Alex Preston in The Guardian:

This is a story about a book that just kept selling, catching publishers, booksellers and even its author off guard. In seeking to understand the reasons for the book’s unusually protracted shelf life, we uncover important messages about our moment in history, about the still-vital place of reading in our culture, and about the changing face of publishing. The book is Sapiens, by the Israeli academic Yuval Noah Harari, published in the UK in September 2014. It’s a recondite work of evolutionary history charting the development of humankind through a scholarly examination of our ability to cooperate as a species. Sapiens sold well on publication, particularly when it came out in paperback in the summer of 2015. What’s remarkable about it, though, is that it’s still selling in vast numbers. In its first two and a half years of life, Sapiens sold just over 200,000 copies in the UK. Since 2017, when Harari published Homo Deus, his follow-up, Sapiens has sold a further half million copies, establishing itself firmly at the top of the bestseller lists (and convincingly outselling its sequel). Sapiens has become a publishing phenomenon and its wild success is symptomatic of a broader trend in our book-buying habits: a surge in the popularity of intelligent, challenging nonfiction, often books that are several years old.

…These are febrile, unpredictable times, with society facing new challenges and quandaries each day, from the rise of populist politics to the migrant crisis to climate change. Mark Richards, publisher at John Murray Press, sees the return to serious works of nonfiction as a response to the spirit of the age. “We’re living in a world that suddenly seems less certain than it did even two years ago, and the natural reaction is for people to try and find out as much about it as possible,” he says. “People have a hunger both for information and facts, and for nuanced exploration of issues, of a sort that books are in a prime position to provide.”

More here.

Brent Staples in The New York Times:

The suffragist heroes Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony seized control of the feminist narrative of the 19th century. Their influential history of the movement still governs popular understanding of the struggle for women’s rights and will no doubt serve as a touchstone for commemorations that will unfold across the United States around the centennial of the 19th Amendment in 2020.

…The famous suffrage convention convened in Seneca Falls, N.Y., in 1848 featured Stanton and her partner-in-arms, Lucretia Mott, in addition to the towering figure of Frederick Douglass, the abolitionist and dyed-in-the-wool supporter of women’s rights who was on his way to becoming one of the most famous speakers of the century. Were it not for Douglass’s oratory, the historian Lisa Tetrault tells us in “The Myth of Seneca Falls,” the “controversial” resolution demanding the vote for women might actually have failed.

It became clear after the Civil War that black and white women had different views of why the right to vote was essential. White women were seeking the vote as a symbol of parity with their husbands and brothers. Black women, most of whom lived in the South, were seeking the ballot for themselves and their men, as a means of empowering black communities besieged by the reign of racial terror that erupted after Emancipation. The tension escalated in the run-up to the 15th Amendment, a provision that ostensibly barred the states from denying Negro men the right to vote. Reasonable people could, of course, disagree on the merits of who should first be given the vote — women or black men. Stanton, instead, embarked on a Klan-like tirade against the amendment. She warned that white woman would be degraded if Negro men preceded them into the franchise. Admiring historians have dismissed this as an unfortunate interlude in an exemplary life. By contrast, the historian Lori Ginzberg argues persuasively that racism and elitism were enduring features of the great suffragist’s makeup and philosophy.

More here.

Round 3

—after Tyehimba Jess

Freedom is what you can buy
with a left jab & a right cross.

You’ve got the uppercut of a champ.
On a sweaty August night, you watch

Ramos v Ramos from the Olympic
on TV. You turn off the blaring AC,

want to hear the fighters’ tssiiuu tssiiuu, exhaling
as they attempt to break each other’s skin.

You’re light on your feet like Mando,
got Sugar’s hand speed. Freedom

is your girl by your side telling you to fight.
She brings your boxing license

in a lunch bag while you labor
at Lockheed, roots for you in Rocky

Lane’s garage on a Sunday
as you spar any man who dares.

She wipes your burning face
with a cool towel, the sinewed shape

of your body surfacing quick
after you trade in Budweiser for a jump

rope. Freedom is the rattle in your jaw
the first time you take a hook

to the gut, the way a glove slides
across your nose slick with Vaseline

as you size up the weary contender,
know that look in his eyes that whispers

across the canvas between rounds. Finish me
already, body shriveling in the corner, you’ve won.

by Eloisa Amezcua
from The Academy of American Poets

From KurzweilAI:

Lauren Groff in The New York Times:

There are books that enter your life before their time; you can acknowledge their beauty and excellence, and yet walk away unchanged. This was how I first read Elizabeth Hardwick’s “Sleepless Nights,” after it was recommended in David Shields’ “Reality Hunger,” a thrilling manifesto that tries to make the case that our contemporary world is no longer well represented by realist fiction. While I loved “Sleepless Nights” on that first read — it is brilliant, brittle and strange, a book unlike any preconceived notion I had of what a novel could be — I moved on from it easily. I’ve lived two thousand and some odd days since, read hundreds of other books and published three of my own, all in a bright, hot landscape of somewhat-realist fiction.

The middle of the night has become a lonely stretch of time, especially in the past few years, with vastly increased anxiety — over climate change and politics and what lies in wait in my little sons’ future. I normally salve insomnia with reading, but few new books have felt so revolutionary or so brave as to be able to rock my tired brain to attention. Only the great ones remain: George Eliot’s infinite wisdom in “Middlemarch,” Jane Austen’s gracious and low-stakes sublimity, Dante’s “The Inferno,” which makes our world above seem downright kind. And strangely, of all the books I have reread to comfort myself, I have turned most often to Hardwick’s “Sleepless Nights,” not without a little bitter tang of irony because of its title. The book didn’t dovetail with my heart on the first reading, but the world has changed around me, and now I find myself hungering for its particularity, the steady voice of Elizabeth Hardwick a balm to my aching, vulnerable mind.

Elizabeth Hardwick grew up in Kentucky, a charming young woman with a dagger of a mind. She left for New York City after college and took up with the Partisan Review crowd, becoming best friends with Mary McCarthy and writing for The New York Review of Books from its inception. “Sleepless Nights,” her third novel, is unambiguously her chef d’oeuvre; it was published when she was 63, after a career of writing sharp, ingenious pieces of criticism and after her long marriage to (and divorce from, then reunification with) the poet Robert Lowell, whose profound psychological struggles and infidelities and plagiarism of Hardwick’s letters in his books must surely have tested her strength. As a result, “Sleepless Nights” feels elemental, an eruption of everything that had been slowly building up over decades. Though there are books that are distant kin to it — Renata Adler’s “Speedboat,” Maggie Nelson’s “Bluets” — I have read nothing close enough to be called a sibling. This is rare; a feat of originality.

More here.

Alessandra Scotto di Santo in the Daily Express:

The Oxford-educated leader delivered his victory speech in Islamabad on Thursday declaring himself as the new Prime Minister, despite the official figures of the Pakistan election not yet expected until this evening.

During his victory speech, Mr Khan promised a welfare state system based on the British model.

He also pledged to “strengthen institutions” and “increase income” in order to “get more taxes and benefit the country”.

He said: “When I came into politics, I wanted Pakistan to become the kind of country that our leader Muhammad Ali Jinnah wanted.

“This election is a historic election in Pakistan. In this election, people have sacrificed a lot.

“There was terrorism in this election. I want to especially praise the people of Balochistan, the kind of difficulties that they had to face. The way they came out to vote, I want to thank all those people.

“I saw the scenes on TV, the way the elderly and disabled came out in the heat to vote, the way overseas Pakistanis came out to vote. I want to praise them because they strengthened our democracy.”

More here.

David Robert Grimes in The Guardian:

Last week the Observer published an article by Mark Hertsgaard and Mark Dowie on a disturbing topic – the idea that telecoms giants might collude to suppress evidence that wireless technology causes cancer. The feature was well written, ostensibly well researched, and deeply concerning. Its powerful narrative tapped into rich themes; our deep-seated fears about cancer, corporate greed, and technology’s potentially noxious influence on our health. It spread rapidly across social media – facilitated by the very object on which it cast doubt.

Yet as enthralling as Hertsgaard and Dowie’s narrative might be, it is strewn with rudimentary errors and dubious inferences. As a physicist working in cancer research, I found the authors’ penchant for amplifying claims far beyond that which the evidence allows troubling. And as a scientist deeply invested in public understanding of science, I’ve seen first-hand the damage that scaremongering can do to societal health. While it is tempting to rage into the void, perhaps this episode can serve as a case study in how public understanding of science can be mangled, and what warning signs we might look out for.

More here.

Joshua Roebke in Quanta:

In 1963, Maria Goeppert Mayer won the Nobel Prize in physics for describing the layered, shell-like structures of atomic nuclei. No woman has won since.

One of the many women who, in a different world, might have won the physics prize in the intervening 55 years is Sau Lan Wu. Wu is the Enrico Fermi Distinguished Professor of Physics at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and an experimentalist at CERN, the laboratory near Geneva that houses the Large Hadron Collider. Wu’s name appears on more than 1,000 papers in high-energy physics, and she has contributed to a half-dozen of the most important experiments in her field over the past 50 years. She has even realized the improbable goal she set for herself as a young researcher: to make at least three major discoveries.

More here.

Ranjit Hoskote in Open:

SAY ‘KASHMIR’, and most people would reach for images of stone-throwing teenagers and harried soldiers. Every other aspect of life has been eclipsed by the protracted violence. Or been devalued as insufficiently urgent by comparison with the fight-to-the-death between the State and militant groups. For many of us, the first, instinctive, tragic response on hearing a Kashmiri place name is to locate it on a list of towns and villages associated with some horrible atrocity, some act of brutalisation. Such a list of place names would not—thankfully, not yet—feature Burzahom (Burzahama), 16 km northeast of Srinagar, and Gufkral, near Tral in the troubled Pulwama district.

These names are infused with the region’s deep history. ‘Burzahom’ enshrines burza, from the Sanskrit bhurja, the birch tree, on whose bark some of the earliest extant Vedic manuscripts were written. ‘Gufkral’ is, literally, the ‘potter’s cave’, and we recall that the kröjü, the potter’s wife, played a pivotal role in the Tantric chakra puja or wheel ritual. These sites—along with others such as Begagund, Hariparigom, Jayadevi-Udar, Olchibag, Pampore, Panzgom, Sombur, and Thajiwor—are associated with quite another period in Kashmir’s long history, and stones other than those pelted by protestors in the streets of Srinagar and Anantnag.

Burzahom and Gufkral are among the oldest Neolithic or New Stone Age sites in South Asia.

More here.

Marina Bolotnikova in Harvard Magazine:

WHEN PEOPLE DESCRIBE feeling “angry” or “distressed” or “dejected,” what do they really mean? Psychologists vigorously debate whether the words individuals use to describe their emotions actually reflect fixed states in the brain, or are merely convenient fictions for talking about feelings. “Are anger, sadness, and disgust” really distinct, universal emotions, asks Erik Nook, a fourth-year doctoral student in clinical psychology, “or is it the case that, because we have learned different concepts for different emotions, we produce those emotions?” Nook particularly wants to understand why some people seem to have more precise, granular emotional concepts—they distinguish among feeling disappointed, frustrated, or discouraged, for example—while others describe a general, undifferentiated negativity.

Disentangling what emotional concepts mean, and how people understand them, is part of Nook’s work with Leah Somerville, an associate professor of psychology whose lab focuses on how the mind develops in adolescence. A new paper in Psychological Science by Nook, Somerville, and colleagues at the University of Washington examines how emotional differentiation (people’s ability to separate emotional experiences into different types) changes from childhood into early adulthood.

Their subjects, 143 recruits ranging in age from five to 25, were each shown a set of images designed to elicit negative emotions, such as a baby crying or a cemetery, and asked to rate on a scale from 0 to 100 how strongly they experienced five different feelings—angry, scared, disgusted, sad, and upset. Measuring emotion is a tricky business, Nook concedes, and image prompts are probably not a perfect way to evoke emotions. But the photographs come from a standard repertoire of images used in psychological research (so the results can be compared to other work in the field), and, he adds, there’s “a lot of good evidence that showing people pictures makes them feel things.”

More here.

Kevin Berger in Nautilus:

A whole lot of books on the brain are published these days and you can read yourself into a coma trying to make sense of their various messages. So it was with my usual low-burn curiosity that I starting reading The Mind Is Flat by British behavioral scientist Nick Chater. At least the title is intriguing. But as I started reading it, I perked right up. Maybe that’s because it starts with a long riff on Anna Karenina and asks us to plumb the motivations of her suicide. Can we explain them? What if the great steam engine slammed on its brakes and Anna didn’t die? Would she be able to explain her own motivations to a psychologist while convalescing in a Swiss sanatorium?

Chater writes it makes no difference that Anna is a fictional character. We would go through the exact same mental peregrinations with a real person. In fact, the surviving real person, struggling to find clarity in the muddle of her feelings, would only be telling the psychologist a story about why she wanted to take her life. Chater’s point is a bold one: There is no deep truth about motivations to be found. “No amount of therapy, dream analysis, word association, experiment or brain-scanning can recover a person’s ‘true motives,’ not because they are difficult to find, but because there is nothing to find,” he writes. “The inner, mental world, and the beliefs, motives, and fears it is supposed to contain is, itself, a work of the imagination.”

More here.

And so it goes

Henry Farrell in Crooked Timber:

Jacob Hamburger has an article in the LA Review of Books on the “Intellectual Dark Web” which is really very sharp, but ends up in the wrong place.

First, what is absolutely right, and explained much better than I’ve seen it explained elsewhere, or, for that matter, been able to explain it to myself:

A common refrain on the dark web is to debunk various left-of-center critiques by arguing that what appears to be systemic inequality is actually the result of individual choices or behavior. Christina Hoff Sommers argues, for example, that the gender wage gap is a result of women’s choices to work jobs that pay less, while Ben Shapiro believes the problem of police brutality could be solved by people — presumably African Americans — simply “avoiding interactions with the cops.” On many occasions, these sorts of arguments involve uses of social science statistics that political correctness is said to ignore; on other occasions the statistics are omitted and the left’s blindness to “reality” and “facts” is simply asserted or implied. In either case, the dark web’s impulse when confronted with claims of inequality is almost always to deny or justify it. Either the left is making up injustices where they do not exist, the argument goes, or they disregard evidence that social disparities are in fact grounded in scientific reality.

This seems to me to be completely on target, and to correctly identify the organizing impulse behind the IDW. It manifestly isn’t an intellectual movement: if it were, what would unite spewers of Jungian witch-symbol gibberish like Jordan Peterson with self-professed admirers of the scientific method like Sam Harris? It’s a political one, which is largely organized around opposition to claims about structural power inequalities – especially claims that map onto categories such as race and gender. This also explains very neatly the Quillette publishing model: any old shite that supports this specific set of prejudices is acceptable so long as it annoys the right people.

But Hamburger’s organizing argument that this is inherently conservative seems wrong to me.

More here.

John Horgan in Scientific American:

In August 1992 I visited David Bohm at his home in a London suburb. His skin was alarmingly pale, especially in contrast to his purplish lips and dark, wiry hair. His frame, sinking into a large armchair, seemed limp, languorous, and at the same time suffused with nervous energy. One hand cupped the top of his head, the other gripped an armrest. His fingers, long and blue-veined, with tapered, yellow nails, were splayed. He was recovering, he said, from a heart attack.

Bohm’s wife brought us tea and biscuits and vanished. Bohm spoke haltingly at first, but gradually the words came faster, in a low, urgent monotone. His mouth was apparently dry, because he kept smacking his lips. Occasionally, after making an observation that amused him, he pulled his lips back from his teeth in a semblance of a smile. He also had the disconcerting habit of pausing every few sentences and saying, “Is that clear?” or simply, “Hmmm?” I was often so hopelessly befuddled that I just smiled and nodded. But Bohm could be bracingly clear, too. Like an exotic subatomic particle, he oscillated in and out of focus.

Born and raised in the U.S., Bohm left in 1951, the height of anti-communist hysteria, after refusing to answer questions from a Congressional committee about whether he or anyone he knew was a communist. After stays in Brazil and Israel, he settled in England. Bohm was a scientific dissident too. He rebelled against the dominant interpretation of quantum mechanics, the so-called Copenhagen interpretation promulgated by Danish physicist Niels Bohr.

Bohm began questioning the Copenhagen interpretation in the late 1940s while writing a book on quantum mechanics. According to the Copenhagen interpretation, a quantum entity such as an electron has no definite existence apart from our observation of it. We cannot say with certainty whether it is either a wave or a particle. The interpretation also rejects the possibility that the seemingly probabilistic behavior of quantum systems stems from underlying, deterministic mechanisms.

More here.

Natalie Wolchover in Quanta:

Proof surfaced in 1898 that the reals, complex numbers, quaternions and octonions are the only kinds of numbers that can be added, subtracted, multiplied and divided. The first three of these “division algebras” would soon lay the mathematical foundation for 20th-century physics, with real numbers appearing ubiquitously, complex numbers providing the math of quantum mechanics, and quaternions underlying Albert Einstein’s special theory of relativity. This has led many researchers to wonder about the last and least-understood division algebra. Might the octonions hold secrets of the universe?

“Octonions are to physics what the Sirens were to Ulysses,” Pierre Ramond, a particle physicist and string theorist at the University of Florida, said in an email.

Günaydin, the Penn State professor, was a graduate student at Yale in 1973 when he and his advisor Feza Gürsey found a surprising link between the octonions and the strong force, which binds quarks together inside atomic nuclei. An initial flurry of interest in the finding didn’t last. Everyone at the time was puzzling over the Standard Model of particle physics — the set of equations describing the known elementary particles and their interactions via the strong, weak and electromagnetic forces (all the fundamental forces except gravity). But rather than seek mathematical answers to the Standard Model’s mysteries, most physicists placed their hopes in high-energy particle colliders and other experiments, expecting additional particles to show up and lead the way beyond the Standard Model to a deeper description of reality. They “imagined that the next bit of progress will come from some new pieces being dropped onto the table, [rather than] from thinking harder about the pieces we already have,” said Latham Boyle, a theoretical physicist at the Perimeter Institute of Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Canada.

Decades on, no particles beyond those of the Standard Model have been found. Meanwhile, the strange beauty of the octonions has continued to attract the occasional independent-minded researcher, including Furey, the Canadian grad student who visited Günaydin four years ago.

More here.

Adam Tooze in Dissent:

Globalists, from Wellesley historian Quinn Slobodian, is important because it provides a new frame for the history of this movement. For Slobodian, the earliest and most authentic brand of neoliberalism was from the outset defined by its preoccupation with the question of world economic integration and disintegration. In the 1970s, neoliberalism’s proponents would help unleash the wave of globalization that has swept the world. But, as Slobodian shows, their advocacy for free trade and the liberalization of capital movement goes back to neoliberalism’s founding moments in the wake of the First World War. The movement was born as a passionately conservative reaction to a post-imperial moment—not in the 1950s and ’60s but amidst the ruins of the Habsburg empire. Torn apart by self-determination, the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Dual Monarchy in 1918 was not just the failure of a complex multinational polity. In the eyes of von Mises and his ideological allies, it threw into question the order of private property. It was the First World War and the Great Depression that birthed democratic nation-states, which no longer merely shielded private property but claimed control over a national economy conceived of as a resource to be supervised by the state. Private property that had once been secured by a remote but even-handed imperial sovereign was now at the mercy of national democracy.

Faced with this shocking transformation, neoliberals set out not to demolish the state but to create an international order strong enough to contain the dangerous forces of democracy and encase the private economy in its own autonomous sphere. Before they gathered at Mont Pèlerin, von Mises hosted the original meetings of the neoliberals in the Vienna Chamber of Commerce, where he and his colleagues called for the rolling back of Austrian socialism. They did not think that fascism offered a long-term solution, but, given the threat of revolution, they welcomed Mussolini and the Blackshirts. As von Mises remarked in 1927, fascism “has, for the moment, saved European civilization.”

More here.

Merve Emre in Boston Review:

It was not until 1970 that radical feminist Shulamith Firestone imagined a future in which technologies of artificial insemination, test-tube fertilization, artificial placentas, and parthenogenesis (“virgin birth,” she calls it in her manifesto The Dialectic of Sex) would liberate women from reproductive work. In the right hands, Firestone insisted, artificial wombs and other reproductive technologies could dismantle hetero-patriarchal sex roles. They could make the grinding work of pregnancy—nausea and exhaustion, labor and delivery, postnatal recovery and postpartum depression, nursing and around-the-clock childcare—just one option among many for how to create and care for children. The problem, as Firestone saw it, was that research on reproductive technologies was performed only incidentally in the interests of women. The development of the artificial womb, for instance, had to be justified as a lifesaving device for premature babies and not as a laborsaving device for women who simply did not want to do the work of gestation. “Until the decision not to have children or to have them by artificial means is as legitimate as traditional childbearing, women are as good as forced into their female roles,” she warned.

Firestone’s enthusiasm for new reproductive technologies was met with incredulity, scorn, and outrage among many of her fellow radical feminists. Some criticized her techno-utopian naïveté; others doubled down on the “natural” as the feminist antithesis to technological dehumanization. In The Dialectic of Sex, Firestone dismisses the natural as part of a “reactionary hippie-Rousseauean Return-to-Nature,” a dangerous ideology that transfigures discomfort and risk into an essential female experience, one women can harness as a source of personal empowerment and political emancipation.

More here.

Alice Gregory at Tablet:

The word Gidget, if it evokes anything in one’s mind, likely compels mental images of gingham bikinis, improvised luaus, and berserk 1950s-style optimism. Maybe Sandra Dee, pre-alcoholism, is pictured, or Sally Field before she was a flying nun. One definitely does not imagine a Jewish septuagenarian, married to a Yiddish scholar, with a tendency toward recreational hitchhiking. But that is who Kathy Zuckerman is, and Kathy Zuckerman is Gidget.

Gidget: The Little Girl With Big Ideas was written by Kathy’s father, the Czech-born screenwriter Frederick Kohner, in less than a month in 1957 and published the same year by G.P. Putnam’s Sons. It skyrocketed up the best-seller list, went on to sell 30 million copies, and was translated into dozens of languages, including Hebrew.

more here.

Zadie Smith at The New Yorker:

Yet to speak of this painting as I have—conceptually—is to pass over the difference between thinking with language and thinking in images, and no narrative explanation of the relation between these two pictures is as compelling as the horizontal line that marks the credenza in the photograph and the edge of the White House gardens in the painting, or the verticality of the white man in the photo’s top-right corner—with his squared-off shoulders—and his painterly analogue: a blue flagpole, with its crossbar and absence of flag. Taylor thinks primarily in colors, shapes, and lines—he has a spatial, tonal genius. Form responds to form: the negative space around Cicely and Miles in the photograph suggests the exact proportions of the White House, yet in the transition the abstract sometimes becomes figured, and vice versa, as if the border between these things didn’t matter. A burst of reflected light in the photo decides the height and placement of the windows in the painting, while two round signs at the movie première—one for Coca-Cola, the other for “Orange”—which can have no figurative echo in the painting, turn up anyhow on the White House façade as abstraction: a red sphere and an orange sphere, tracking the walls of what, in reality, now belonged to Trump. Like two suns setting at the same time.

more here.