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.

Jacqueline Banerjee at the TLS:

Emily Brontë was born on July 30, 1818, in the village of Thornton, West Yorkshire, far from the mainstream of literary life. She died of tuberculosis at Haworth Parsonage, not six miles away, at the age of thirty. Her work had startled the critics with the force of its passion, but, over the years, shock was to settle into widespread admi­ration. In 1948, in a note added to the first chapter of The Great Tradition, F. R. Leavis described the author as the genius of her family, and her only novel, Wuthering Heights, as “astonishing”. When he added that it was a “kind of sport”, he was implying not its triviality, but its uniqueness. Forty years later, John Sutherland could introduce it in his Longman Companion to Victorian Fiction as the “twentieth century’s favourite nineteenth-century novel”. Emily’s poetry, which she published with great reluctance, has also continued to rise in the public estimation. The opening line of one of her poems, “No coward soul is mine”, can now be found emblazoned on mugs and key rings. It is even popular as a tattoo.

more here.

.
Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing
there is a field. I’ll meet you there.

When the soul lies down in that grass
the world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase each other
doesn’t make any sense.

Jelaluddin Rumi
from A Book of Luminous Things
Harvest Books, 1996

Jon Cohen in Science:

When Science published a monkey study nearly 2 years ago that showed an anti-inflammatory antibody effectively cured monkeys intentionally infected with the simian form of the AIDS virus, the dramatic results turned many heads. But some skeptical researchers thought the data looked too good to be true and predicted the intervention wouldn’t work on HIV in humans. They were right. Anthony Fauci, head of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in Bethesda, Maryland, and a co-author of the Science paper, today reported the failure of a clinical trial that attempted to translate the remarkable monkey success to humans. “We did not see those dramatic results at all,” Fauci said at the International AIDS Conference in Amsterdam that is taking place this week.

In the monkey experiment, the animals infected with the simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV) were treated with antiretroviral (ARV) drugs that suppressed the pathogen, and then given repeated injections of an antibody that blocks a receptor called α4ß7 found on immune cells. The researchers then stopped giving both the antibodies and ARVs, and the monkeys still completely controlled SIV for more than 9 months. The virus quickly came roaring back in control animals that had only received ARVs and then had that treatment halted. Some considered the antibody-treated monkeys cured, as they appeared capable of indefinitely controlling the small quantity of virus that persisted without any further interventions.

…If people reacted like monkeys to the antibody treatment, once vedolizumab blocked α4ß7, they could stop ARV drugs and the HIV that inevitably remained would start to copy itself, but would have difficulty infecting cells and creating new virions. That wasn’t the case, Fauci explained. In all but two of the 18 people, HIV sprang back once they stopped ARVs. Moreover, a team of researchers not involved with the original monkey study attempted to repeat it in another set of the primates, and they reported at the meeting that their experiment had no success. The original monkey results, Fauci said, “might be a fluke.”

More here.

Shehryar Fazli in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

CRITICS GENERALLY DEFINE “Lynchian” as the cohabitation of the macabre and the mundane. The severed ear hidden in the field in Blue Velvet may be the most iconic representation of this junction, but it’s everywhere in David Lynch’s work: from Twin Peaks’s sweet, brochure-like title sequence of a mountainous town that, as it turns out, hides Laura Palmer’s corpse and many other monstrosities, to the arrival of Naomi Watts’s aspiring actress Betty in a dreamlike Hollywood in Mulholland Drive, before the nightmare of that city consumes her. In Lynch’s early work, the small town is the theater of this dance of innocence and evil, but in his later films, namely the loose trilogy of Lost Highway (1997), Mulholland Drive (2001), and Inland Empire (2006), the macabre and the mundane coexist in the individual soul. Upon reading Room to Dream — Lynch’s newly released experimental memoir — one’s tempted to say that the same coupling exists in David Lynch himself.

More here.

Mary Halton at the BBC:

Researchers have found evidence of an existing body of liquid water on Mars.

What they believe to be a lake sits under the planet’s south polar ice cap, and is about 20km (12 miles) across.

Previous research found possible signs of intermittent liquid water flowing on the martian surface, but this is the first sign of a persistent body of water on the planet in the present day.

Lake beds like those explored by Nasa’s Curiosity rover show water was present on the surface of Mars in the past.

However, the planet’s climate has since cooled due to its thin atmosphere, leaving most of its water locked up in ice.

The result is exciting because scientists have long searched for signs of present-day liquid water on Mars, but these have come up empty or yielded ambiguous findings. It will also interest those studying the possibilities for life beyond Earth – though it does not yet raise the stakes in the search for biology.

The discovery was made using Marsis, a radar instrument on board the European Space Agency’s (Esa) Mars Express orbiter.

More here.

Omar Ali at Brown Pundits:

Pakistan heads to the polls on July 25th. I happen to be in the middle of a move, so I have not been posting much but a short note on the election is certainly due. Back in 2013 Pakistan had its first peaceful democratic transfer of power and it looked like some sort of democracy was finally taking root, with the military still exercising disproportionate influence but with an elected government running most of the country according to its own priorities. Unfortunately, the trend line has since reversed and done so in spectacular fashion. There are many theories about why this particular reversal happened, with some people blaming the party in power (the nominally right of center PMLN) and others the overweening ambitions of GHQ (*General Headquarters. The army). Whatever the triggers, it seems that at some point the army high command decided that it could not coexist with Mian Nawaz Sharif and his politically ambitious daughter (Maryam Nawaz Sharif) and for the last year and a half the army, primarily acting through its intelligence agencies (for the rough stuff) and ISPR (the PR wing of the army, now expanded into a vast public relations operation with a serving general in charge) has been on a crusade against the PMLN in general and Mian Nawaz Sharif (MNS) and his daughter in particular.

More here.

Keith Doubt at berfrois:

It is difficult to understand the genocide because the genocide occurred not in a secret place, but in full view of the observing world. In 1993, Lieutenant General Philippe Morillon, the United Nations Protection Force (UNPROFOR) Commander in Bosnia-Herzegovina, came to Srebrenica and, after seeing the death camp circumstances of the civilians living under the siege, declared that Srebrenica was under the protection of the UN. In April 1993, the UN Security Council, adopted Resolution 819 which formally declared Srebrenica a UN “safe area,” following after Morillon’s declaration, and sent UNPROFOR soldiers from Canada, and later the Netherlands to the town. As part of the demilitarization agreement, military commanders defending Srebrenica agreed to turn over their heavy arms in exchange for UN protection. As early as April 1993, Ambassador Diego Arria, Permanent Representative of Venezuela to the UN Security Council, described the situation in Srebrenica as a “slow-motion genocide under the protection of the UN forces” In July 1995, Srebrenica—under the protection of UN forces—became a fast-motion genocide.

more here.

Peter Thonemann at Literary Review:

But Alcibiades, like Byron, clearly had that indefinable something. One catches a glimpse of it in the unforgettable last scene of Plato’s Symposium, when he crashes into the room, blind drunk, flirting with everything on legs, shouting about his love for Socrates. Thucydides captures it in his report of Alcibiades’s speech whipping up the Athenian assembly to vote for the disastrous Sicilian expedition of 415 BC – an extraordinary stew of egotistic bragging (about how successful his racehorses are), mendacious demagoguery and brilliantly acute strategic thinking. The unwashed Athenian masses, not usually prone to atavistic toff-grovelling, absolutely adored him: when Alcibiades finally returned to Athens in 407 BC after eight years of exile, sailing coolly into Piraeus on a ship with purple sails, they welcomed him back with paroxysms of joy.

more here.

Erica X Eisen at The Paris Review:

In the Chester Beatty Library, there are books made entirely of jade. There are picture scrolls featuring calligraphy by the brother of the Japanese emperor. There are papyrus codices that constitute some of the few surviving texts of Manichaeism, a religion of darkness and light that rivaled Christianity in scale until its last believers died out in fourteenth-century China. There are Armenian hymnals, Renaissance catalogues of war machines, and monographs on native Australian fauna. There is all of this and more—thousands and thousands of other works diverse in period and place of origin, waiting for human eyes. And yet as I walk through the galleries, as I survey the cases of books safe behind their glass, it occurs to me that if a book is a thing meant to be read, then in a certain sense, these objects have lost their function to all but the scholarly epigraphists, backs bent in the private study room. And yet far from becoming something less because of this, the books on display have become something more.

Can we recover a physical literature? Can we recover a literature that is not merely read but felt? The library museum gestures at just such a possibility.

more here.

Melanie McFarland in Salon:

“Castle Rock,” Hulu’s longform series ode to Stephen King debuting Wednesday, is a reminder of how differently people can view the same story. By no means is it a “Rashomon”-type of affair; King’s commercial success is rooted in the fact that his stories are straightforward entertainments, with meanings no more complex than the eternal struggles between light and dark or good versus evil. The same applies to “Castle Rock,” a original creation by Sam Shaw (“Manhattan”) and Dustin Thomason, that is foremost a fairly straightforward pastiche of the horror author’s oeuvre. Those who are well-versed in King’s work, whether on the page or by way of one of the 100-plus screen adaptations of his stories — may welcome the Easter egg hunt it offers by dotting each episode with details and character associations from previous works. The most obvious is the town itself. The average filmgoer is much more likely to recognize the second most important character in Castle Rock other than the town itself: Shawshank State Penitentiary. Even those familiar with King by reputation and little else should recognize the classic narrative of the prodigal son returned, personified here in Henry Deaver.

An attorney who specializes in death row cases, Deaver is lured back to Castle Rock at the behest of an unidentified caller. It’s not a trip he wants to take, but something prods him into going. Henry could be thought of the spiritual sibling to Selena St. George, the accusatory daughter in the film adaptation of “Dolores Claiborne.” Like Selena, it’s implied that Henry left town to escape something in his past that the townsfolk won’t allow him to forget. But a key difference, besides their gender, is that Henry, played by Andre Holland, is black.

More here.

Ed Yong in The Atlantic:

In early 2014, Laura Brealey was visiting her daughters in Singapore when she slipped on a marble floor and cracked her hip. She had it replaced, but in the process, the surgeons noticed that her breathing sounded odd, and told her to speak to a respiratory specialist. At her daughtJer’s urging, she did so when she returned home to London, England—and was told that she had lung cancer. The doctors moved quickly. That same August, they cut out part of her right lung, and gave her both radiotherapy and chemotherapy. The tumor disappeared. Things were looking promising. But the following summer, Brealey started experiencing fresh pain in her ribs. The cancer was back. When I meet Brealey in April 2016, in a brightly colored room at University College Hospital, she’s about to start her third drug—a new one called nivolumab that her doctor, a young oncologist named Charlie Swanton, is hopeful about. As he preps her for the new treatment, he is also thinking about how to manage the severe pain that the tumor is causing, as it presses against the nerves that run along Brealey’s ribs. “It hasn’t been easy for Laura,” says Swanton. “When I first told her she couldn’t go back to Singapore to visit her family…”

“… I nearly fell off my chair in shock,” she finishes. Brealey, now 75, has bright blue eyes, short white hair, and preternaturally high spirits. “My best friend’s brother calls me the Indestructible Laura. I’m very active. Before this, I was going to the gym, doing aqua-aerobics, pilates, gardening. Now, I just sleep. This has been a nuisance.” She misses the theater, longs to return to Asia, dreams about going on the Trans-Siberian Railway. When she mentions the tumor that is curtailing all of those plans, she talks as if it was an errant child. “It’s so stubborn,” she says. Brealey’s story is typical. An initial wave of treatments seemed to knock a tumor out, but despite the scalpels, the radiation, and the drugs—not to mention relentless optimism—the tumor recurs, seemingly more resilient than before. Stubborn, as she says. Even the latest drugs, tailored to strike at the specific genetic faults behind a person’s tumor, fail to permanently halt the backswing of a tumor’s pendulum.

More here.

As Lazarus

How deep is deep enough
until I reach the bent rafters
of my own ribcage? I test
the extent of my dimensions. This—

this is an effort of pencil checks,
measuring-tape & desperation.
Behind the drywall of sternum
& knucklebone, I am certain
that the same thing that aches
in the attic is what keeps it
standing. How far down is it?
That place I’m afraid to name.
That place where God lives.

I’m pressing up against the door—
an angry thumb against a tooth,
snapped loose in my mouth.
How long have I been straining
at the concrete slab of my own
foundations, barely making a scratch?
Again—again, I’ve been asking God
for permission to uproot my life
like a weed in the asphalt, to split
the stem of my spine & let me sleep.
Again—again, he keeps telling me no.

by Ian Williams
from Ecotheo Review
July 24, 2018