Tim Whitmarsh in The Guardian:

Ancient Greeks often wondered whether non-Greeks could do philosophy. Some thought the discipline had its origins in the wisdom of Egypt and Mesopotamia. Some counted itinerant Scythian sages or Jewish preachers as philosophers. Others said no: whatever the intellectual merits of neighbouring peoples, it is a distinctively Greek practice. A new, angrier version of that ancient debate has arisen amid the culture wars of the last 50 years. Is philosophy an exclusively western phenomenon? Or is denying it to non-western peoples a form of neocolonialism? Or does the imperialism lie, rather, in folding non-western thought into a western category? Difficult questions, and the answers are not always obvious.

Julian Baggini’s contribution is an engaging, urbane and humane global history. “History” here is a misnomer: this is not a systematic, chronological exposition of different intellectual traditions (anyone wanting that is better off with Peter Adamson’s podcast series Philosophy Without Any Gapshttps://historyofphilosophy.net/). Baggini’s strengths lie not in history (as is revealed, for example, when he ill-advisedly ticks off the Greek archaeological authorities for not advertising the Areopagus as the site of Socrates’ trial) but in a clear-sighted ability to boil complex arguments down to their essentials, and so to allow many different voices from across the world to converse in a virtual dialogue. In his view, people everywhere grapple with the same moral questions, which are fundamentally about balancing contradictory imperatives: individual autonomy versus collective good; the social need for impartial arbiters of truth versus awareness of subjective experience; adherence to rules versus commonsense flexibility; and so forth. The differences between people lie not in the issues they face, but in the positions they end up adopting on the scale between the extremes. The analogy he draws is with a producer in a recording studio: “By sliding controls up or down, the volume of each track can be increased or decreased.” All cultures play the same song, but some prefer the cymbals higher up in the mix.

More here.

Ringing Doorbells

that night for Gene
McCarthy at the edge
of Little Italy
turned into
an olfactory
adventure: after

the mildew, after
the musts and fetors
of tomcat and cockroach,
barrooms’ beer-reek,
the hayfield whiff
of pot, hot air

of laundromats
a flux of borax
the entire effluvium
of the polluted
Hudson opened
like a hidden

fault line, and from
a cleft between the
backs of buildings
blossomed, out of
the dark, as
with hosannas,

the ageless,
pristine, down-
to-earth aromas
of tomorrow’s
bread from
Zito’s Bakery.

Amy Clampitt
from: Collected Poems
Alfred Knopf, 2003

Ian Hughes in Open Democracy:

Is it possible to transform politics around values such as empathy, solidarity and love? Many progressive commentators think so, and have laid out different plans to put these ideas into practice. But empathy and love seem in short supply in the actuality of politics today, crowded out by hate and intolerance.  In one society after another fear-mongering proceeds apace against poor people, immigrants, minorities and anyone else who is not part of the dominant group.

Politics have always been animated as much by passions as by policies, but we can’t assume those passions will be positive. Therefore it’s incumbent on us to understand how negative emotions play out in politics and how politicians exploit these feelings to advance their agendas. Where does hate come from, and why has it played such a role in recent political history?

According to psychologist Robert Sternberg hatred is not a single emotion, but instead comprises three distinct components. The first of these components is the negation of intimacy. Instead of wanting to be close to others, hatred grips us with a feeling of repulsion, an impulse to distance ourselves from the hated other.

More here.

Eric Boodman in STAT News:

A few hours after sunset one night in July of 2016, a Ph.D. student walked into a New Jersey hotel carrying a bouquet of butterfly nets. The travelers who usually occupy the place looked up from their lonely business trips, curious to hear what Tim Fallon had caught. Tangled up in the mesh, he said, were about 100 fireflies, freshly nabbed from a local meadow as they blinked their way toward reproductive fulfillment.

He’d interrupted their mating dance for a worthy cause: figuring out how these insects first acquired the ability to glow — and hopefully, in the process, finding better laboratory tools for studying disease and developing treatments. Now, two years later, his team from the MIT-affiliated Whitehead Institute is publishing this firefly’s genome for the first time. It will appear next week in the journal eLife.

Among the key results: Bioluminescence evolved separately in fireflies and certain other species of beetles. But the findings won’t just be scoured by entomologists and evolutionary biologists.

“The data provided can (will) be used by others,” said Hugo Fraga, a biochemist at the Institut de Biologie Structurale, in Grenoble, France, who has done research on firefly chemistry, and who was not involved in this study. “The same way the human genome … provides a map for other researchers.”

More here.

Alexander C. Kafka in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

Some scholars applauded the hoax.

“Is there any idea so outlandish that it won’t be published in a Critical/PoMo/Identity/‘Theory’ journal?” tweeted the Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker.

“Three intrepid academics,” wrote Yascha Mounk, an author and lecturer on government at Harvard, “just perpetrated a giant version of the Sokal Hoax, placing … fake papers in major academic journals. Call it Sokal Squared. The result is hilarious and delightful. It also showcases a serious problem with big parts of academia.”

In the original Sokal Hoax, in 1996, a New York University physicist named Alan Sokal published a bogus paper that took aim at some of the same targets as his latter-day successors.

Others were less receptive than Mounk. “This is a genre,” tweeted Kieran Healy, a sociologist at Duke, “and they’re in it for the lulz” — the laughs. “Best not to lose sight of that.”

“Good work is hard to do,” he wrote, “incentives to publish are perverse; there’s a lot of crap out there; if you hate an area enough, you can gin up a fake paper and get it published somewhere if you try. The question is, what do you hate? And why is that?”

More here.

From Quillette:

Editor’s note: For the past year scholars James Lindsay, Helen Pluckrose, and Peter Boghossian have sent fake papers to various academic journals which they describe as specialising in activism or “grievance studies.” Their stated mission has been to expose how easy it is to get “absurdities and morally fashionable political ideas published as legitimate academic research.” 

To date, their project has been successful: seven papers have passed through peer review and have been published, including a 3000 word excerpt of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf, rewritten in the language of Intersectionality theory and published in the Gender Studies journal Affilia.

From Foolish Talk to Evil Madness — Nathan Cofnas

Twenty years ago, Alan Sokal called postmodernism “fashionable nonsense.” Today, postmodernism isn’t a fashion—it’s our culture. A large proportion of the students at elite universities are now inducted into this cult of hate, ignorance, and pseudo-philosophy. Postmodernism is the unquestioned dogma of the literary intellectual class and the art establishment. It has taken over most of the humanities and some of the social sciences, and is even making inroads in STEM fields. It threatens to melt all of our intellectual traditions into the same oozing mush of political slogans and empty verbiage.

Postmodernists pretend to be experts in what they call “theory.” They claim that, although their scholarship may seem incomprehensible, this is because they are like mathematicians or physicists: they express profound truths in a way that cannot be understood without training. Lindsay, Boghossian, and Pluckrose expose this for the lie that it is. “Theory” is not real. Postmodernists have no expertise and no profound understanding.

More here.

Daniel T. Rodgers at Eurozine:

By the end of the twentieth century, the landscape of social thought had changed radically. The pressures bearing down on individuals had not in the least diminished. But, to a great extent, earlier ways of imagining self and society had broken apart. Strong notions of society receded from the forefront of language and imagination. Structures and institutions became less visible. Talk of power grew more abstract. In their place,rights-bearing, choice-making, autonomously acting individuals took centre stage in social thought.

One found these socially unencumbered actors more and more frequently and acrossmore and more domains of political and economic discourse. Historians talked less about the pressures of society and more about recovering the ‘agency’ of human actors. Economists replaced macroeconomic models with micro-economic extrapolations from the preference-satisfying choices of individual actors.

more here.

David L. Ulin at Literary Hub:

The letter rambled vividly and profanely through a crazy story about a few days in Denver in late 1945, beginning with Cassady meeting “a perfect beauty of such loveliness that I forgot everything else and immediately swore to forgo all my ordinary pursuits until I made her”: Joan Anderson. Its stream of consciousness is a rollercoaster ride through devotion, a breakup, a suicide attempt, a reunion, a reconciliation, an arrest, incarceration and, finally, abandonment. Appropriately, Cassady described the tale, mid-letter, as a “pricky tearjerker.”

This was what Kerouac admired most about the letter: the way Cassady’s personality exploded off the page. He had been looking for a strategy to open up his writing, and the immediacy of his friend’s account, full of digressions and moving back and forth in time, gave him an idea.

more here.

James Meek at the LRB:

No matter how outrageous – or illegal –the behaviour of the Leave campaign, for the losing side to continue to focus on the referendum campaign and result is to be drawn onto the Brexiteers’ turf. That isn’t to say campaigners shouldn’t be investigated and prosecuted if appropriate, or that there shouldn’t be a public vote on the nature of a Brexit deal with the EU. But the win-lose, legitimate-illegitimate argument about the referendum is a fight that plays out on the Brexiteers’ territory. The Brexiteers assert that the myth has been enacted (‘We killed the dragon!’). The Remainers deny the myth (‘You lied, there was no dragon!’). This makes it an argument about myth, and here the Brexiteers are on stronger ground. Every myth has two facets, the story that is told to make events or states of being comprehensible to people, and the underlying events or states that provide the material for the myth; a stylised, simplified dramatisation of change, and the change that demands dramatisation. Reckless, hypocritical, deluded, mendacious and chauvinist as they are, the Brexiteers found a real set of circumstances, and misapplied a popular, off-the-shelf folk myth to it. By simply rejecting the Brexiteer myth, without offering another, better one, the Remainers appear to deny the underlying changes. ‘Look,’ the Leave voter says to the Remainer. ‘Look at the abandoned coal mines, the demolished factories, the empty fishing harbours. Look at the old people lying sick on trolleys in hospital corridors and how there aren’t enough school places to go round and how you can’t afford a roof over your head. Look at my debts. Look at the low-wage work that’s all that’s left. Look at the decent jobs that have gone abroad. Look at the foreign workers we have to compete with, where did they come from? Who are all these strangers? If the problem isn’t the EU, what is it?’ The Remainer struggles to answer. Why?

more here.

Jennifer Schuessler in The New York Times:

One paper, published in a journal called Sex Roles, said that the author had conducted a two-year study involving “thematic analysis of table dialogue” to uncover the mystery of why heterosexual men like to eat at Hooters. Another, from a journal of feminist geography, parsed “human reactions to rape culture and queer performativity” at dog parks in Portland, Ore., while a third paper, published in a journal of feminist social work and titled “Our Struggle Is My Struggle,” simply scattered some up-to-date jargon into passages lifted from Hitler’s “Mein Kampf.” Such offerings may or may not have raised eyebrows among the journals’ limited readerships. But this week, they unleashed a cascade of mockery — along with a torrent of debate about ethics of hoaxes, the state of peer review and the excesses of academia — when they were revealed to be part of an elaborate prank aimed squarely at what the authors labeled “grievance studies.”

“Something has gone wrong in the university — especially in certain fields within the humanities,” the three authors of the fake papers wrote in an article in the online journal Aero explaining what they had done. “Scholarship based less upon finding truth and more upon attending to social grievances has become firmly established, if not fully dominant, within these fields.”

More here.

“Self expression is the source of all abasement, just as, counterwise, it is the basis for all true elevation. The first step is introspection— exclusive contemplation of the self. But whoever stops there goes only half the way. The second step must be genuine observation outward—spontaneous, sober observation of the external world.” —Novalis, 1800
.

The Delights of the Door

Kings do not touch doors.
They know nothing of this joy: to push gently or fiercely
one of those huge panels so well known,
then turning back to replace it
—holding a door in our arms.

The pleasure of grabbing the midriff
of one of these tall barriers to a room
by its porcelain node; the short clinch
during which forward motion stops,
the eye opens, and the whole body
adjusts to its new surroundings.

But one friendly hand still holds it
before decisively pushing it away,
shutting oneself in, which the click
of the well-oiled spring pleasantly confirms.

Francis Ponge
from News of the Universe
Sierra Club Books, 1995

Jordan Robertson and Michael Riley at Bloomberg:

In 2015, Amazon.com Inc. began quietly evaluating a startup called Elemental Technologies, a potential acquisition to help with a major expansion of its streaming video service, known today as Amazon Prime Video. Based in Portland, Ore., Elemental made software for compressing massive video files and formatting them for different devices. Its technology had helped stream the Olympic Games online, communicate with the International Space Station, and funnel drone footage to the Central Intelligence Agency. Elemental’s national security contracts weren’t the main reason for the proposed acquisition, but they fit nicely with Amazon’s government businesses, such as the highly secure cloud that Amazon Web Services (AWS) was building for the CIA.

To help with due diligence, AWS, which was overseeing the prospective acquisition, hired a third-party company to scrutinize Elemental’s security, according to one person familiar with the process. The first pass uncovered troubling issues, prompting AWS to take a closer look at Elemental’s main product: the expensive servers that customers installed in their networks to handle the video compression. These servers were assembled for Elemental by Super Micro Computer Inc., a San Jose-based company (commonly known as Supermicro) that’s also one of the world’s biggest suppliers of server motherboards, the fiberglass-mounted clusters of chips and capacitors that act as the neurons of data centers large and small. In late spring of 2015, Elemental’s staff boxed up several servers and sent them to Ontario, Canada, for the third-party security company to test, the person says.

Nested on the servers’ motherboards, the testers found a tiny microchip, not much bigger than a grain of rice, that wasn’t part of the boards’ original design.

More here.

Dawn Stover in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists:

In the wake of Hurricane Florence and the rains that followed, residents of disaster-stricken areas of North Carolina are now also dealing with swarms of “enormous, aggressive” mosquitos up to a half-inch long. Some news reports are calling it a “mosquito-pocalypse.”

The giant mosquitos plaguing North Carolina are known as “gallnippers” (their scientific name is Psorophora ciliata). They can be three times the size of an average mosquito and are persistent biters that can easily penetrate two layers of clothing.

North Carolina’s governor has ordered $4 million to fund mosquito abatement; FEMA provides reimbursement for spraying. Gallnippers are more of a nuisance than a health risk, but they make storm recovery more difficult by driving people indoors.

“As surely as night follows day, mosquitos follow floodwaters,” noted a FEMA news release a decade ago, after Tropical Storm Fay inundated much of Florida. In a report published a few days ago, Michael Reiskind, an entomologist at North Carolina State University, told USA Today that there are 61 species of mosquitos in his state, of which “probably 15 to 20 would be highly responsive to floodwaters” that cause dormant eggs to hatch in vast numbers.

Climate change does not make mosquitoes bigger but it does make storms like Hurricane Florence, on average, wetter and wider—so we can expect to see more mosquito population explosions in the future in places like the Carolinas.

More here.

Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe:

Aging — everybody does it, very few people actually do something about it. Coleen Murphy is an exception. In her laboratory at Princeton, she and her team study aging in the famous C. Elegans roundworm, with an eye to extending its lifespan as well as figuring out exactly what processes take place when we age. In this episode we contemplate what scientists have learned about aging, and the prospects for ameliorating its effects — or curing it altogether? — even in human beings.

More here.

Odeh Bisharat in the Boston Review:

A village boy once asked his local priest, “Father, when you go to sleep, where do you lay your beard, under or over your blanket?” Ever since he heard the question, the priest couldn’t sleep through the night. If he laid his beard under the blanket, he felt hot; if his beard was over the blanket, he got cold. He had always slept fine, without waking. But once he was asked to pick a single side, neither one seemed comfortable.

Such is the case with the concept of Israel as a “Jewish and democratic country.” As a Palestinian citizen of Israel, I have always found the notion a contradiction in terms, a source of unfair Jewish privilege. The very proposal of this phrase, the democratic half of which was codified into Israeli law in 1985, turned into a national obsession: Which would be more important, the Jewish or the democratic side? On whichever side of the equation you gripped, something went awry.

More here.

Kenneth Miller in Discover:

Britt Peterson in Nautilus:

When I first adopted Lucas nine years ago from a cat rescue organization in Washington, D.C., his name was Puck. “Because he’s mischievous,” his foster mother said. Although we changed the name, her analysis proved correct. Unlike his brother Tip, whom I also adopted, a gray cat with white paws and an Eeyore-ish dour doofy sweetness, Lucas was from the start a fierce black fireball, a menace to stray toes or blanket fringes or loose items on tabletops. He was my alarm clock in the morning with his habit of knocking my hairbrush, deodorant, and earrings box off my bureau until I got up to feed him.

Then, almost four years ago, my husband and I had a child. Lucas, no longer the most important small creature in the apartment, retreated to the top shelf of his cat tree, where he would lie all day, staring morosely over the edge. When he did want attention, his solicitations became aggressive. Instead of waiting until 7 a.m. to start knocking things off of the bureau, he started hopping up there at 4 a.m. We closed the bedroom door and were still woken up at 4 every day by Lucas rattling the doorknob or hurling the weight of his 13-pound body against it. At mealtimes he would gobble down his food and then shove Tip out of the way to eat Tip’s food. He started marking the carpets in our living room and my son’s room, and his play with Tip turned more violent too.

I made an appointment, first, with a pet behavior specialist and, five months later, when her initially helpful suggestions didn’t change Lucas’s behavior, with a vet. The vet described Lucas’s condition as “anxiety” and prescribed fluoxetine, a generic for Prozac that’s often prescribed for animals. While I had felt a mixture of frustration and pity toward Lucas, in that moment I experienced a surprising stir of recognition. Over a decade ago, during six months in college, I had panic attacks every other day. I was given a similar diagnosis—panic disorder being a major anxiety disorder—and was prescribed a similar medication.

More here.

Waiting for the new ice age to come along
Like a dawdling child from a previous eon,
Waiting for the homeless man to go on home
With his tired cardboard sign that says “anything helps,”
Waiting for a cure, waiting for the closeout sale,
The black sail, a new tarboosh and a tiny red car,
A new improved and safer war,
A harmless war, a war that we could win,
A brain tumor in your smart phone, an entitlement check
(Will you please check on my entitlement?),
Waiting for the bank hack, the backtrack, the take,
Waiting for a calabash, the calaboose, an acquisition,
An accusation, resuscitation from a total stranger,
Waiting for the finish line to explode.