with the sorrow of ruined childhoods, that it cannot be denied.

More here.

Scott Alexander in Slate Star Codex:

Elephants have bigger brains than humans, so why aren’t they smarter than we are?

The classic answer has been to play down absolute brain size in favor of brain size relative to body. Sometimes people justify this as “it takes a big brain to control a body that size”. But it really doesn’t. Elephants have the same number of limbs as mice, operating on about the same mechanical principles. Also, dinosaurs had brains the size of walnuts and did fine. Also, the animal with the highest brain-relative-to-body size is a shrew.

The classic answer to that has been to look at a statistic called “encephalization quotient”, which compares an animal’s brain size to its predicted brain size given an equation that fits most animals. Sometimes people use brain weight = constant x (body weight)^0.66, where the constant varies depending on what kind of animal you’re talking about. The encephalization quotient mostly works, but it’s kind of a hack. Also, capuchin monkeys have higher EQ than chimps, but are not as smart. Also, some birds have lower encephalization quotients than small mammals, but are much smarter.

So although EQ usually does a good job predicting intelligence, it’s definitely not perfect, and it doesn’t tell us what intelligence is.

A new AI Impacts report on animal intelligence, partly based on research by Suzana Herculano-Houzel, starts off here. If we knew what made some animals smarter than others, it might help us figure out what intelligence is in a physiological sense, and that might help us predict the growth of intelligence in future AIs.

More here.