Not fresh off the press but interesting nevertheless, this article is by Kaja Perina in Psychology Today:

The tiny village of Lasserre is tucked into one of France’s southernmost hills, a hamlet of stone buildings strong in the embrace of centuries-old cement. The home in which the mathematician Alexander Grothendieck spent the last two decades of his life in near-complete seclusion is as tranquil as its neighbors. A patchwork of vines—trained, then abandoned—climb toward the white shutters and terracotta roof. Among the few postwar sentries is a standard-issue metal mailbox. Visitors left mostly unclaimed notes for him; letters via post were marked retour a l’envoyeur. The locals knew to leave him alone, but when a young mathematician arrived in the early 1990s in hopes of speaking to him, he slammed the door in her face, screaming.

Grothendieck burned many of his papers in 1991, just before moving to Lasserre, though tens of thousands of unpublished pages remain. For years before his death in 2014, at age 86, he could be seen through a ground-floor window, writing long into the night. The pages revealed an obsession with environmental apocalypse. He was said to rave to locals about God and the devil and to have renounced all his mathematical work. This remains hard to accept for many who knew him. To them, he was the greatest mathematician of the 20th century.

Alexander Grothendieck altered mathematics with a velocity that is hard to articulate, so abstruse is his work.

More here.  [Thanks to Pramathanath Sastry.]

Callum Paton in Newsweek:

The first Israeli mission to the moon carried a secret cargo, a small metal disk that contains the building blocks of human civilization in 30 million pages of information.

The extensive archive has been dubbed the ‘lunar library’ and is meant to act as a kind of civilization backup for future generations. The DVD-size metal disk containing the information blasted off to the moon onboard the Beresheet spacecraft, a privately funded Israeli mission to the moon, facilitated by Elon Musk’s SpaceX aerospace company.

Nova Spivack, the co-founder of Arch Mission Foundation, a Los Angeles-based nonprofit that backed the mission, told NBC the archive was a measure to preserve humanity. “One of the primary evolutionary challenges that we face is amnesia about our past mistakes, and the lack of active countermeasures to repeating them,” Spivack said

“For the survival of our species, we need to find ways to raise our awareness of what worked and didn’t work, and we need to ensure it is shared with the people of the future,” he added.

More here.

Tim Barker in n + 1:

IF SOMEONE WERE TO MAKE a movie about neoliberalism, there would need to be a starring role for the character of Paul Volcker. As chair of the Federal Reserve from 1979 to 1987, Volcker was the most powerful central banker in the world. These were the years when the industrial workers movement was defeated in the United States and United Kingdom, and third world debt crises exploded. Both of these owe something to Volcker. On October 6, 1979, after an unscheduled meeting of the Fed’s Open Market Committee, Volcker announced that he would start limiting the growth of the nation’s money supply. This would be accomplished by limiting the growth of bank reserves, which the Fed influenced by buying and selling government securities to member banks. As money became more scarce, banks would raise interest rates, limiting the amount of liquidity available in the overall economy. Though the interest rates were a result of Fed policy, the money supply target let Volcker avoid the politically explosive appearance of directly raising rates himself. The experiment—known as the Volcker Shock—lasted until 1982, inducing what remains the worst unemployment since the Great Depression and finally ending the inflation that had troubled the world economy since the late 1960s. To catalog all the results of the Volcker Shock—shuttered factories, broken unions, dizzying financialization—is to describe the whirlwind we are still reaping in 2019.

More here.

Reviewed by Ajay Singh Chaudhary in The Hedgehog Review:

There was once a liberal dream: “A free society of equals, based on the proliferation of opportunities for individuals to lead lives characterized by personal independence from the domination of others,” as Elizabeth Anderson writes of the Levellers during the English Civil War. In Yascha Mounk’s The People vs. Democracy: Why Our Freedom Is in Danger and How to Save It, the liberal dream, limited as it might have been, has noticeably narrowed.

Mounk, a lecturer on Government at Harvard University, takes as his subject the now ubiquitous crisis of liberal democracy. A nebulous we are suddenly faced with illiberal democracies and undemocratic liberalism. Mounk sets out to guide our economic-political elite to a better understanding of the grievances of “the people.” Elites must learn to hear the dissatisfaction of the people and also become better messengers who can communicate the fundamental goodness of the existing order in the people’s language. In turn, “the people” must learn their natural limitations. Some issues—trade, regulatory environments, and climate change, for instance—are too complex for “the people” to understand. Here, they must defer to expert opinion. Mounk and similar noble-minded intellectuals are there to help both sides understand their proper place and role.

But all their careful work is being undone by “the populists,” who offer “simplistic” solutions to “complex” problems. They divide the world into the good “us’s” and the evil “them’s.” But worst of all, “the populists” introduce the people as demos, as participants, even as rulers in their societies, and so upset the efforts of elites-whisperers like Mounk to provide the missing connective tissue between natural rulers and ruled.

More here.

Matt Ridley in Spectator:

‘The whole aim of practical politics,’ wrote H.L. Mencken, ‘is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.’ Newspapers, politicians and pressure groups have been moving smoothly for decades from one forecast apocalypse to another (nuclear power, acid rain, the ozone layer, mad cow disease, nanotechnology, genetically modified crops, the millennium bug…) without waiting to be proved right or wrong.

Increasingly, in a crowded market for alarm, it becomes necessary to make the scares up. More and more headlines about medical or environmental panics are based on published scientific papers, but ones that are little more than lies laundered into respectability with a little statistical legerdemain. Sometimes, even the exposure of the laundered lies fails to stop the scare. Dr Andrew Wakefield was struck off in 2010 after the General Medical Council found his 1998 study in the Lancet claiming a link between the MMR vaccine and autism to be fraudulent. Yet Wakefield is now a celebrity anti-vaccine activist in the United States and has left his long-suffering wife for the supermodel Elle Macpherson. Anti-vax campaigning is a lucrative business. Meanwhile, the notion that chemicals such as bisphenol A, found in plastics, are acting as ‘endocrine disruptors’, interfering with human hormones even at very low doses, started with an outright fraudulent study that has since been retracted. Many low-quality studies on BPA have pushed this theory, but they have been torpedoed by high-quality analyses including a recent US government study called Clarity. Yet this is of course being largely ignored by the media and the activists.

So the habit of laundering lies is catching on.

More here.

Rafia Zakaria in The Nation:

As irony would have it, Pakistan and India’s latest squabble began on Valentine’s Day when an explosive-laden truck, commandeered by a young Kashmiri Indian man, slammed into an Indian military convoy, killing 40 Indian soldiers. Even before the funerals were over, India blamed Pakistan, claiming its neighbor was sponsoring the terrorist group, Jaish-e-Muhammad, responsible for the attack. Ten days later, India carried out strikes in Pakistan—though it’s unclear what, if anything, it hit. The following day, Pakistan shot down two Indian planes that had crossed into its territory and captured an Indian pilot. The Pakistani government then closed its airspace and imposed blackouts in the Northern Areas so that Indian aircraft could not detect its cities. In an instant, it seemed, the two countries stood daggers drawn, teetering on the edge of nuclear cataclysm.

Yet peace, or the desire for it, caught on in Pakistan. On Thursday, the day after Pakistan captured the Indian pilot, peace rallies were held all over Pakistan, and the hashtag #SayNoToWar trended on Twitter. Groups of Pakistani women photographed themselves holding placards asking women across the border to #SayNoToWar.

More here.

Sean Kelly in MIT Technology Review:

Advances in artificial intelligence have led many to speculate that human beings will soon be replaced by machines in every domain, including that of creativity. Ray Kurzweil, a futurist, predicts that by 2029 we will have produced an AI that can pass for an average educated human being. Nick Bostrom, an Oxford philosopher, is more circumspect. He does not give a date but suggests that philosophers and mathematicians defer work on fundamental questions to “superintelligent” successors, which he defines as having “intellect that greatly exceeds the cognitive performance of humans in virtually all domains of interest.”

Both believe that once human-level intelligence is produced in machines, there will be a burst of progress—what Kurzweil calls the “singularity” and Bostrom an “intelligence explosion”—in which machines will very quickly supersede us by massive measures in every domain. This will occur, they argue, because superhuman achievement is the same as ordinary human achievement except that all the relevant computations are performed much more quickly, in what Bostrom dubs “speed superintelligence.”

So what about the highest level of human achievement—creative innovation? Are our most creative artists and thinkers about to be massively surpassed by machines?

No.

Human creative achievement, because of the way it is socially embedded, will not succumb to advances in artificial intelligence. To say otherwise is to misunderstand both what human beings are and what our creativity amounts to.

More here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ZEBm1SoQnQ

P. Kishore Saval in American Affairs:

For thousands of years, the liberal arts were not liberal, and that is why they are increasingly unwelcome in our time. An honest study of the past is unsettling in a liberal age, because a person who learns to venerate earlier cultural traditions, from Homer to the baroque, may come to venerate the values to which those traditions are devoted. And those values are a direct rebuke to the substance of liberalism.

“Liberalism” here does not refer to the modern American distinction between liberals and conservatives, both of whom are liberals in every important respect. Liberalism is a governing idea dedicated to the priority of the autonomous, rights-bearing individual—an individual defined against, rather than constituted by, a community and its inherited traditions. In the early centuries of liberalism, the commitment to this idea of the individual appeared to release enormous creativity and achieve real benefits. But few can fail to notice that liberal societies are at the end of their vitality and creative energy.  It has now become apparent to many that liberalism does not work—that it has degraded our spiritual freedom, impoverished the world of meaning, and dehumanized us before the power of money. But liberalism also prevents us from finding our way out of the mess that it has created. Liberalism is only a few centuries old, yet this recent governing order is now being treated as an eternal condition of humanity from which there can be no dissent or alternative. When we attempt to diagnose our disorder, we can only do so through a prejudicial history that falsifies the past, and therefore prevents any true understanding of the present. In such a context, the destruction of an authentic liberal arts tradition is not hard to understand.

More here.

Issie Lapowsky in Wired:

SKOOTER MCCOY WAS 20 years old when his wife, Michelle, gave birth to their first child, a son named Spencer. It was 1996, and McCoy was living in the tiny town of Cherokee, North Carolina, attending Western Carolina University on a football scholarship. He was the first member of his family to go to college.

McCoy’s father had ruined his body as a miner, digging tunnels underneath lakes and riverbeds, and his son had developed a faith that college would lead him in a better direction. So McCoy was determined to stay in school when Spencer came along. Between fatherhood, football practice, and classes, though, he couldn’t squeeze in much part-time work. Michelle had taken an entry-level job as a teacher’s aide at a local childcare center right out of high school, but her salary wasn’t enough to support the three of them.

Then the casino money came.

More here.

Jaya Sundaresh in Current Affairs:

Look, we already know that Ishmael Reed hasn’t seen Hamilton.

The New York Times called Reed out for it. So did the New Yorker. So did some stray Hamilton stans on Twitter, disgruntled that the legendary playwright, who has written a satire of their beloved play, had the gall to criticize without taking the time to luxuriate in the original, the way they have.

They can all calm down.

“I’ve read the book,” said Reed, who sounded a little surprised that this was even up for debate when I interviewed him a few weeks ago. He’s extensively studied the script that Lin-Manuel Miranda wrote. That’s probably one better than most Hamiltonfans, whose familiarity most likely comes through the original soundtrack, have managed to achieve.

“I’ve been criticized for going after this multibillion dollar juggernaut,” said Reed with a laugh. “Well, Gone With The Wind was a global phenomenon as well.” Look how that turned out.

It would be a mistake to underestimate Reed, whose 10th and latest play, The Haunting of Lin-Manuel Miranda, had its first reading at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe on the Lower East Side a few weekends ago. The Haunting rips apart Hamilton, Miranda’s homage to the first Secretary of the Treasury. Reed has been writing literature and non-fiction since the 1960s, and is widely regarded as one of the most important African American authors.

More here.

Dave Eggers in The Guardian:

“I love that,” said Thompson. “He’s for America 100%. It’s America or no way. I love that.” Thompson is an African American man in his early 20s. He was wearing a camouflage shirt under black overalls, with a large pin on his chest depicting a cartoon boy – a mashup of Calvin from Calvin and Hobbes and Trump himself – urinating on the CNN logo.  People continued to walk past us en route to the rally. Mothers and daughters in University of Texas-El Paso sweatshirts. A man wearing an Uncle Sam costume. Groups of young men and groups of young women, and couples holding hands and dressed up as if the rally were a night on the town. A middle-aged blond woman rushed by in a head-to‑toe suede outfit, fringes flying as she crossed the street, the lights of the Coliseum beckoning.

“I really think Trump can help put order in this world,” Gaudet said. “Because right now it’s just a mess. And I think he can do that because of his attitude. He just, he don’t give a damn if the next person gets mad or not. As far as becoming a president and putting shit in order, I think he could be that dude to put shit in order.”

A man walked by wearing a sleeveless denim jacket with a rendering of a grim reaper on the back. The staff of the reaper’s scythe was an AK-47, the blade an American flag. He stopped briefly to inspect the merchandise. I asked Gaudet and Thompson how, as self-employed entrepreneurs, they got their healthcare.

“Right now I don’t even have healthcare,” Thompson said.

“I go to the emergency room,” Gaudet said, laughing.

“I just go to the emergency room,” Thompson agreed.

I asked if they would support higher taxes for millionaires if it meant that people like them would get free healthcare. Gaudet didn’t hesitate. “No, because one day we might be the millionaires.”

More here.

Why Latin Should Still be Taught in High School

Because one day I grew so bored
with Lucretius, I fell in love
with the one object that seemed to be stationary,
the sleeping kid two rows up,
the appealing squalor of his drooping socks.
While the author of De Rerum Natura was making fun
of those who fear the steep way and lose the truth,
I was studying the unruly hairs on Peter Diamond’s right leg.
Titus Lucretius Caro labored, dactyl by dactyl
to convince our Latin IV class of the atomic
composition of smoke and dew,
and I tried to make sense of a boy’s ankles,
the calves’ intriguing
resiliency, the integrity to the shank,
the solid geometry of my classmate’s body.
Light falling through blinds,
a bee flinging itself into a flower,
a seemingly infinite set of texts
to translate and now this particular configuration of atoms
who was given a name at birth,
Peter Diamond, and sat two rows in front of me,
his long arms, his legs that like Lucretius’s hexameters
seemed to go on forever, all this hurly-burly
of matter that had the goodness to settle
long enough to make a body
so fascinating it got me
through fifty-five minutes
of the nature of things.

by Christopher Bursk
from The Improbable Swervings of Atoms

James McBride in The New York Times:

Toni Morrison, the author and Nobel Prize winner, turned 88 on Feb. 18. I have never met Morrison. And while you’ll likely see a donkey fly before you see her stand before a bunch of Harvard undergraduates and sing on demand, the fact is Toni Morrison is very much like Ella Fitzgerald. Like Fitzgerald, she rose from humble beginnings to world prominence. Like Fitzgerald, she is intensely private. And like Fitzgerald, she has given every iota of her extraordinary American-born talent and intellect to the great American dream. Not the one with the guns and bombs bursting in air. The other one, the one with world peace, justice, racial harmony, art, literature, music and language that shows us how to be free wrapped in it. Morrison has, as they say in church, lived a life of service. Whatever awards and acclaim she has won, she has earned. She has paid in full. She owes us nothing.

Yet even as she moves into the October of life, Morrison, quietly and without ceremony, lays another gem at our feet. “The Source of Self-Regard” is a book of essays, lectures and meditations, a reminder that the old music is still the best, that in this time of tumult and sadness and continuous war, where tawdry words are blasted about like junk food, and the nation staggers from one crisis to the next, led by a president with all the grace of a Cyclops and a brain the size of a full-grown pea, the mightiness, the stillness, the pure power and beauty of words delivered in thought, reason and discourse, still carry the unstoppable force of a thousand hammer blows, spreading the salve of righteousness that can heal our nation and restore the future our children deserve. This book demonstrates once again that Morrison is more than the standard-bearer of American literature.

She is our greatest singer. And this book is perhaps her most important song.

More here.

Peter Conrad at The Guardian:

Were the humanists wrong to claim that art is good for us, “like Ovaltine and yoga”? Movies have been more like a secret vice, the first and most invasive of the technologies that have progressively estranged us from one another. As a Londoner resettled in San Francisco, Thomson is also keenly aware of the way the medium has duped Americans, convincing them that happy endings are inevitable so long as gun-toting men control the narrative. “Can’t we admit,” he asks, “how much American experience has been rooted in fear?” In one mind-bending paragraph he outlines an alternative pantheon of great American films – including Citizen Kane, Vertigo and a surprising number of screwball comedies – that expose the country’s gnawing insecurity.

Thomson’s last and boldest speculative forays try to find a way out of the current impasse between the genders, for which he makes movies in large part responsible. Are the sexes doomed to battle for ever, as in Howard Hawks’s His Girl Friday?

more here.

Max Gray at The Quarterly Conversation:

“Bloodlines” employs numbered sections, one of Carreira’s favored devices, to divide the poem into a triptych. She uses time and place to distinguish each, taking us from her adolescence in Portugal to early adulthood in New Jersey to the present moment. In the first, the adolescent version of Carreira feels shame about her body—not the first time we encounter, in heartbreaking fashion, the painful self-consciousness of a young narrator—while, at the same time yearning for physical connection. She wants “a God-fearing man,” but she observes that a young neighbor of hers is “a pretty boy.” The end of this section is marked by the advent of menstruation, a hallmark of maturity that doubles as a sign of heritage and hardship. While the neighbor boy collects the material possessions that “make for a good life,” the menstrual signature on the speaker’s bed sheets “promises thorns no bread or gold can dull.” The concrete trappings of health and prosperity are conflated with the promise of a bright future, but “blood,” in all its multi-layered meaning, complicates the simple promise of “bread or gold.” Profoundly, for Carreira, this duality echoes the divided heart of the Portuguese immigrant community in America—one heart striving and struggling forward in its quest for material security and the American Dream, while the other looks backward toward an idealized past that continues to drift further and further out of reach with the passage of time.

more here.