James Garvey in Prospect:

Just a few weeks before her death in October, Mary Midgley agreed to meet and discuss her new book, What Is Philosophy For? It seemed astonishing that someone about to celebrate her 99^th birthday had a new book out, but I was less in awe of that than the reputation of one of the most important British philosophers of the 20^th century and beyond.

People who have encountered Midgley often use the word “formidable” to describe her. Journalist Andrew Brown called her “the most frightening philosopher in the country: the one before whom it is least pleasant to appear a fool.” During my email correspondence with her to set up a date to talk about those philosophical problems “which are exercising both me and the public,” she worried that publications like the ones I write for “occasionally give rather half-witted answers to large questions of this kind.”

A lot of people were on the receiving end of her sharp intellect. She made puncturing scientific pretension into an art form—going after DNA discoverer Francis Crick for saying that human behavior can be explained simply by the interactions of brain cells, the physicist Lawrence Krauss for claiming that only science can solve philosophical problems, those theorists who insist we must look to machines for our salvation, and, most famously, Richard Dawkins for the idea that a gene could be selfish.

In person, though, Midgley was kind, generous with her time and as engaged as ever with philosophical ideas—even if her voice was soft and she had a little trouble hearing me. She sat in an armchair, sipping tea, surrounded by books. Having just celebrated her approaching birthday with friends and family, she had a kitchen full of cakes.

More here.

Maya Wei-Haas in National Geographic:

In 2016, a series of unassuming stone shapes rocked the paleobiology world when they were declared the earliest fossilized life yet found. Standing up to 1.6 inches tall, the triangular forms line up like a string of inverted flags in an outcrop on the southwest coast of Greenland that dates back 3.7 billion years.

“If these are really the figurative tombstones of our earliest ancestors, the implications are staggering,” NASA astrobiologist Abigail Allwood wrote in a review article that accompanied the Nature study announcing the find. The microbes that made these fossils are over 200 million years older than the most widely accepted evidence of fossil life and would have lived a geologic blink of an eye after astroids had blasted Earth’s early surface. Evidence of critters from this time would suggest that “life is not a fussy, reluctant, and unlikely thing,” Allwood wrote. “Give life half an opportunity, and it’ll run with it.”

But even as Allwood penned these words, she had a nagging sense that something was amiss.

More here.

Alex Carp in the New York Review of Books:

What was America? The question is nearly as old as the republic itself. In 1789, the year George Washington began his first term, the South Carolina doctor and statesman David Ramsay set out to understand the new nation by looking to its short past. America’s histories at the time were local, stories of states or scattered tales of colonial lore; nations were tied together by bloodline, or religion, or ancestral soil. “The Americans knew but little of one another,” Ramsay wrote, delivering an accounting that both presented his contemporaries as a single people, despite their differences, and tossed aside the assumptions of what would be needed to hold them together. “When the war began, the Americans were a mass of husbandmen, merchants, mechanics and fishermen; but the necessities of the country gave a spring to the active powers of the inhabitants, and set them on thinking, speaking and acting in a line far beyond that to which they had been accustomed.” The Constitution had just been ratified at the time of Ramsay’s writing, the first system of national government submitted to its people for approval. “A vast expansion of the human mind speedily followed,” he wrote. It hashed out the nation as a set of principles. America was an idea. America was an argument.

The question has animated American history ever since. “For the last half century,” the historian and essayist Jill Lepore told an interviewer in 2011, academic historians have been trying “to write an integrated history of the United States, a history both black and white, a history that weaves together political history and social history, the history of presidents and the history of slavery.” Over the same period, a generation of Americans have had their imaginations narrowed, on one side by populist myths blind to the evidence of the past, and on the other by academic histories blind to the power of stories. Why, at a time when facts are more accessible than at any other point in human history, have they failed to provide us with a more broadly shared sense of objective truth?

More here.

Lynne Cooke at Artforum:

IN A 1985 INTERVIEW, Anni Albers remarked, “I find that, when the work is made with threads, it’s considered a craft; when it’s on paper, it’s considered art.” This was her somewhat oblique explanation of why she hadn’t received “the longed-for pat on the shoulder,” i.e., recognition as an artist, until after she gave up weaving and immersed herself in printmaking—a transition that occurred when she was in her sixties. It’s hard to judge whether Albers’s tone was wry or rueful or (as one critic alleged) “some-what bitter,” and therefore it’s unclear what her comment might indicate about the belatedness of this acknowledgment relative to her own sense of her achievement. After all, she had been making “pictorial weavings”—textiles designed expressly as art—since the late 1940s. Though the question might now seem moot, it isn’t, given the enduring debates about the hierarchical distinctions that separate fine art from craft, and given the still contested status of self-identified fiber artists who followed in Albers’s footsteps and claimed their woven forms as fine art, tout court.

more here.

Sudip Bose at The American Scholar:

When George Frideric Handel arrived in London in 1710—he was in his mid-20s at the time and would reside in the capital for the duration of his life, becoming a naturalized British subject—he made his reputation composing operas, their librettos written not in his native German but in Italian, as was the fashion of the day. Working tirelessly and continuously, Handel produced an astonishing succession of operatic masterpieces: Giulio Cesare, Tamerlano, Rodelinda, Orlando, and Alcina, to name just a few. Eventually, however, he turned to the language of his adopted land, and it was in his English oratorios—Esther, Saul, Israel in Egypt, Samson, Judas Maccabaeus, Jephtha, and most famously of all, Messiah—that he arguably made his most striking contributions to Western music. Handel was attracted not only to the Bible but also to secular poetry, his subjects inspired by the likes of Milton, Pope, and Dryden. The composer’s command of English was never stellar (he was hardly a fluent exophone in the manner of Voltaire, Conrad, or Beckett), which makes his facility with the cadences, imagery, rhythms, and rhymes of English verse all the more remarkable.

more here.

Barbara Kollmeyer in MarketWatch:

Our call of the day, pulls no punches as it warns that all that oft-referenced increase in affluence, has been artificially inflated by the Fed, which is ultimately bad news for the economy and the stock market. Here’s how Jesse Colombo, analyst at Clarity Financial, explains it:

“The U.S. household wealth boom since the Great Recession is a sham, a farce and a gigantic lie that is tricking everyone into believing that happy days are here again even though the engines that are driving it are bubbles that are going to burst and cause a crisis that will be even worse than the 2008 crash,” Colombo said in a video he posted via the Real Investment Advice blog.

There has been a fair bit of buzz on the topic since data this summer that showed household wealth topped $100 trillion for the first time in June. Colombo’s isn’t the only invective against bloated U.S. wealth and how it could go terribly wrong, but the commentary delivers, perhaps, the most potent argument to date, including charts, such as the following, that illustrates the degree to which wealth has been outpacing economic expansion:

Wealth that gallops past economic growth is a “telltale sign that the boom is artificial and unsustainable, he said. The last two times the share of household-wealth growth exceeded gross domestic product, or GDP, was during the late 1990s dot-com bubble and the mid-2000 housing bubble, he notes. “Both of which ended in tears,” he said.

More here.

Good Bones

Life is short, though I keep this from my children.
Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine
in a thousand delicious ill-advised ways
in a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways,
I’ll keep from my children. The world is at least
fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative
estimate, though I keep this from my children.
For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird.
For every loved child, a child broken, bagged,
sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world
is at least half terrible, and for every kind
stranger, there is one who would break you,
though I keep this from my children. I am trying
to sell them the world. Any decent realtor,
walking you through a real shithole, chirps on
about good bones: This place could be beautiful,
right? You could make this place beautiful.

by Maggie Smith
from Waxwing Magazine Issue IX, 2016

Alex Tzelnic in Slate:

When people learn that I meditate every day, they often sheepishly admit that they wish they could, but that they just aren’t suited for it, or their mind is too active, or they don’t have the time. This always reminds me of Anne Lamott’s iconic gem of an essay, “Shitty First Drafts.” While nonwriters tend to conceive of the writing process as a montage of steaming mugs of tea and meaningful glances outside windows frosted just so, in reality, writing is a grind. Words arrive slowly, and in direct proportion to how much time your ass is touching the chair and your fingers stroking the keyboard. And so I try and explain that meditation is exactly the same.

Many burgeoning meditators have visions of rapturous sitting rounds spent floating upon the meditation cushion, the incense burning just so, the mind clear and calm. The reasoning for this misconception is twofold: first, this is exactly how every meditator appears, since no one else is privy to the cacophony inside your skull; second, meditation is big business these days, and serenity sells. The truth, though, is that meditation can also be a real grind, the understanding arriving slowly and in direct proportion to how much time your ass is touching the sitting cushion and your breath rising and falling. When I wake up early to sit on the cushion for 30 minutes, it is often begrudgingly, and my sitting round is often, well, shitty. But this kind of message does not fill dharma halls and lead to best-sellers. (If a meditation instructor tells the truth and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?)

More here.

Carol Clark in Phys.Org:

Clifton Mark in Aeon:

In 1717, Voltaire was arrested, some might say, for giving offence. He had published a ‘satirical’ verse that opens by calling the Duc d’Orleans, the then Regent of France, ‘an inhuman tyrant, famous for poison, atheism, and incest’. This pungent personal attack became so popular it was sung on the streets of Paris. In response, the Duc had Voltaire arrested without accusation or trial. The author spent 11 months in the Bastille.

Such stories help to explain why Voltaire turns up so frequently in today’s debates over offensive speech, which are driven by the sense that members of historically marginalised groups have become increasingly willing to take offence to speech that they feel implies their exclusion or inferiority. Many believe that this trend has gone too far. In 2016, the Pew Research Centre in the US found that a majority of Americans believe that ‘too many people are easily offended these days over language’. Angus Reid, a Canadian polling company, found similar results – in their poll, 80 per cent of Canadians agreed with the statement: ‘These days, it seems like you can’t say anything without someone feeling offended.’ This sense is not without basis. Public discourse is filled with confrontations over offensive speech. Hardly a day goes by when some public figure is not called out for offensive behaviour, or when another argues that all this offence-taking is a threat to free speech.

More here.

Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe:

Economics, like other sciences (social and otherwise), is about what the world does; but it’s natural for economists to occasionally wander out into the question of what we should do as we live in the world. A very good example of this is a new book by economist Tyler Cowen, Stubborn Attachments. Tyler will be well-known to many listeners for his long-running blog Marginal Revolution (co-created with his colleague Alex Tabarrok) and his many books and articles. Here he offers a surprising new take on how society should arrange itself, based on the simple idea that the welfare of future generations counts for just as much as the welfare of the current one. From that starting point, Tyler concludes that the most moral thing for us to do is to work to maximize economic growth right now, as that’s the best way to ensure that future generations are well-off. We talk about this idea, as well as the more general idea of how to think like an economist. (In the second half of the podcast we veer off into talking about quantum mechanics and the multiverse, to everyone’s benefit.)

More here.

Will Glovinsky in Public Books:

Was Sharmila Sen “happy” on the first morning she woke up in the United States to the strange smell of bacon frying? That’s what her young son wants to know when, near the end of Not Quite Not White—Sen’s powerful memoir and meditation on race and migration—he interviews her for a school project on immigration. It turns out we already know the answer. “It was a complex animal smell,” we read earlier of the odor she ever after associates with her 1982 arrival in Boston from Calcutta, “making my mouth water and my stomach churn in revulsion at the same time.”

Unwilling to a give her son a placating affirmative, Sen instead emphasizes that, while hardly joyous on arrival, she eventually adapted to life in her new country, just as her son would be able to should he himself have to emigrate one day. Though the prospect pains the young interviewer, it crystalizes an important strand of Sen’s reflections on emigration and belonging. “Should we only teach our children to welcome strangers among us? Or should we also teach them that one day they too might be strangers in a strange land—pushed around the globe by forces of economics, politics, or nature?” For Sen, the answer is at once clear and paradoxical: “We have truly arrived when we are no longer afraid of departure.”

What’s striking about this closing scene is not only the bold parenting or the way Sen turns a hoary Ellis Island mythology on its head.

More here.

Susan Napier at The Paris Review:

Princess Mononoke inaugurated a new chapter in Miyazakiworld. Ambitious and angry, it expressed the director’s increasingly complex worldview, putting on film the tight intermixture of frustration, brutality, animistic spirituality, and cautious hope that he had honed in his manga Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind. The film offers a mythic scope, unprecedented depictions of violence and environmental collapse, and a powerful vision of the sublime, all within the director’s first-ever attempt at a jidaigeki, or historical film. It also moves further away from the family fare that had made him a treasured household name in Japan.

In the complicated universe of Princess Mononoke, there is no longer room for villains such as Future Boy Conan’s power-hungry Repka, the greedy Count of The Castle of Cagliostro, or the evil Muska of Laputa: Castle in the Sky. Miyazaki instead gives his audiences the ambitious but generous Lady Eboshi and the enigmatic monk Jiko-bō, who insists that we live in a cursed world. Jiko-bō isn’t the only one who thinks this, apparently.

more here.

James Winchell at Tablet Magazine:

The publication of Cynthia Haven’s full-dress biography of René Girard, a major figure in the “French invasion” that stormed the beaches of American academe across the final decades of the last millennium, marks a notable event on many fronts: academic, professional, literary, philosophical; and for some individuals among generations of students world-wide, deeply personal. In my case, that means religious.

Thanks to a series of synchronicities that I will never fully grasp, I served for five years as Girard’s junior colleague, having earned my first tenure-track post as assistant professor of French at Stanford University (1988-93), where the brilliant Catholic thinker occupied a Distinguished Chair in the department of French and Italian, and influenced, among many other students, Peter Thiel. My subsequent decision—seven years and another university later—to become a Jew-by-choice was significantly informed by Girard, whose writings, colleagueship, and friendship informed the ongoing, gradual uncovering of the pre-existing Judaism that I had already intuited within myself.

more here.

Frank Furedi in Sp!ked:

It is unpleasant to feel alone. Loneliness can be a source of desolation and anguish. That is why it is understandable that many of us look for ways to fix it. Some seek out therapy, others join social clubs and attempt to forge new relationships and contacts. The refusal to accept social isolation and the search for solidarity shapes who we are and influences community life. Loneliness is not just a condition that we must suffer. It also provides people with an opportunity to gain an understanding of themselves and of their world. The theologian Paul Tillich exhorted people to embrace their loneliness, because it forces us to engage with life’s two most fundamental questions: what is the meaning of life and how should we understand ourselves?

He argued that the word loneliness expresses ‘the pain of being alone’, while the term solitude captures the ‘glory of being alone’. This draws on Greek philosophers, who understood the importance of the value of self-reflection. Socrates referred to thinking as the soul’s internal dialogue with itself. The capacity to conduct an internal dialogue is essential for the development of a sense of self. It also helps you manage loneliness. Arendt, like Socrates, believed that the anguish of loneliness could be managed through the habit of conversing with oneself. Though still alone, she believed that through a ‘silent dialogue of myself with myself’, she was ‘together with somebody’. What Arendt, Tillich and other philosophers understood was that there is real value in solitude.

The medicalisation of loneliness distracts people from understanding the importance of living with solitude. Solitude is essential for the development of people’s sense of self and freedom. Our solitude provides a space where we can be free from any external pressure and control. It is a precious space that we open up to the gaze of doctors and health experts at our peril – doing so risks undermining our sense of moral independence. It is also the place where human beings can develop the psychological and moral resources they require to enter into intimate relationships.

More here.

Laura Cumming at The Guardian:

Édouard Vuillard was 60 when his mother died in 1928. He had never lived with anybody else. “My mother is my muse,” he confessed to a friend, and the truth of that is apparent in more than 500 images of this small, stout widow with her tight bun and patterned dresses running a sewing business in the various Paris apartments they shared. She is there from first to last.

There – but where exactly? Take the smallest but most absorbing work in this gripping exhibition. Its title is Two Seamstresses in the Workroom. There they are, two young girls furled up in the lengths of cloth they are stitching. It is late; the lamp’s amber glow makes the blue of their dresses sing out in the silence while casting their faces into shadow. Their profiles are unusually distinct for Vuillard, who seems to be sitting close to the table himself. But at the far end is the hint of another person: just a fraction of flesh tone, but the shape of her forehead is characteristic. Madame Vuillard presides at the head of the table.

more here.

Carl Zimmer in The New York Times:

Cancer is a disease of mutations. Tumor cells are riddled with genetic mutations not found in healthy cells. Scientists estimate that it takes five to 10 key mutations for a healthy cell to become cancerous. Some of these mutations can be caused by assaults from the environment, such as ultraviolet rays and cigarette smoke. Others arise from harmful molecules produced by the cells themselves. In recent years, researchers have begun taking a closer look at these mutations, to try to understand how they arise in healthy cells, and what causes these cells to later erupt into full-blown cancer. The research has produced some major surprises. For instance, it turns out that a large portion of the cells in healthy people carry far more mutations than expected, including some mutations thought to be the prime drivers of cancer. These mutations make a cell grow faster than others, raising the question of why full-blown cancer isn’t far more common. “This is quite a fundamental piece of biology that we were unaware of,” said Inigo Martincorena, a geneticist at the Wellcome Sanger Institute in Cambridge, England.These lurking mutations went unnoticed for so long because the tools for examining DNA were too crude. If scientists wanted to sequence the entire genome of tumor cells, they had to gather millions of cells and analyze all of the DNA. A mutation, to be detectable, had to be very common.

But as DNA sequencing grew more sophisticated, Dr. Martincorena and other researchers developed methods for detecting very rare mutations, and they began to wonder if those mutations might be found in healthy cells, hidden below the radar. Dr. Martincorena and his colleagues began their search in skin; its cells are battered daily by the sun’s ultraviolet rays, which trigger mutations. “We thought it was the lowest-hanging fruit,” Dr. Martincorena said. In a study in 2015, he and his colleagues collected bits of skin left over from cosmetic surgeries to lift drooping eyelids. They examined 234 biopsies from four patients, each sample of skin about the size of a pinhead. They gently coaxed the top layers of cells, known as epithelial cells, from the underlying tissue. Dr. Martincorena’s team then fished the DNA from the healthy epithelial cells, and carefully sequenced 74 genes that are known to play an important role in the development of cancer. Mutations that are common in cancer genes were remarkably common in these healthy skin cells, too, the researchers found. About one of every four epithelial cells carried a mutation on a cancer-linked gene, speeding up the cell’s growth.

More here.