John Horgan in Scientific American:

In 2015 I attended a workshop on political polarization with an eclectic group of scholars and activists. We swapped ideas on resolving battles over climate change, inequality, abortion and gay rights. One obstacle to compromise, a psychologist said, is that many Americans have a visceral, emotional reaction to issues like homosexuality.

I have a visceral, emotion reaction to inequality, I replied. It sickens me that some Americans have billions while others barely have enough to eat. An economist derided my attitude as typical left-wing irrationality. Inequality isn’t the problem, he said, poverty is the problem, and we shouldn’t try to solve it by taking more from the rich.

I felt chastened. But a flurry of recent articles—with headlines like “Abolish Billionaires” and “The Economics of Soaking the Rich”—argues that we should be appalled by the immense gap between the poor and rich. The proliferation of billionaires shows that capitalism is malfunctioning and in need of reforms, including higher taxes on the ultra-wealthy.

More here.

John Baez in Nautilus:

In my 50s, too old to become a real expert, I have finally fallen in love with algebraic geometry. As the name suggests, this is the study of geometry using algebra. Around 1637, René Descartes laid the groundwork for this subject by taking a plane, mentally drawing a grid on it, as we now do with graph paper, and calling the coordinates x and y. We can write down an equation like x²+ y² = 1, and there will be a curve consisting of points whose coordinates obey this equation. In this example, we get a circle!

It was a revolutionary idea at the time, because it let us systematically convert questions about geometry into questions about equations, which we can solve if we’re good enough at algebra. Some mathematicians spend their whole lives on this majestic subject. But I never really liked it much until recently—now that I’ve connected it to my interest in quantum physics.

More here.

Arundhati Roy in The Huffington Post:

With his reckless “pre-emptive” airstrike on Balakot in Pakistan, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has inadvertently undone what previous Indian governments almost miraculously, succeeded in doing for decades. Since 1947 the Indian Government has bristled at any suggestion that the conflict in Kashmir could be resolved by international arbitration, insisting that it is an “internal matter.” By goading Pakistan into a counter-strike, and so making India and Pakistan the only two nuclear powers in history to have bombed each other, Modi has internationalised the Kashmir dispute. He has demonstrated to the world that Kashmir is potentially the most dangerous place on earth, the flash-point for nuclear war. Every person, country, and organisation that worries about the prospect of nuclear war has the right to intervene and do everything in its power to prevent it.

More here.

Sallie Tisdale at Harper’s Magazine:

In 1974, after protracted legal efforts and sometimes violent protests, a US district court in Washington State upheld the treaties of the Columbia Plateau tribes. Known as the Boldt Decision, the ruling upended the fishing industry and still angers non-Indian fishermen. It gave tribal members the right to half of the river’s harvestable fish, and it was upheld by the Supreme Court in 1979. (The number considered harvestable varies. Fishery managers meet throughout the year to set limits that will allow weak populations to rebound and tributary stocks to spawn, but the shares are always kept equal between treaty and non-treaty fishers.) The tribes also have access to thirty-one fishing sites closed to others. A long stretch of the lower river is now divided into six fishing zones. The first five zones are in the 145 miles between the mouth of the Columbia and Bonneville Dam. Zone 6 runs above Bonneville for another 147 miles, and commercial fishing can only be done by the tribes there. The Boldt Decision affirmed the right to fish—but it didn’t bring back the fish. It did nothing to mitigate the desperate losses caused by dams, development, and overfishing. By 1995, there were about 750,000 salmon left in the entire Columbia River.

more here.

Ian Dreiblatt at The Believer:

Cheesemania ’93, as I’ve decided to call it, is a classic TV commercial. In a civilization organized primarily around the funneling of capital to corporations, commercials offer a space of transcendent communion with the objects of our dependence and desire. They take place in a realm understood to be ideational without quite being imaginary—existing not in any one person’s mind, but ambiently, on a level of reality we rarely think to question, encoded in the daily order of things as neatly as the peanut butter aisle of a suburban grocery store. (This bare proximity to capitalism’s exposed nerves, combined with a habitual callousness to human dignity, is I believe why, in the recent words of A.S. Hamrah, “TV commercials are the worst thing to see on hallucinogenic drugs.”) These commercials embody and transmit all kinds of cultural norms, declaiming on the career-destroying horror of “even one flake” of dandruff, the correct way to manage a labor force, how women should interpret cough syrup viscosity, and so on.

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Christopher Turner at Literary Review:

Fiona MacCarthy met Walter Gropius (1883–1969) through Jack Pritchard, the British entrepreneur who built Lawn Road Flats in Hampstead, an experiment in modernist living where Gropius took up residence after escaping Nazi Germany in 1934. The Bauhaus, the school he founded in Weimar a century ago this year, had been closed by stormtroopers the previous year (by then it had moved to Berlin). In 1968, after the opening of a Bauhaus exhibition at the Royal Academy, MacCarthy was invited to dinner with Gropius at the Lawn Road Isobar, the block’s in-house dining room: ‘He was then eighty-five, small, upright, very courteous, retaining a Germanic formality of bearing,’ MacCarthy recalled. He ‘was still valiant and impressive, with a flickering of arrogance’.

Gropius, who died nine months later, split his life into three acts, obligingly providing the overall structure for MacCarthy’s biography. He started out as a radical, avant-garde architect in Germany, working for Peter Behrens alongside Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe, before founding the Bauhaus; he then fled Nazi Germany to Britain, where he became a leading advocate of modernism but struggled to build anything of substance or replicate his school; finally, he emigrated to America, where he was feted and taught a new generation of architects at Harvard, thereby exerting enormous influence.

more here.

Barry Blitt in The New Yorker:

More here.

Jon Cohen in Science:

Variations of the genome editor CRISPR have wowed biology labs around the world over the past few years because they can precisely change single DNA bases, promising deft repairs for genetic diseases and improvements in crop and livestock genomes. But such “base editors” can have a serious weakness. A pair of studies published online in Science this week shows that one kind of base editor causes many unwanted—and potentially dangerous—“off-target” genetic changes. The mistakes are still rare overall, says David Liu, a chemist at Harvard University whose team developed the first generation of base editors, and are unlikely to interfere with laboratory uses of the technology. But they are enough to concern anyone contemplating use of the technology in patients, Liu and others say. “The two papers are very interesting and important,” says Jin-Soo Kim, a CRISPR researcher at Seoul National University. “It is now important to determine which component is responsible for the collateral mutations and how to reduce or avoid them.”

In its original form, CRISPR uses an RNA strand to guide an enzyme known as Cas9 to a specific place in a genome. The Cas9 acts as a molecular scissors on the DNA, cutting both of its strands, and the cell’s attempts to repair the brake can disable the gene. Or researchers can use the cut to insert a new sequence of DNA. Base editors instead couple the guide RNA to a Cas9 that only cuts one DNA strand. This molecular complex also includes an enzyme, called a deaminase, that can chemically change one base into another. Because such editors have more control over the specific changes than CRISPR itself, researchers did not expect them to cause off-target errors.

More here.

Karla Marie-Rose Derus in the New York Times:

During six years of singlehood in my 20s, I became a person I did not know. Before, I had always been a reader. I walked to the library several times a week as a kid and stayed up late into the night reading under my blankets with a flashlight. I checked out so many books and returned them so quickly the librarian once snapped, “Don’t take home so many books if you’re not going to read them all.”

“But I did read them all,” I said, unloading them into her arms.

I was an English major in college and went on to get a master’s in literature. But shortly after the spiral-bound thesis took its place on my shelf next to the degree, I stopped reading. It happened gradually, the way one heals or dies.

More here.

Richard Marshall interviews Quassim Cassam at 3:AM Magazine:

Quassim Cassam is interested in epistemology, conspiracy theories, terrorism and counterterrorism and medicine. Here he discusses disappearing knowledge, conspiracy theories, how we can protect knowledge from threats of erosion, epistemic vice as Obstructionism, whether epistemic vices might sometimes be ok, Trump and Brexit, the role of expertise, comparing epistemic vices to moral vices, terrorism, why much contemporary philosophy hasn’t engaged with these issues, and what difference philosophy can make regarding them.

3:AM: What made you become a philosopher?

Quassim Cassam: I studied P.P.E. (Philosophy, Politics and Economics) at Oxford. When I started, I planned to concentrate on Politics and Economics but quickly discovered that I loathed Economics. It took a while for me to become seriously interested in Philosophy but was hooked by a couple of things: reading Kant and Strawson and attending Charles Taylor’s brilliant seminars on Nozick’s Anarchy, State and Utopia. I also remember some inspiring tutorials on Wittgenstein’s Tractatus with James Griffin, who was my main undergraduate tutor. When I graduated, I thought seriously about going to law school but decided in the end to stay on to do graduate work in Philosophy. I was lucky enough to be supervised by Strawson and even luckier to land a job teaching Philosophy at Oxford as soon as I finished my doctorate.

More here.

Louise Perry in Quillette:

You probably already know—or think you know—what happened on the night of September 25, 2017 between Aziz Ansari and an anonymous woman calling herself “Grace.” These are the accepted facts: she went on a date with Ansari, they went back to his house, and then had some sexual contact that left Grace feeling deeply uncomfortable. No crime was alleged, since Ansari did not force himself on Grace in any way, but this was clearly a nasty encounter for her. The next day, she texted Ansari telling him as much and he apologized for having “misread things.” Several months later, she published her account on the website babe.

For a few weeks following the publication of Grace’s story, the internet was awash with claims and counter-claims about the rights and wrongs of what had taken place. Every media outlet offered up its judgment on Ansari. To somecommentators, he was the victim of a witch hunt, persecuted by an internet mob with no respect for due process. On the other side, many feminists argued that his behavior exemplified the aggressive, entitled, chauvinistic attitude that too many men show towards women. Others suggested that the reaction against Ansari was disproportionate—yes he had behaved badly, but that badly? Everyone had an opinion, not only on what he had done, but on what the incident revealed about sexual politics in the #MeToo era.

More here.

Hollis Clayson at nonsite:

When the Eiffel Tower—the daring centerpiece of the centenary celebration of the French Revolution, the 1889 Exposition Universelle—was new, it was widely disparaged for its impertinent mechanical appearance. The distinctive 300-meter iron structure still looms over western Paris from the Champ de Mars close to the Seine, but it is now admired, even adored. The history of the Tower thus contains a two-fold surprise: it was the odd World’s Fair edifice to survive, and, though once reviled, it is now loved. Not only has the old derrick-shaped monument become endearing, its thrusting gigantism, surprising shape, and unapologetically industrial materials, along with its attention-grabbing nocturnal lighting and mesmerizing daytime transparency, make it inescapable in many districts of the French capital city. And not only there: owing to its nonstop reproduction and circulation, its familiarity exceeds the spaces of Paris. On account of its global popularity, it is called an urban icon. According to leading image historians, the Tower is “a reference-point for urban signification,” “the iconic object of Paris,” and “the archetype for all urban icons to follow.” The parent of this outlook was literary critic Roland Barthes. In 1964, he argued influentially that the bases of the Tower’s clout are its widespread fame and its emptiness: it is both “a pure signifier” and “an utterly useless monument” meaning that wherever the Tower is known, it absorbs any claim whatsoever about its identity and significance.

more here.

Margaret Drabble at the TLS:

A writer of enormous energy, Burgess suffered from an embarrassment of riches as well as from an excessive love of words and language. The vulgar and irritating phrase “swallowed the dictionary” could have been coined for him, and he cheerfully recommends “ransacking the dictionary” when in need of an inspirational boost. Rejecting a critic who praised Shakespeare’s dying delirium in his novel Nothing Like the Sun (1964) as “writing of the highest order”, he confesses, “Not quite so, really. I had taught myself the trick of contriving a satisfactory coda by what, in music, is termed aleatory means: I flicked through a dictionary and took whatever words leaped from the page. I did this again at the end of my Napoleon novel: the effect is surrealistic, oceanic, and easily achieved”. (You’ve Had Your Time, Chapter Two.) This is a very odd mode of composition. Lorna Sage nailed it in a review of Napoleon Symphony (1974), which he quotes in his memoir with what seems to be approval as “probably profound”. Sage writes, “he is original, inventive, idiosyncratic even, and yet the ingredients are synthetic . . . . His own attitude to this, so far as one can extract anything so direct from the novel, is determinedly, manically cheerful. Better the collective unwisdom of the verbal stew, he would say, than any tyrannous signature”. Sage was a brilliantly perceptive critic, and she could read an author’s mind.

more here.

Sudip Bose at The American Scholar:

We can practically feel the wind blowing upon our cheek, so visceral is Thomson’s tone painting here. The sonorities of the orchestra are bright, the musicians strumming phrases like an ancient lyre, the baritone morphing from priest into bard. There’s a lovely decadence to these lyrical passages in duple and triple time, as the singer pleads with Diana to refrain from hunting in her wooded realm so that the party can continue unimpeded. The chaste Diana, meanwhile, has not been invited to the celebration; that her realm is being violated is suggested by another contrasting musical texture—still lyrical but with hints of darkness not far beneath the surface.

Indeed, The Feast of Love is a work of contrasts and tension. Any impulse toward the voluptuous is tempered by classical restraint. A composer such as Samuel Barber might have taken this same text and produced music more romantically exuberant, but Thomson’s aesthetic, honed by Nadia Boulanger in Paris, demanded simplicity, directness, wittiness, and elegance.

more here.

Peter Reuell in PhysOrg:

What do you think of when you think of a rainbow? If you’re sighted, you’re probably imagining colors arcing through the sky just after the rain. But what about someone who can’t see a rainbow? How does a congenitally blind person’s knowledge of a rainbow—or even something as seemingly simple as the color red—differ from that of the sighted? The answer, Alfonso Caramazza said, is complicated: There are similarities but also important differences.

The Daniel and Amy Starch Professor of Psychology, Caramazza is the co-author, with postdoctoral fellow Ella Striem-Amit and Xiaoying Wang and Yanchao Bi from Beijing Normal University, of a new study that suggests that, although they experience them differently, the sighted and the blind are still able to share a common understanding of abstract visual phenomena like rainbows and color. The study is described in a December paper published in Nature Communications. “The question here is how do we represent things that don’t have an external physical reality—something we can’t touch or smell?” Caramazza said. “If you think about it, this is not just a problem for the blind; it’s a problem anyone has when they hear a word like ‘ion’ or ‘quark,’ for example. Most of us have only a very vague understanding of what those things actually are. If you talk to physicists they can give you theoretical, mathematically precise descriptions, but none of the things they associate with those things have a concrete, physical correspondence.”

With no way to directly experience what something like quarks actually are, Caramazza said, people lean heavily on language to understand or describe them—using words like “strange” and “charm” to describe quarks’ “flavors.” And the same, he said, is true for blind people seeking to understand color.

“You can use language to describe things that are physical,” he explained. “If you were blind and I wanted to describe a cup to you, I could say it’s a hard object that’s concave and it’s nonporous, so you can put liquids in it. Those descriptions are things you have some physical experience of, so you can piggyback on that experience. But there are some concepts for which you cannot do that. Color is a surface property of an object, but there’s no way for me to tell a blind person what that sensory experience is, because it’s a purely visual experience. So the way they learn about red is the way you and I learn about quarks, or about concepts like justice or virtue—through a verbal description or use in verbal contexts.”

More here.

From The Washington Post:

Two hundred and twenty one years ago, in a hall that still stands across the street, a group of men gathered and, with these simple words, launched America’s improbable experiment in democracy. Farmers and scholars; statesmen and patriots who had traveled across the ocean to escape tyranny and persecution finally made real their declaration of independence at a Philadelphia convention that lasted through the spring of 1787. The document they produced was eventually signed but ultimately unfinished. It was stained by this nation’s original sin of slavery, a question that divided the colonies and brought the convention to a stalemate until the founders chose to allow the slave trade to continue for at least 20 more years, and to leave any final resolution to future generations.

Of course, the answer to the slavery question was already embedded within our Constitution – a Constitution that had at is very core the ideal of equal citizenship under the law; a Constitution that promised its people liberty and justice, and a union that could be and should be perfected over time.

And yet words on a parchment would not be enough to deliver slaves from bondage, or provide men and women of every color and creed their full rights and obligations as citizens of the United States. What would be needed were Americans in successive generations who were willing to do their part — through protests and struggle, on the streets and in the courts, through a civil war and civil disobedience, and always at great risk — to narrow that gap between the promise of our ideals and the reality of their time.

More here. (Note: Throughout February, we will publish at least one post dedicated to Black History Month)

For Rashan Charles

And after the black boy is
strangled by police, after

the protests where the man,
his Rottweiler on an iron leash yells,

let’s go mash up dis city

and another crowd bulks,

the parents of the murdered
beg us not to become

the monsters some think
we already are—even when

the barista shakes her head
at the banners, says actually,

police be killing whites too.
Look how scary it is

to be here and know
if we die someone

will make a sound
like her before earth

is tipped over us.
Who hasn’t had enough?

Enough burning
bins, pushing

shopping trolleys
into static and sirens?

Who isn’t chanting
enough, enough,

enough, throwing spells,
the rebellious

holding what they can
in front of a supermarket

or police stations
or voting booths—I am

kind to the man
sitting next to me

in C.L.R James Library, even if
his breathing disturbs me.

Can we disagree graciously
I am tired of people

not knowing the volume
of their power. Who doesn’t

deserve
some silence at night?

by Raymond Antrobus
from Academy of American Poets