Leonard Sax in Psychology Today:

If there are superstar scholars, Berkeley professor Judith Butler is a superstar. She is best known for pioneering the idea that “male” and “female” are merely social constructs. She writes that “because gender is not a fact, the various acts of gender creates the idea of gender, and without those acts, there would be no gender at all.” For this insight, she has been rewarded with an avalanche of scholarly honors and prizes, including the Mellon Prize, which carries with it a $1.5 million cash award. (By comparison, the Nobel Prize gets you just $1.1 million.)

Butler is a professor of comparative literature, not a neuroscientist, but her ideas about gender have become widely accepted worldwide in the nearly 30 years since the publication of her book Gender Trouble. In 2017, Cordelia Fine, professor of historical and philosophical studies at the University of Melbourne, published a book titled Testosterone Rex: Unmaking the myths of our gendered minds. Following Butler, Fine asserted that any claims that women and men differ significantly in brain or behavior are simply myths perpetuated by the heteronormative patriarchy. Fine’s book promptly received the Royal Society’s prestigious prize for best science book of the year.

The worldview promulgated by Butler, Fine, and their followers now constrains what neuroscientists are allowed to say in public.

More here.

Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe:

The modern world is full of technology, and also with anxiety about technology. We worry about robot uprisings and artificial intelligence taking over, and we contemplate what it would mean for a computer to be conscious or truly human. It should probably come as no surprise that these ideas aren’t new to modern society — they go way back, at least to the stories and mythologies of ancient Greece. Today’s guest, Adrienne Mayor, is a folklorist and historian of science, whose recent work has been on robots and artificial humans in ancient mythology. From the bronze warrior Talos to the evil fembot Pandora, mythology is rife with stories of artificial beings. It’s both fun and useful to think about our contemporary concerns in light of these ancient tales.

More here.

Stuart Schrader in the Boston Review:

I recently stumbled across a statue in Baltimore that celebrates the young men of the city who fought in the “Spanish War.” On a narrow triangle in a residential neighborhood, this lone soldier stands at ease, holding a rifle across his body and staring into the distance, unperturbed by the city buses screeching past or the litter that collects below his feet. The pedestal records the years, from 1898 to 1902, when these brave Americans fought against Spain’s weak imperialist hold on the Philippines, Cuba, and Puerto Rico. Known as “The Hiker,” fifty or so versions of this statue still quietly dot city streets and parks across the United States. The bulk were erected in the 1920s in northern states, with Baltimore’s in 1943, and the last in 1965 near Arlington Cemetery.

Their anti-imperialist sentiment resonated with a different kind of monument that emerged in the same period—those to the Confederacy. To numerous white Americans, the democratic reconstruction of the former Confederacy was an imperialist exercise, and both types of statue celebrated a fight against empire. But they mobilized a rose-tinted vision of past war-making to reject the contemporary reality of early twentieth-century U.S. statecraft: Washington had built an empire, subjecting millions with dark skin to its rule. The anti-imperialist sentiment implicit in the statues, whatever its source, did not curtail empire. It denied its existence.

These monuments—both to the Confederacy and to far-flung operations and occupations—reveal just how vexing the term “empire” is in the U.S. vocabulary.

More here.

Barry Schwabsky at The Nation:

Last year saw the publication of a book that could well turn out to be a future classic of art writing. Jack Whitten’s Notes From the Woodshed was released just a few months after the painter’s death in New York at the age of 78. More than 500 pages of journal entries, written between March 24, 1962, and December 27, 2017, Notes From the Woodshed gives as true a sense of how the life of an artist is lived, and how it’s lived for the sake of his work, as any I’ve read. The book’s hallmarks are a kinetic energy of thought and immediacy of expression that trump literary style or even good spelling. By the end of his life, Whitten knew that his notes would be published—he wrote a prefatory essay in September 2015, more than two years before his last journal entry—but he didn’t gussy them up. They have been abridged, though, partly because he could be as critical of his fellow artists as he could be generously enthusiastic about them, and “a few of his writings have been redacted here to protect the living,” notes the book’s editor, Katy Siegel, who also curated last year’s exhibition, “Odyssey: Jack Whitten Sculpture, 1963–2017,” at the Baltimore Museum of Art and the Met Breuer.

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Lucy Wasensteiner at the TLS:

The subsequent outpouring of creativity at the Bauhaus has since become the stuff of legend. Yet despite its popularity among teachers and students, the school and its methods were consistently controversial. As the clouds of nationalism gathered over Germany, many in Weimar were troubled by the blatant internationalism of the Bauhaus. Others attacked the emphasis on freedom and experimentation as inappropriately indulgent for a state-funded school. The economic uncertainties of the early 1920s only increased the pressure on Gropius. In 1925, the authorities in Weimar closed the school, forcing its relocation to Dessau, about 100 miles to the northeast.

This move provided Gropius the architect with perhaps his best-known commission: new premises for the Bauhaus and living quarters for its staff and students. Dessau also marked a new chapter in the ideology of the school. In 1926 – the year of the reopening – Gropius published what amounted to a second manifesto, his “Principles of Bauhaus Production”.

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Daniel Mendelsohn at the NYRB:

This familiar Strindbergian theme is underscored in The Best Intentions by an ingenious device to which the author turns more than once: the juxtaposition of some ostensibly documentary evidence from the “real life” that he’s fictionalizing—a photograph he has found of this or that relative or an entry in someone’s diary—with his novelistic reconstruction of the person or incident in question. This technique can shed ironic light on the characters. A passage, for instance, when Bergman quotes a diary entry by Henrik’s mother, Alma, after she meets her future daughter-in-law for the first time: “Henrik came with his fiancée. She is surprisingly beautiful and he seems happy. Fredrik Paulin called in the evening. He talked about tedious things from the past. That was inappropriate and made Henrik sad.”

This text is cited, pointedly, at the end of a long passage that has dramatized the moment that Alma so tersely summarizes in her diary: the visit by Anna, the interruption of the family friend, Fredrik.

more here.

Lois Beckett in The Guardian:

Romance readers compound the sin of liking happy, sexy stories with the sin of not caring much about the opinions of serious people, which is to say, men. They are openly scornful of the outsiders who occasionally parachute in to report on them. In late 2017, Robert Gottlieb – the former editor of the New Yorker and unsurpassable embodiment of the concept “august literary man” – wrote a jocular roundup of that season’s best romances in the New York Times Book Review. He opined that romance was a “healthy genre” and that its effect was “harmless, I would imagine. Why shouldn’t women dream?” The furious public response from romance readers – “patriarchal ass” was among the more charitable comments – prompted a defensive editor’s note from the NYT, which later announced it was hiring a dedicated romance columnist, who happened to be both a woman and a long-time fan of the genre.

Coverage of the romance industry often dwells on the contrast between the nubile young heroines of the novels and the women who actually write the books: ordinary women with ordinary bodies, dressed for their own comfort. Reporting on the first annual conference of the Romance Writers of America (RWA) – the major trade association for romance authors – in 1981, the Los Angeles Times wrote that the 500 authors who attended were “not the stuff of which romance heroines are made – at mostly 40 and 50, they were less coquette and more mother-of-the-bride”. That observation – combining creeping horror at the idea that middle-aged women might be interested in sex, with indifference to the fact that male authors are rarely judged for failing to resemble James Bond – is typical.

Part of the intense scorn romance authors face is the result of their rare victory. They have built an industry that caters almost completely to women, in which writers can succeed on the basis of their skill, not their age or perceived attractiveness.

More here.

Chelsea Wald in Nautilus:

Not long ago I diagnosed myself with the recently identified condition of sidewalk rage. It’s most pronounced when it comes to a certain friend who is a slow walker. Last month, as we sashayed our way to dinner, I found myself biting my tongue, thinking, I have to stop going places with her if I ever want to … get there! You too can measure yourself on the “Pedestrian Aggressiveness Syndrome Scale,” a tool developed by University of Hawaii psychologist Leon James. While walking in a crowd, do you find yourself “acting in a hostile manner (staring, presenting a mean face, moving closer or faster than expected)” and “enjoying thoughts of violence?”

Slowness rage is not confined to the sidewalk, of course. Slow drivers, slow Internet, slow grocery lines—they all drive us crazy. Even the opening of this article may be going on a little too long for you. So I’ll get to the point. Slow things drive us crazy because the fast pace of society has warped our sense of timing. Things that our great-great-grandparents would have found miraculously efficient now drive us around the bend. Patience is a virtue that’s been vanquished in the Twitter age. Once upon a time, cognitive scientists tell us, patience and impatience had an evolutionary purpose. They constituted a yin and yang balance, a finely tuned internal timer that tells when we’ve waited too long for something and should move on. When that timer went buzz, it was time to stop foraging at an unproductive patch or abandon a failing hunt.

“Why are we impatient? It’s a heritage from our evolution,” says Marc Wittmann, a psychologist at the Institute for Frontier Areas of Psychology and Mental Health in Freiburg, Germany. Impatience made sure we didn’t die from spending too long on a single unrewarding activity. It gave us the impulse to act. But that good thing is gone. The fast pace of society has thrown our internal timer out of balance. It creates expectations that can’t be rewarded fast enough—or rewarded at all. When things move more slowly than we expect, our internal timer even plays tricks on us, stretching out the wait, summoning anger out of proportion to the delay.

More here.

Kenan Malik in Pandaemonium:

The Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market is a bland name for a dreadful piece of law likely to reshape our use of the internet. “The transformation of the internet from an open platform for sharing and innovation into a tool for the automated surveillance and control of its users,” was how Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the worldwide web, and 70 other technology pioneers described it in a letter to the president of the European parliament last year. And they’re right.

The two most controversial parts of the new directive are articles 11 and 13 (though, just to complicate matters, in the final law, these have become articles 15 and 17). Article 11, dubbed a “link tax”, obliges search engines and news aggregate platforms to pay for use of snippets from publishers. Article 13 holds platforms, such as Google and YouTube, responsible for material posted without copyright permission and enforces penalties for failure to block infringing content.

Online platforms, the EU argues, make huge profits by either hosting or linking to creative content without funnelling that cash back to the creators. As a writer, I love to be paid for my work and anything to squeeze more money out of every word I write, the better. The trouble is that the EU directive will do little for “content creators” like me. What it will do is constrain my use of the internet.

More here.

Stan Carey in Sentence First:

Jared Diamond’s book Guns, Germs and Steel has an engrossing chapter on the evolution of writing as a communication technology. It includes a brief account of the development of a syllabary – a set of written characters that represent syllables – for the Cherokee language. The syllabary looks like this:

Some of the signs (or ‘syllabograms’) will look familiar, others like variations of familiar shapes. But any similarity to the Roman, Greek, and Hebrew alphabets is misleading. For example, in a nice demonstration of the arbitrariness of the sign, the first three, R, D, W, encode the sounds e, a, la. So what’s going on?

I’ll let Diamond tell most of the story. First, a step back.

More here.

From the editors of Democracy:

We are at an inflection point in the Democratic Party’s history, and in the economic history of the country; similar, perhaps, to the mid-1930s and the late-1970s. In the first period, the country embraced Keynesian, demand-side economics. In the second, during a time of pummeling inflation and wage stagnation, the country turned away from Keynes and toward Milton Friedman and supply-side economics.

To us, on the merits, the two systems aren’t close. Keynesian principles helped drive the greatest era of expansion, prosperity, and equality the United States has ever known. Supply-side economics has been good for the top 10 or 15 percent, great for the top 1 percent, but rather bad for everyone else. Yet, because it’s done so well for the people who have money, finance political campaigns, and run things, and because the Democratic Party never quite made the case for an alternate theory of growth (despite this journal’s frequent efforts), supply-side has hung around well past its sell-by date.

That date may finally have come. There are numerous signs that the American people are beginning to question the supply-side assumptions that dominated our economic debates for four decades. Are the signs real?

More here.

Amber A’Lee Frost at The Baffler:

I had recently been forced to break off a collaboration with another writer over her Russiagate sympathies. Though she was smart and talented, I didn’t feel I could work with someone who considered Russian “interference” in the 2016 election to be a politically significant topic or a major compromise to what passes for American democracy these days. I consider the recent obsession with Russia a sort of liberal hysteria that feeds off of resentment over losing the election to Trump—the nadir of elite entitlement and a pathological state of denial over the fact that their candidate was a dud, and that the electorate rightly holds the Democratic Party in contempt. It’s the bitter delusion of an asshole who lost his girl to a different kind of asshole, and responds with incredulity and conspiratorial rage. What’s more, it’s clearly an attempt to conjure up a totally anachronistic paranoia over the late Soviet Union, a country that hasn’t even existed for nearly thirty years.

Nonetheless, America’s recently reinvigorated Russophobia doesn’t seem a large or lucrative enough phenomenon for the “unnamed American entrepreneur” funding the KGB museum to eke out a profit (if you’re in the market for a Chelsea flat above a KGB Spy Museum, you can get a one-bedroom for just shy of $1.9 million).

more here.

James Pogue at The Believer:

Here are some things you can learn from Peattie: sequoias are, of course, the largest of all trees, and the most massive freestanding organisms in the world. They live as long as three thousand five hundred years, longer than all trees but the Chilean alerce and the bristlecone pine, which grows east of here, over the Sierra crest and across the Owens Valley. I like to stand at certain vantage points in the Sierras and imagine that I can look north to the three-thousand-year-old Bennett juniper, west to the sequoias, east to the bristlecones, and south to the ancient clonal stands of Mojavean creosote bush, and be somehow at the center of a circle of inexplicable, primordial genetic wisdom.

You will never find a lonely old-growth sequoia, because they live in groves, of which only seventy or so still survive. You don’t have to be a mystic to think that this is because they are sociable old trees—we are only now learning how plants communicate underground and through aerosols they emit, and in a sequoia grove it doesn’t take long to notice they are working together to form a special environment: a grove provides an airy break from the denser, darker, and more juvenile west-slope forest; it is a place where “the bright world,” as Peattie puts it, “is never shut away.”

more here.

Brian Dillon at The Paris Review:

It’s said the British never stop remarking on their weather. How will they cope in decades to come, when life is all weather, all the time? The country ran a brief test a few weeks ago: in mid- to late February the sun blazed, spring surprised itself, and the temperature in London, where I live, reached over 20°C (68°F). Boon or portent? Meteorological holiday or climate-change hell? Beautiful or sublime? Britons could not agree. It’s now mid-March, and I was awoken at five this morning by rattling windows and the rising shriek of a storm called Gareth (not the direst of names). Abruptly, spring is canceled, and London’s squares are littered with the corpses of premature blossoms.

As the wind died in the morning, I wandered around to Finsbury Circus, on the north side of which the London Institution once stood. It was here, on February 4 and February 11, 1884, that the essayist and art critic John Ruskin (who was born two hundred years ago last month) delivered “The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century”: a pair of apocalyptic lectures on modern weather.

more here.

Mary Brunton

Let us walk to the waterfall before lunch
and sail the paper boats we made yesterday;
let us not put away that afternoon of losses
when the August sunshine belted onto the Kerry slate roof
and cooked the lichen to fine, sallow dust.
From out of nowhere, I saw you shatter
the blank white page to an angle
and all my flat earth certitudes fell away,
as any waterfall collapses into its pool.
You see, I wanted to believe more than you thought,
but the plain fact of how your fingers
worked the terrible geometries into being
frightened me, the way a child is frightened
by death without knowing why.
This, though, was a coming into the world.
It had not occurred to me to think
you would know how to do such a thing.
You showed me the proper way of it
and so you are changed to me and I to you,
the way that creases remain always
in a sheet of paper that has once been folded.

by John Stammers
from Stolen Love Behaviour
publisher: Picador, 2005
ISBN: 0330433865

Stacy Schiff in The New York Times:

Amid frantic, last-minute negotiations, under a spray of machine-gun fire, Vladimir Nabokov fled Russia 100 years ago this week. His family had sought refuge from the Bolsheviks in the Crimean peninsula; those forces now made a vicious descent from the north. The chaos on the pier at Sebastopol could not match the scene that met the last of the Russian imperial family, evacuated the same week: In Yalta, terrified families mobbed a quay littered with abandoned cars. Nor were the Nabokovs’ accommodations as good. The Romanovs made their escape on a British man-of-war. The Nabokovs crowded into a filthy Greek cargo ship. Overrun by refugees, Constantinople turned them away. For several days they lurched about on a rough sea, subsisting on dog biscuits, sleeping on benches. Only the family jewelry traveled comfortably, nestled in a tin of talcum powder. On his 20th birthday, Nabokov disembarked finally in Athens. He would never again set eyes on Russia.

At the time of the evacuation he had spent 16 quiet months in the Crimea, the last speck of Russia in White hands. Already the Bolsheviks had murdered any number of harmless people; Nabokov’s jurist father, as his son would later note, was anything but harmless. In February 1917 riots had delivered a revolution. The czar abdicated, replaced by a liberal government, swept into power on a tide of popular support. Nabokov’s father, Vladimir Dmitrievich, played a prominent role in that administration. Months afterward Lenin returned from exile, disembarking at St. Petersburg’s Finland Station. Within the year, what had begun as an idealistic, progressive uprising would end — like Iran’s, like Egypt’s — in totalitarianism. With Lenin arrived another 20th-century staple: a one-party system in which hacks and henchmen replaced the competent and qualified.

The terror began immediately.

More here.

Peter Szolovits in Science:

In 1970 in The New England Journal of Medicine, William Schwartz predicted that by the year 2000, much of the intellectual function of medicine could be either taken over or at least substantially augmented by “expert systems”—a branch of artificial intelligence (AI). Schwartz hoped that the medical school curriculum would be “redirected toward the social and psychologic aspects of health care” and that medical schools would attract applicants interested in “behavioral and social sciences and … the information sciences and their application to medicine.” But Schwartz’s dream of smart medical technologies, for the most part, remains just that. Eric Topol, however, is optimistic about the future of health care. In Deep Medicine, he anticipates that new machine learning technologies will improve the precision and accuracy of disease diagnosis, thus providing a better way to identify the best therapies. Like Schwartz, he hopes that the time freed up by these approaches will be devoted to reviving humane medical practices.

…Last, Topol turns to his vision of how AI can provide a virtual medical assistant to clinicians and how these technologies can lead to the resurgence of the empathy-based care that Topol—and many others—miss in current health care. “AI can help achieve the gift of time with patients,” and that extra time can develop empathy, which “is not something machines can truly simulate.” The great contribution of this book is that Topol synthesizes the fragmentary views that we who work in this field gain from day-to-day reading into a cohesive vision of a future in which medical care is about human care. Alas, achieving that depends on much more than improved technological support for clinical medicine. Hopefully, the economic and administrative forces that have done much to frustrate other recent visionaries will not derail this new plan.

More here.

Edward Mendelson in the New York Review of Books:

In 1945, when Bennett Cerf of Random House was preparing to send to the printer An Anthology of Famous English and American Poetry, edited by William Rose Benét and Conrad Aiken for the Modern Library series, he omitted twelve early poems by Ezra Pound that Aiken had included in a 1927 anthology on which the new book had been based. In place of the poems, a note explained that, over Aiken’s protest, the publishers “flatly refused at this time to include a single line of Mr. Ezra Pound. This is a statement that the publishers are not only willing but delighted to print.”

In the years since Pound wrote those poems, he had become notorious for his fascist politics, florid anti-Semitism and racism, and hero-worshipping praise for Hitler and Mussolini. He stayed in Italy during the war, insisting on making radio broadcasts to American troops, urging them to drop their weapons and stop fighting on behalf of Jews and everyone else whom Pound hated. For these broadcasts, he was arrested after the war and charged with treason against the United States. At the end of 1945, he was awaiting trial in Washington, D.C.

In the eyes of many writers at the time, Cerf’s refusal to reprint Pound’s poems adopted the same logic that the Nazis had used when burning books by Jews and leftists.

More here.