John Halstead & Phil Thomson at Works in Progress:

Hunter gatherers were not non-violent noble savages by any stretch of the imagination. They were relatively violent when compared with modern standards and even when compared with rates of violence experienced by other primates and mammals in general. However, we think this is primarily because human conflict is so lethal, not because it happens so often. On the contrary, hunter gatherers typically exhibit non-violent norms, with amoral and atypical sociopaths accounting for a disproportionate share of violence, just as in our own societies today.

Understanding this matters. Our extraordinary capacity to inflict lethal violence on each other is normally held in restraint by the natural aversion most people have to violence. If we fail to cooperate, we are vulnerable to falling into vicious cycles of violence that don’t benefit anyone. But we should be more optimistic about our capacity for peacemaking. Despite living in states of political anarchy, hunter gatherers were normally able to cooperate and exist peacefully together.

More here.

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Sean Carroll at Preposterous Universe:

Consciousness is easier to possess than to define. One thing we can do is to look into the brain and see what lights up when conscious awareness is taking place. A complete understanding of this would be known as the “neural correlates of consciousness.” Once we have that, we could hopefully make progress on developing a theoretical picture of what consciousness is and why it happens. Today’s guest, Christof Koch, is a leader in the search for neural correlates and an advocate of a particular approach to consciousness, Integrated Information Theory.

More here.

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From the Long Now Foundation:

Benjamin Bratton begins his Long Now Talk by noting the “persistent weirdness” of our times. We find ourselves in a “pre-paradigmatic moment” in which our technology has outpaced our theories of what to do with it.

The task of philosophy today is to catch up.

More here.

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Noah Smith at Noahpinion:

The debate over abundance liberalism unleashed by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s book has, so far, been pretty lopsided. On one hand, you have the abundance liberals themselves, who walk on eggshells to avoid offending the sensibilities of people to their left, in the hope of building a big tent. On the other side, you have a collection of Warrenite progressives and Bernie-faction leftists who simply assume that the abundance liberals are just a bunch of deregulators, and excoriate them for being corporatists and ignoring the dangers of billionaires and oligarchy and such.

Many things frustrate me about this debate. One is that most of the progressive critics of the abundance idea appear not to have actually read Klein and Thompson’s book; they lazily assume it’s all about deregulation, when in fact Klein and Thompson spend more time calling for building up state capacity and the power of the bureaucracy. Another frustrating thing is that the progressive critics seem to assume that their preferred ideas — such as antitrust — are alternatives to abundance, when in fact they usually don’t conflict, and sometimes complement each other.

But what frustrates me most is that by insisting on degrowth over abundance, progressives are hurting themselves much more than they’re hurting any billionaires, oligarchs, or conservatives.

More here.

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Sam Mills in aeon:

The Oscar Wilde Temple first opened in 2017, in the basement of the Church of the Village in Greenwich, New York. Wilde is glorified on a plinth: a creamy statue dressed as a dandy, his prison number from his time served in Reading Gaol, C.3.3, on a sign below him. Directly behind Wilde is a large neo-Gothic stained glass window of Jesus, drawing an association of martyrdom between the two men. On the walls there are also pictures of LGBTQ figures who were similarly persecuted: Alan Turing, Harvey Milk, Marsha P Johnson. The artwork was created by David McDermott and Peter McGough.

This is a depiction of Wilde that we are all familiar with: as a flamboyant aesthete and gifted writer, a witty provocateur who is supposed to have told customs officials in New York, ‘I have nothing to declare but my genius’, who wrote sparkling plays and splendid children’s books. He might have married the writer Constance Lloyd, but this was clearly a smokescreen to conceal his true sexuality, for he had numerous affairs with men, from Robbie Ross to Lord Alfred Douglas.

More here.

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Nic Fleming in Nature:

The enduring popularity of intermittent fasting has been fed by celebrity endorsements, news coverage and a growing number of books, including several written by researchers in the field. More than 100 clinical trials in the past decade suggest that it is an effective strategy for weight loss. And weight loss generally comes with related health improvements, including a reduced risk of heart disease and diabetes. What is less clear is whether there are distinct benefits that come from limiting food intake to particular windows of time. Does it protect against neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease, enhance cognitive function, suppress tumours and even extend lifespan?

More here.

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As For the World

As for the world,
I am always like one of
Socrates’ disciples,
Walking by his side,
Hearing his opinions and histories;
It remains for me to say:
Yes, Yes, it is like that.
You are right again,
Indeed your words are true.

As for my life,
I am always like Venice:
Whatever is mere streets in others
Within me is a dark streaming love.

As for the cry, as for the silence,
I am always a shofar:
All year long hoarding its one blast
For the Terrible Days.

As for action,
I am always like Cain:
Nomad
In the face of the act, which I will not do,
Or, having done,
Will make it irredeemable.

As for the palm of your hand,
As for the signals of my heart
And the plans of my flesh,
As for the writing on the wall,

I am always ignorant;
I can neither read nor write
And my head is like the
Heads of those senseless weeds,

Knowing only the rustle and drift
Of the wind
When a fate passes through me
To some other place.

by Yehuda Amichai
From Poems by Yehuda Amichai
Harper and Row, 1969

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Dorian Lynskey in The Guardian:

It is a tad obnoxious for Michael Lewis, perhaps America’s most consistently successful nonfiction author, to open his new book by boasting that a previous one sold half a million copies, but bear with him. The book in question was 2018’s The Fifth Risk, in which Lewis smartly responded to Donald Trump’s first administration with profiles of a handful of unknown federal government employees in order to valorise what Trump scorned and highlight the cost of breaking it. His point in the introduction to Who Is Government? is that you could lift the lid on any department and find a similar treasure trove of stories: people you’ve never heard of, doing work whose importance you’ve never understood.

Last year, Lewis assembled a crack team of long-form writers to uncover more of these stories for the Washington Post, and those articles are collected here. The gods have yet again smiled on him, if not his country, because the timing is horrendously perfect. One of the many people who doesn’t understand how the US government works has somehow been permitted to take it down to the studs in the name of “efficiency”.

More here.

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Leon Vlieger at The Inquisitive Biologist:

Evolution is often characterised rather one-sidedly in terms of a struggle for existence, “red in tooth and claw”, and selfish genes. And yet, as evolutionary biologist Jonathan Silvertown shows here, cooperation in biology is both widespread and ancient. In his entertaining Dinner with Darwin which I reviewed way back in 2018, he briefly touched on food sharing in humans as one example of cooperation; in Selfish Genes to Social Beings, he gives the topic at large the book-length treatment it deserves. Silvertown here writes for a broad audience, explicitly including those without a formal background in biology. With nary an equation in sight, he relies on a potent combination of human-interest stories, wit, and ingenious metaphors to convince you that cooperation is an important component driving evolution.

Cooperation initially flummoxed biologists, yet, Silvertown contends, a few straightforward conditions are sufficient for its appearance. I might just as well hit you over the head with his take-home messages now. Two conditions are required for cooperation to evolve. First, the benefits to the individuals involved have to outweigh the costs. Attentive biologists might immediately pipe up that that simple statement hides important technicalities, while others will undoubtedly exclaim: “Yes, but what about…?— bear with me, I will get to this. Second, there has to be a way for cheaters to be detected and excluded, or otherwise. the system will buckle under their exploitation.

More here.

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David Ciepley in The Hedgehog Review:

Market economies, in which the key productive inputs such as land, labor, and capital are bought and sold, display a notable long-run tendency  toward business concentration, high inequality, political capture, domination of the laboring classes, and ultimate economic sclerosis. Auspicious beginnings in economic and political freedom and relative equality seem ineluctably, despite periods of reprieve, to end in oligarchy, authoritarianism, and decline.

This is not just a surmise based on the current US trajectory, or on the higher returns to capital than labor.¹ It is also a conclusion of the comparative study of market economies from medieval Persia through the Dutch and Italian republics down to today.² To date, there has been no exception that would give us reason to ignore the words of caution attributed to Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis: “We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.” The fates of political democracy and political economy have always been linked.

More here.

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Cynthia Haven at The Book Haven:

The origins of Gregorian chant are enigmatic. It appears to have its roots in fourth-century Jerusalem. The link with Pope Gregory the Great (590-604) is the byproduct of early spin, based on what is probably an erroneous assumption that he composed and collected early chant.

The otherworldly effect of the music is hard to describe, but Mahrt, an associate professor of music at Stanford, recently gave it a try: “It is what we call monophonic – that is to say, it’s a melody that’s unaccompanied,” he said. “A free rhythm has an ability to evoke eternal things, more than passages tied down to regular time. It’s a sprung rhythm that has a freedom to it – like Hopkins’ poetry.”

Mahrt has conducted Gregorian chant for more than 40 years without a break. He is the director of Stanford’s Early Music Singers and of the St. Ann Choir, a Gregorian schola at St. Thomas Aquinas Church in Palo Alto. He instructs singers in the mysteries of “the chant,” as well as the glorious polyphonic music that came after it. In fact, it’s possible that there is more chant sung in Palo Alto than anywhere else in the country, with the possible exception of monastic communities. Mahrt has inspired and guided generations of scholars and singers.

more here.

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Out of Three or Four in a Room

Out of three or four in a room
One is always standing at the window.
Forced to see the injustice among the thorns,
The fires on the hill.

And people who left whole
are brought home in the evening, like small change.

Out of three or four in a room
One is always standing at the window.
Hair dark above his thoughts.
Behind him, the words.
And in front of him the words, wandering, without luggage.
Hearts without provision, prophecies without water
And big stones put there
And staying closed, like letters
With no addresses, and no one to receive them.

by Yehuda Amichai
from Poems by Yehuda Amichai
Translation: Michael Hamburger
Harper and Row, 1969

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Maureen Dowd in The New York Times:

George Clooney has been sneaking outside to smoke. Not like his friend Barack Obama used to, when he was running for president and his wife, Michelle, was after him to quit. Clooney doesn’t even like smoking.

“I had to get better at inhaling,” he said. “I go outside so the kids don’t see and smoke a little bit.” He plans to switch to herbal cigarettes when he makes his Broadway debut next month in a stage adaptation of his 2005 movie, “Good Night, and Good Luck.” Smoking has been unpleasant, he said, because in his Kentucky clan “eight uncles and aunts all died of lung cancer — it’s a big deal.” He noted that his aunt Rosemary Clooney, the torch singer and movie star, was 74 when she died in 2002 from complications of lung cancer. “My dad’s the only one that didn’t smoke, and he’s 91.”

More here. (Note: Excellent show. Saw it last night and loved it.)

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Matt Abrahams in Time Magazine:

In today’s fast-paced world, many of us rush to deliver our messages without taking the time to tailor or test them. At work, we rely on boilerplate presentations, or “Frankendecks,” consisting of slides we have “borrowed” from previous presentations or hastily composed emails and memos that lack focus and relevance. This approach leads to confusion, lost engagement, missed opportunities, and a lot of time cleaning up the mess of misunderstandings.

However, the tech industry can teach us a way to predictably increase the fidelity of how we communicate while remaining time efficient. Just as product designers use the Minimally Viable Product (MVP) approach to quickly test, refine, and improve their offerings, we can apply similar principles to communication. The concept of MVP emphasizes launching a simplified version of a product to test its core value with real users. Similarly, we can leverage Minimally Viable Communication (MVC) to generate and iterate on meaningful, memorable messages that are audience-centric and clear.

More here.

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Owen Matthews at Literary Review:

Are the Baltic Sea states, as former Estonian president Lennart Meri once put it, the factory of Europe’s future? Oliver Moody’s brilliantly written, convincingly argued and compelling book makes a good argument that it is in the plucky, resilient and often overlooked littoral states of the Baltic that the spirit of Europe burns strongest.

According to Moody, since the beginning of the war in Ukraine the Baltic countries – encompassing here not just Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, but also Finland, Poland and Sweden – have ‘articulated and realised a positive vision of how to put the West back on the front foot, and a compelling idea of what Europe could be: more hopeful, more assertive in defence of its values and interests, more conscious of solidarity with other liberal democracies, more open to the potential of technology, more confident of its own distinctive strengths, less constrained by fear’. Echoing Robert Graves’s characterisation of the dying Roman Empire in his poem ‘The Cuirassiers of the Frontier’, Moody argues that the rotten tree of Europa lives only in its rind. 

more here.

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John McWhorter in the New York Times:

In 2021, Mark McGowan, who was then the premier of Western Australia, made a video informing Aboriginal people about safety precautions during the Covid-19 pandemic. He stood next to an Aboriginal interpreter, who translated his statements into Kriol, the language many Aboriginal people in Australia speak. So, for instance, when McGowan said, “This is an important message to keep Aboriginal people safe,” it was followed by the interpreter saying, “Dijan message i proper important-one to keep-im everybody safe-one.”

Commentary in and out of Australia was mean, calling it racist and condescending for McGowan to have statements directed at Aboriginal people translated into mere baby talk. Typical was “This isn’t a mix of languages, this is just ignorant usage of English. Apparently saying this is ‘bad English’ is racist, but I guess I’m a racist because this is just bad English.”

The dust-up revealed that even in Australia, many people are unaware that Aboriginal people have transformed English into a new language entirely. To many people, the idea that Kriol is a legitimate form of speech is unfamiliar, and even absurd.

More here.

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Charlie Wood in Quanta:

Last spring, a team of nearly 1,000 cosmologists announced that dark energy — the enigmatic agent propelling the universe to swell in size at an ever-increasing rate — might be slackening. The bombshell result, based on the team’s observations of the motions of millions of galaxies combined with other data, was tentative and preliminary. Today, the scientists report(opens a new tab) that they have analyzed more than twice as much data as before and that it points more strongly to the same conclusion: Dark energy is losing steam.

“We are much more certain than last year that this is definitely a thing,” said Seshadri Nadathur(opens a new tab), a member of the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) collaboration, the group behind the new result.

Their finding, presented today at the Global Physics Summit in Anaheim, California, aligns with that of a second group of cosmologists, the 400-strong Dark Energy Survey (DES). Having also observed a huge swath of the cosmos, DES reported evidence(opens a new tab) of varying dark energy in a paper earlier this month and in a talk today at the Anaheim meeting.

More here.

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