Ajay Singh Chaudhary in Public Seminar:

We Americans are “constitutional fetishists” in the apt phrase of the lesser-known mid-20^th century critical theorist of law and economy, Franz Neumann. We tend to think that a particular order of state institutions — for example, our current incarnation of the separation-of-powers — embodies the essence of democracy instead of looking to see what kind of politics, democratic or otherwise, such institutions facilitate. Although Neumann was speaking in the broad strokes of theory, the United States is, perhaps, the case-in-point.

Far from living at the bay of “the mob,” the United States is institutionally the least democratic among nominally democratic countries in the OECD world. When the political scientists Alfred Stepan and Juan Linz — who had devoted their careers to studying democratization around the world – turned their analysis to the United States, what they discovered was a not a pretty picture. While most democratic states have at best one or two so-called “veto players” — checks on the expression of popular sovereignty through elected representation — the United States has four. The United States has an additional four further amplifications of the power of an elected minority. Taken together, these establish the United States as the least representative democracy among developed democracies in the world. Stepan and Linz were hardly radical scholars but the implications of what they observed in the 1990s is indeed quite radical today.

It’s not that somehow this system has gone off the rails in recent years. Rather, as democratic pressures for the recognition of women and racial minorities as full human beings – to redress our gross economic inequality, to fundamentally transform our state and society into ones of freedom and flourishing for all — have increased, our constitutional order has acted precisely as it was intended. The “founders” feared a democratic society — that eventually an ever increasingly enfranchised majority would encroach on the privileges and the property of society’s “betters.”

More here.

Sanjay G. Reddy in Development and Change:

In The Nobel Factor, Avner Offer and Gabriel Söderberg help us to understand the politics behind the awarding of what is colloquially known as the Nobel Prize in Economics (and more correctly as the Swedish Central Bank Prize in Honour of Alfred Nobel). The main idea of the book is that the Prize has been often awarded to market‐oriented thinkers with the aim of undermining social democracy, of which Sweden was the most famous exemplar, in favour of market principles. This rather local agenda, pressed by the influential economist Assar Lindbeck (and presumably by others, although they receive less attention in the book) was, the authors argue, crucial to explaining the pattern of awards. The authors go so far as to contrast Economics with Social Democracy, in the process identifying the discipline as a whole with its most market‐oriented strand. The authors recognize that there were other elements within modern economics, but argue that the ‘high theory’ of neoclassical economics, interpreted as making the case for the optimality of markets, was greatly bolstered by the prize, especially after its first decade (when social democratic stalwarts such as Gunnar Myrdal won it.). The preponderance of University of Chicago faculty members among winners in the later period is one indication of this tendency, although the presence of exceptions even in the later years (notably Amartya Sen) is acknowledged (pp. 122–23). The authors state that ‘from an ideological point of view, the Nobel Committee was even‐handed in its awards, but the balance it achieved was biased to the right in comparison with opinion within the discipline, especially during the 1990s’ (ibid.).

The proposition that the pattern of prizes awarded reflected an agenda to change Swedish society should be distinguished from two others, each important in their own right, and distinct but potentially causally interrelated, that can be identified, namely 1.) that the prizes awarded actually did have the intended effect, or indeed any specific effect, on public policies shaping society (in Sweden or more generally), and 2.) that the pattern of the prizes awarded shaped the economics discipline, perhaps by offering prestige and authority to particular ideas or by shaping the activity of prize seekers.

More here.

Justin E. H. Smith in his own blog:

A rather ambitious campaign of academic hoaxing has been in the news over the past week. The hoaxers claim to be “liberals.” The online nonacademic right is gleeful in its celebration of the hoaxers’ purported accomplishments, and in its denunciation of what they call “postmodernism” (I prefer the alternative term “grievance studies,” as I take it that this relatively new sort of agenda-driven “me-search” holds to a naive and basically premodern realism about its categories; the proliferation of new pseudospecies and the tracking of their “intersections” looks much more like the “analogism” that characterises Italian Renaissance cosmology than it looks like, say, Baudrillard’s theory of simulacra or Lyotard’s critique of metanarratives). The academic left has taken its familiar posture of preening defensiveness, denying that there’s any distinct problem at all in the scholarly standards governing the publication of articles in the various “theory” fields that do not also show up in, say, psychology or political science.

Whatever. Everyone’s playing their assigned roles. But what I wanted to speak to here is the question of hoaxes in general. Quite apart from whether I think “Sokal Squared” has accomplished what its authors claim, I confess I am astounded, though I really should not be by now, by the moralism and the piety about rules and procedures that so many academics are expressing, as if hoaxing were always unethical and lacking in any potential salutary effects. These academics seem entirely unaware of the distinguished history of hoaxing, and to assume that it dates back no earlier than Sokal.

More here.

Mark Harris in Wired:

CHRISTOPHER TALBOT THOUGHT he would make a great police officer. He was 29 years old, fit, and had a clean background record. Talbot had military experience, including a tour of Iraq as a US Marine, and his commanding officer had written him a glowing recommendation. In 2014, armed with an associate degree in criminal justice, he felt ready to apply to become an officer with the New Haven Police Department, in his home state of Connecticut.

Talbot sailed through the department’s rigorous physical and mental tests, passing speed and agility trials and a written examination—but there was one final test. Like thousands of other law enforcement, fire, paramedic, and federal agencies across the country, the New Haven Police Department insists that each applicant take an assessment that has been rejected by almost every scientific authority: the polygraph test.

Commonly known as lie detectors, polygraphs are virtually unused in civilian life. They’re largely inadmissible in court and it’s illegal for most private companies to consult them. Over the past century, scientists have debunked the polygraph, proving again and again that the test can’t reliably distinguish truth from falsehood. At best, it is a roll of the dice; at worst, it’s a vessel for test administrators to project their own beliefs.

More here.

Christobel Hastings in Broadly:

It was the autumn of 1868, and for the samurai warriors of the Aizu clan in northern Japan, battle was on the horizon. Earlier in the year, the Satsuma samurai had staged a coup, overthrowing the Shogunate government and handing power to a new emperor, 15-year-old Mutsuhito, who was wasting no time in replacing the feudal ways of the ruling Tokugawa with a radically modern state. After a long summer of fighting, imperial forces reached the gates of Wakamatsu castle in October to quash the resistance, besieging the stronghold with 30,000 troops. Beyond its walls, 3,000 defiant warriors readied themselves for the final stand.

As the Aizu fought valiantly from the towers and trenches, most women remained behind the scenes, ploughing their energies into cooking, bandaging, and extinguishing cannonballs that pounded the castle day and night. But for Nakano Takeko, an onna-bugeisha woman warrior, front line defense was the only course of action. Faced with the mighty gun-power of the imperial army, Takeko led an unofficial unit of 20-30 women in a counter-attack against the enemy, felling at least five opponents with her naginata blade before taking a fatal bullet to the chest. With her dying breaths, Takeko asked her sister to behead her, so that her body wouldn’t be taken as a trophy. She was buried under a tree in the courtyard of the Aizu Bangmachi temple, where a monument now stands in her honor.

More here.

Mark Greif in n + 1:

IT’S PROVING DIFFICULT TO STOP THINKING about the testimonies last week. Four hours of questions to a citizen named Christine Blasey Ford. Four hours of questions, of a sort, to Judge Brett Kavanaugh of the second highest court in the United States. The woman lives quietly as a professor of psychology and surfer in Northern California. The man has never left Washington, DC, and helps decide the law of the land. The miserable anticipation before last Thursday depended on the “impression” Ford would make in repeating, before the country, the assertion that this judge—nominated to the Supreme Court—had once confined and sexually assaulted her when she was 15 and he was 17. The abyss we’ve dwelt in since is the result of the impression from his testimony. I still don’t know how to assimilate it all. The mirrored sessions reversed the conventional meanings and assignment of shame and pity, then of impartiality and knowledge.

The one thing certain following both testimonies was that Christine Blasey Ford had shown herself qualified by temperament and character to ascend to the open seat on the Supreme Court. Alas this was not the arrangement being considered.

More here.

FOG

A vagueness comes over everything,
as though proving color and contour
alike dispensable: the lighthouse
extinct, the islands’ spruce-tips
drunk up like milk in the
universal emulsion; houses
reverting into the lost
and forgotten; granite
subsumed, a rumor
in a mumble of ocean.
            Tactile
definition, however, has not been
totally banished: hanging
tassel by tassel, panicled
foxtail and needlegrass,
dropseed, furred hawkweed,
and last season’s rose-hips
are vested in silenced
chimes of the finest,
clearest sea-crystal.
            Opacity
opens up rooms, a showcase
for the hueless moonflower
corolla, as Georgia
O’Keefe might have seen it,
of foghorns; the nodding
campanula of bell buoys;
the ticking, linear
filigree of bird voices.

by Amy Clampitt
from The Collected Poems of Amy Clampitt
published by Alfred A. Knopf, 1997. 

Giovanni Biglino in Smithsonian:

When working with people in other disciplines – whether surgeons, fellow engineers, nurses or cardiologists – it can sometimes seem like everyone is speaking a different language. But collaboration between disciplines is crucial for coming up with new ideas.

I first became fascinated with the workings of the heart years ago, during a summer research project on the aortic valve. And as a bioengineer, I recently worked with an artist, a psychologist, a producer, a literature scholar and a whole interdisciplinary team to understand even more about the heart, its function and its symbolism. We began to see the heart in completely different ways. The project, The Heart of the Matter, also involved something that is often missing from discussions purely centred around research: stories from the patients themselves. The Heart of the Matter originally came out of artist Sofie Layton’s residency at Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children in London a couple of years ago, before the project grew into a wider collaborative effort. For the project, patient groups were engaged in creative workshops that explored how they viewed their hearts. Stories that emerged from these sessions were then translated into a series of original artworks that allow us to reflect on the medical and metaphorical dimensions of the heart, including key elements of cardiovascular function and patient experience.

More here.

Dean Keith Simonton in Nautilus:

People too often forget that IQ tests haven’t been around that long. Indeed, such psychological measures are only about a century old. Early versions appeared in France with the work of Alfred Binet and Theodore Simon in 1905. However, these tests didn’t become associated with genius until the measure moved from the Sorbonne in Paris to Stanford University in Northern California. There Professor Lewis M. Terman had it translated from French into English, and then standardized on sufficient numbers of children, to create what became known as the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale. That happened in 1916. The original motive behind these tests was to get a diagnostic to select children at the lower ends of the intelligence scale who might need special education to keep up with the school curriculum. But then Terman got a brilliant idea: Why not study a large sample of children who score at the top end of the scale? Better yet, why not keep track of these children as they pass into adolescence and adulthood? Would these intellectually gifted children grow up to become genius adults?

Terman subjected hundreds of school kids to his newfangled IQ test. Obviously, he didn’t want a sample so large that it would be impractical to follow their intellectual development. Taking the top 2 percent of the population would clearly yield a group twice as large as the top 1 percent. Moreover, a less select group might be less prone to become geniuses. So why not catch the crème de la crème? The result was a group of 1,528 extremely bright boys and girls who averaged around 11 years old. And to say they were “bright” is a very big understatement. Their average IQ was 151, with 77 claiming IQs between 177 and 200. These children were subjected to all sorts of additional tests and measures, repeatedly so, until they reached middle age. The result was the monumental Genetic Studies of Genius, five volumes appearing between 1925 and 1959, although Terman died before the last volume came out. These highly intelligent people are still being studied today, or at least the small number still alive. They have also become affectionately known as “Termites”—a clear contraction of “Termanites.”

More here.