Paul Bloom and Matthew Jordan in the New York Times:

There is a dial in front of you, and if you turn it, a stranger who is in mild pain from being shocked will experience a tiny increase in the amount of the shock, so slight that he doesn’t even notice it. You turn it and leave. And then hundreds of people go up to the dial and each also turns it, so that eventually the victim is screaming in agony.

Did you do anything wrong? Derek Parfit, the influential British philosopher who died in January 2017, called this the case of the Harmless Torturer. Parfit first considered a simpler scenario in which a thousand torturers each turn the dial a thousand times on their own victim. This is plainly terrible. But then he explores a contrasting case where each of the torturers turns a dial a thousand times — each turn shocking a different one of the thousand victims. The end result is the same; a thousand people in agony. And yet morally it feels different, since nobody, individually, caused any real harm to any single individual.

This seems like the sort of clever technical example that philosophers love — among other things, it’s a challenge to a utilitarian view in which the wrongness of an act is reduced to its consequences — but one with no actual real-world relevance. But the world has changed since Parfit published his scenario in 1986.

More here.

Claudia Dreyfus in the New York Times:

As a science writer at The New Yorker, Maria Konnikova, 34, focuses on the brain, and the weird and interesting ways people use their brains.

Dr. Konnikova is an experimental psychologist trained at Columbia University. But her latest experiment is on herself. For a book she’s researching on luck and decision-making, Dr. Konnikova began studying poker.

Within a year, she had moved from poker novice to poker professional, winning more than $200,000 in tournament jackpots. This summer Poker Stars, an online gaming site, began sponsoring Dr. Konnikova in professional tournaments.

We spoke recently for two hours at the offices of The Times. An edited and condensed version of the conversation follows.

More here.

Frances Wilson in Spectator:

‘The Divine Comedy is a book that everyone ought to read,’ according to Jorge Luis Borges, and every Italian has read it. Dante’s midlife crisis in the dark wood, his journey down the circles of hell, up the ledges of Purgatory and into the arms of Beatrice is mother’s milk to Italian schoolchildren. Today lines from La divina commediaare printed on T-shirts; before the war, as Primo Levi recalled, there were ‘Dante tournaments’ on the streets of Turin, where one boy would recite the start of a canto and his rival would try to complete it. I had two Italian students in an English literature seminar last year who sniggered when I mentioned the once standard Penguin translation of the Comedy by Dorothy L. Sayers, inventor of the Dante-loving Lord Peter Wimsey. ‘Dante in translation,’ they explained, ‘isn’t the real Dante.’ But, as Ian Thomson shows, the real Dante is hard to find even in Italian. Over 800 pre-Gutenberg editions of La divina commedia are known to exist, most marred by errors and nibbled by rats, but because none is in Dante’s hand we can’t be sure what he actually wrote. An example of the way his poem was doctored by the copiers can be seen by the fact that it was Boccaccio (author of The Decameron and Dante’s first biographer) who added the divina to what Dante had simply called La commedia.

As Thomson explains, by ‘comedy’, Dante did not imply that he was trying to be funny, although he very often is, particularly when he details the punishments meted out to his enemies in Hell. A comedy was a story with a happy ending, but Dante also referred his readers to the fact that this was ‘low’ rather than ‘high’ literature, written not in Latin but the Tuscan vernacular and therefore accessible to weavers, brewers, workers and even women. The reason Dante still matters, Thomson argues, is not because readers today ‘fear damnation or are moved by the beauty of the Christian revelation, but because he wrote the story of an ordinary man — an Everyman — who sets out hopefully in this life in search of renewal’.

More here.

Steve Donoghue in The Christian Science Monitor:

Mrill Ingram in The Progressive:

In his new book, In Defense of Public Lands: The Case against Privatization and Transfer (Temple University Press), Steven Davis, political science professor at Edgewood College in Madison, Wisconsin, takes on the “privatizers.” His book is an even-handed and thorough look at public lands in the United States. Although public support for wilderness, national parks, and other public lands is high, Davis is rightly concerned that these open spaces—from national parks like Yosemite to county-owned lands—face serious threats.

The sentiments that led to the Sagebrush Rebellion and Wise Use Movement are not in the past, Davis tells us. In his first chapter, “Public Land and its Discontents,” Davis details how, since the gains of the Tea Party in 2010, those against public lands have the support of a large number of office-holders in state and federal legislatures. “What was previously seen as the intemperate agitation of fringe activists is now the standard stuff of political platforms, floor debates, and campaign speeches,” he writes.

The Republican Party’s 2012 platform, for example, stated, “Congress should reconsider whether . . . federal government’s enormous landholdings and control of water in the West could be better used for ranching, mining, or forestry through private ownership.”

More here.

america

am I not your baby?
brown & not allowed

my own language?
my teeth pulled

from mouth, tongue
bloated with corn syrup?

america, didn’t you raise me?
bomb the country of my fathers

& then tell me to go back to it?
didn’t you mold the men

who murder children in schools
who spit at my bare arms

& uncovered head?
america, wasn’t it you?

who makes & remakes
me orphan, who burns

my home, watches me rebuild
& burns it down again?

wasn’t it you, who uproots
& mangles the addresses

until there are none
until all I have are my own

hands & even those you’ve
told me not to trust? america

don’t turn your back on me.
am I not your baby?

brown & bred to hate
every inch of my skin?

didn’t you raise me?
didn’t you tell me bootstraps

& then steal my shoes?
didn’t you make there no ‘back’

for me to go back to?
america, am I not your refugee?

who do I call mother, if not you?

by Fatimah Asghar
from Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here Festival
D. C., 2016.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Fatimah Asghar is a nationally touring poet, screenwriter and performer. She created Bosnia and Herzegovina’s first Spoken Word Poetry group, REFLEKS, while on a Fulbright studying theater in post-violent contexts. She has performed on many stages, including the Dodge Poetry Festival, The Nantucket Project, and TedX. Her work has appeared in many journals, including POETRY Magazine, Southern Indiana Review, The Margins, The Paris-American, and PEN Poetry Series. She is a member of the Dark Noise Collective and a Kundiman Fellow. Her chapbook After was released on Yes Yes Books fall of 2015. Her web series Brown Girls was released in February 2017.

Cordelia Fine in the Financial Times:

In 2009, in the aftermath of the global financial crisis, the “Lehman Sisters” hypothesis was born. If only there had been more senior women in the banking industry, would the credit crunch have happened? Journalists, politicians and scientists speculated that the Lehman Sisters might indeed have saved us, on the grounds that “women managers are naturally more risk adverse,” as Neelie Kroes put it in a speech as European Commisioner for Competition in July 2007.

The idea that women — not so very long ago legally unable to own properties and securities — might be the saviours of the financial system may seem like a new and radical idea. But the notion’s heritage is an old one, both scientifically and politically.

Part of its cultural inheritance is a character I dubbed Testosterone Rex. You already know him. He was at that drinks party, telling us that testosterone is so potent that assumed average differences in testosterone levels between chief executives in mid-middle age versus late-middle age have a material, detectable influence on multi-party negotiations that involve discussions with the top management team, directions from the chair of the board and investors, and receipt of detailed financial advice from an investment bank. Testosterone Rex is, in short, the legend of that familiar scientific story that tells us risk-taking evolved more strongly in males than in females because of the greater reproductive advantages of status and resources for men in our ancestral past, and that these qualities are therefore wired into the male brain and fuelled by testosterone.

More here.

Richard V Reeves at Aeon:

The Indian economist and philosopher Amartya Sen observed that everybody is in favour of some kind of equality – the real question is, ‘Equality of What?’ (1979). Relational equality, based on equality of respect, is distinct from two other kinds of equality: basic equality based on equality of legal rights; and material equality, based on equality of resources.

Basic equality, sometimes referred to as deep or moral equality, underpins human rights, which are, as a matter of principle, universal and unconditional. In his book One Another’s Equals (2017), the New Zealand legal philosopher Jeremy Waldron draws on an Anglican prayer for ‘all sorts and conditions of men’, to emphasise basic equality. He argues that ‘we believe there is just one sortal status – one kind of human being’, even if people exist under different conditions, for example in terms of their economic situation. To treat a person differently because they are a woman, or have darker skin, negates this principle.

But basic equality does not ensure or demand relational equality based on respect. I can defend the right of a criminal to a fair trial, without respecting him as my equal in any broader sense. Basic equality, then, generates a rather thin, legalistic egalitarianism.

Material equality, by contrast, is focused on the second part of Waldron’s prayer, the ‘conditions’ of men. The currency this time is resources, typically economic ones. Egalitarian arguments are here focused on the justification for reallocating resources between person A and person B. But no account is taken of the relationship between person A and person B. In contrast to both basic equality and material equality, relational equality is created between people, in our relationships with each other.

More here.

Eric Levitz in NY Magazine [h/t: Leonard Benardo]:

The Reward Work Act would require every large company in the United States to have one-third of its board of directors directly elected by its labor force. Which is to say: It would force companies to give their workers a say in how profits are allocated. This arrangement, widely known as “worker co-determination,” is prevalent in Western Europe and a pillar of Germany’s economic model. Both historical evidence and common sense suggest that, had workers’ representatives been in every corporate boardroom this January, the Trump tax cuts might have actually trickled down into workers’ paychecks (instead of pooling in wealthy shareholders’ bank accounts). At a time of record corporate profits, and stubbornly tepid wage growth, co-determination is a simple way of rebalancing the gains of growth in ordinary Americans’ favor — without raising taxes by a single cent.

And new polling suggests it is among the most broadly popular ideas in American politics.

For a while now, the progressive think tank Data for Progress (DFP) has been commissioning national polls on far-left ideas, and then applying state-of-the-art demographic modeling techniques (i.e., the ones used by well-funded political campaigns) to estimate the likely level of support for said policies in every state and district in the country. With the help of the data science firm Civis Analytics, DFP recently ran the concept of worker co-determination by the American public, and found that the proposal has a positive approval rating in 100 percent of the nation’s states and congressional districts.

More here.

Santiago Ramos at Commonweal:

A common argument against Bergman is that he is fated for oblivion because his movies did not advance the art of film; they were closer to theater than to the pure cinematic art of other art-house directors of that generation, such as Godard, Resnais, and Antonioni. Bergman’s religious themes, it is said, are pretentious and outdated; people don’t brood over God and death anymore the way his characters do. We brood over social conditions and economic injustice, or else we are too happy at the End of History, too secular and self-satisfied to brood at all. Bergman will only be remembered, the argument goes, by scholars, who will credit him for bringing Scandinavian exoticism and a certain “seriousness” to the cinema, as well as for the great actors who graced his movies: Max von Sydow, Harriet Andersson, Bibi Andersson, Ingrid Thulin, Liv Ullmann, et al. But neither his stories nor his ideas will move people the way they once did.

Even if all these criticisms were true—and I’d dispute at least some of them—there is still something else that is of lasting value in Bergman: the unique aesthetic attitude that his movies invite the viewer to assume.

more here.

Simon G. Talbot and Wendy Dean at The Boston Globe:

Physicians on the front lines of health care today are sometimes described as going to battle. It’s an apt metaphor. Physicians, like combat soldiers, often face a profound and unrecognized threat to their well-being: moral injury.

Moral injury is frequently mischaracterized. In combat veterans it is diagnosed as post-traumatic stress; among physicians it’s portrayed as burnout. But without understanding the critical difference between burnout and moral injury, the wounds will never heal and physicians and patients alike will continue to suffer the consequences.

Burnout is a constellation of symptoms that include exhaustion, cynicism, and decreased productivity. More than half of physicians report at least one of these. But the concept of burnout resonates poorly with physicians: it suggests a failure of resourcefulness and resilience, traits that most physicians have finely honed during decades of intense training and demanding work.

more here.

Lorrie Moore at the NYRB:

The concentrated, flinty nature of Cusk’s mind (a fellow admirer and I often refer to her, in pseudo-jazz-intimacy, simply as “Rachel,” though we have never met her and haven’t the flimsiest intention of trying to do  so) ensures that authorial intelligence is burned into the syntax of every line, despite the cloaked narrator in the foreground. Even if they technically belong to fictional others, the voices, with their stories of familial upheaval, traps, escapes to dubious safety, or dull drift, are chosen and arranged by Cusk as both reflections and arguments concerning life’s dissolutions and reconstructions. What runs through her trilogy is a coolly abstracted consciousness organizing all the stories—one that is alert to the mendacity and (as the trilogy suggests, if they are any good) the cruelty in stories (in a culture that glibly claims to value them). It is like reading the best kind of philosophy—steely, searching, brisk.

more here.

Sam Leith in The Guardian:

It’s hard to imagine, at this distance, how it must have been to be Aristotle in his own time: cutting-edge rather than foundational. We see him standing at the beginning of western philosophy and surveying something like virgin territory. Did it feel like that at the time? He didn’t know, obviously, that he was an Ancient – at the start of things, as we now see it, rather than, say, at their end. He was interdisciplinary before there were really disciplines to worry about. Look at him, romping across the territory of possible human knowledge like a big dog snapping at butterflies, or Theresa May running through a field of wheat. One moment he invents literary theory. At another he formulates the rules of human persuasion. Whoops: politics. Bang! Catharsis! Hello: musicology. Ethics! Psychology! And while we’re at it who wants to know how a cuttlefish works?

The range and subtlety of his thought are almost inexpressibly thrilling, and it’s a mark against Edith Hall’s mostly lucid trot through what Aristotle can do for us that, in modernising and domesticating him, and making him instrumental in a self-help format, some of that thrill is lost. Mind you, it may be that this wasn’t the book on Aristotle she wanted to write so much as the only one she could publish. The fuse was probably lit for the highbrow self-help boom by Alain de Botton’s How Proust Can Change Your Life in 1997. In the two decades since, the puckish irony of De Botton’s title has burned off like morning dew. “How X Can Change Your Life” is publishing boilerplate these days. That’s not to write off the whole genre. As De Botton and his compadre Roman Krznaric have argued, lots of ancient philosophy was self-help, and the Nicomachean Ethics – with its inquiry into how best to live – certainly answers that description. Though, as Hall makes clear, Aristotle is everywhere preoccupied with the question of how we live in relation to others, rather than offering life lessons as the spiritual equivalent of a selfie-ready workout in the gym.

More here.

Cassandra Willyard in Nature:

Lindsey Abel takes an anaesthetized mouse from a plastic container and lays it on the lab bench. With a syringe, she injects a slurry of pink cancer cells under the skin of the animal’s right flank. These cells once belonged to a person with tongue cancer, a former smoker whose disease recurred despite radiation and surgery. The mouse is the second rodent to harbour them, creating a model for cancer known as a patient-derived xenograft (PDX). The tumour that grows inside will provide cells that can be transferred to more mice. Abel has performed this procedure hundreds of time since she joined Randall Kimple’s lab at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Kimple, a radiation oncologist, uses PDX mice to carry out experiments on human tumours that would be impractical in people, such as testing new drugs and identifying factors that predict a good response to treatment. His lab has created more than 50 PDX mice since 2011. Kimple’s lab is not the only one doing this; PDX mice have exploded in popularity over the past decade and are beginning to supplant other techniques for modelling cancer in research and drug development, such as mice implanted with cancer cell lines. Because the models use fresh human tumour fragments rather than cells grown in a Petri dish, researchers have long hoped that PDXs would model tumour behaviour more accurately, and perhaps even help to guide treatment decisions for patients. They also allow researchers to explore the vast variety of human tumours. PDXFinder, a catalogue launched earlier this year, lists more than 1,900 types of PDX mouse. But there are many more scurrying around in academic and industry labs — as many as 10,000 PDXs have been created, says Nathalie Conte, a bioinformatician at the European Bioinformatics Institute, in Hinxton, UK, who leads PDXFinder.

PDX models are not perfect, however — and scientists are beginning to recognize their shortcomings and complexities. The tumours can diverge from the original sample, for example, and the models cannot be used to test immunotherapies. Now, biologists are scrutinizing PDX mice and looking for creative ways to cope with the challenges. “Every model is artificial in some way,” says Jeffrey Moscow, head of the investigational drug branch at the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Maryland. “The real question is how predictive are these models going to turn out to be.”

More here.

From the Bridge

I never found the order
I searched for
but always a sinister
and well-planned disorder
that increases in the hands
of those who hold power
while the others
who clamor for
a more kindly world
a world with less hunger
and more hopefulness
die of torture
in the prisons.
Don’t come any closer
there’s a stench of carrion
surrounding me.

By Claribel Alegría

Claribel Alegría was born to Nicaraguan and Salvadoran parents in Estelí, Nicaragua, on May 12, 1924. She moved to the United States in 1943, graduating from George Washington University in 1948. In 1985 she moved back to Nicaragua. Her work was featured in Bill Moyers’ PBS series, “The Language of Life.” Her forty books of poems, fiction, non-fiction, and children’s stories have been translated into more than ten languages.

John McWhorter in The Atlantic:

The Nation recently published a poem in which a homeless narrator speaks a complex, nuanced variety of English with a long and interesting history.

The variety of English is Black English, and the poet is Anders Carlson-Wee, a white man. In the wake of the controversy, The Nation’s poetry editors have appended a kind of trigger warning to the poem calling its language “disparaging.” (They also apologized for its “ableist language;” the poem used the word “crippled.”) Carlson-Wee has dutifully, and perhaps wisely, apologized that “treading anywhere close to blackface is horrifying to me” and declared that the poem “didn’t work.”

However, I suspect that many are quietly wondering just what Carlson-Wee did that was so wrong—and they should.

The primary source of offense, in a poem only 14 lines long, is passages such as this, in a work designed to highlight and sympathize with the plight of homeless people: “It’s about who they believe they is. You hardly even there.” The protagonist is referring to the condescending attitudes of white passersby who give her change. Yet Roxane Gay, for example, directs white writers to “know your lane,” and not depict the dialect.

More here.

Evan Horowitz in the Boston Review:

When the European Union slapped Google with a $5 billion antitrust fine recently, President Trump readied his exclamation points, insisting that Europe had “taken advantage of the U.S. but not for long!”

Yet it’s possible this is just what fair, competitive capitalism looks like — and Europe is its real home.

Quietly, gradually, Europe has transformed itself into a capitalist haven, a place where profits and prices are kept in check by fierce competition among businesses, and where anticompetitive schemes are policed by active, independent regulators.

If that flies in the face of stereotype, a lot has changed in recent decades. Europe — once maligned for its intrusive state-controlled companies and harmful limits on hiring and firing — has managed to buck some of the worrisome trends threatening US competitiveness.

More here.

Lenore Palladino in Boston Review:

The stakeholder model of corporate governance would redesign governance so that all stakeholders in our economy (workers, customers, and the public) have a chance to benefit as corporations create profit. It is simultaneously radical and incremental by promising to remake our economy with some straightforward legal shifts. Though there are plenty of variations, three substantive changes to corporate governance are necessary.

The first change is to disallow corporations from forming for any lawful purpose. Corporations should be required by statute to have as their purpose “creating general public benefit,” which is the language that benefit corporations such as Kickstarter and Patagonia use. Benefit corporations are companies that have chosen to be governed by a new kind of law that requires a public benefit purpose and accountability to stakeholders. Benefit corporation status is permissive—right now, corporations have to choose it. Corporate law should be changed so that all corporations—creatures of the state—must create a general public benefit. This would, at minimum, allow some ability to challenge corporate externalities that have disastrous social consequences.

The second change is to mandate that employees, and perhaps other stakeholders, have elected representatives on the board to balance the interests among those making major decisions of the corporation. The third is to make the fiduciary duties of board members—their obligation to be loyal and to make decisions with the interests of the corporation, not themselves, in mind—applicable to a variety of stakeholders, not merely the shareholders who have been actively trading on the secondary markets.

More here.