Scott Aaronson in Shtetl-Optimized:

You see, when Pinker says he supports Enlightenment norms of reason and humanism, he really means to say that he supports unbridled capitalism and possibly even eugenics. As I read this sort of critique, the hair stands on my neck, because the basic technique of hostile mistranslation is so familiar to me. It’s the technique that once took a comment in which I pled for shy nerdy males and feminist women to try to understand each other’s suffering, as both navigate a mating market unlike anything in previous human experience—and somehow managed to come away with the take-home message, “so this entitled techbro wants to return to a past when society would just grant him a female sex slave.”

I’ve noticed that everything Pinker writes bears the scars of the hostile mistranslation tactic. Scarcely does he say anything before he turns around and says, “and here’s what I’m not saying”—and then proceeds to ward off five different misreadings so wild they wouldn’t have occurred to me, but then if you read Leon Wieseltier or John Gray or his other critics, there the misreadings are, trotted out triumphantly; it doesn’t even matter how much time Pinker spent trying to prevent them.

More here.

Wael Ghonim:

In July of 2013, my tears fell as the plane took off. For the first time in my life, I was desperate to leave Egypt, despite not knowing when I would be able to return. A few days prior, a military coup had toppled our two-year-old struggling democracy.

I had lived most of my life as an outsider. I never belonged to a majority. As a child, I was the Egyptian kid growing up in Saudi Arabia, and when I moved to Egypt at the age of 13, I became “the kid who came back from Saudi.” At 17, I became religious, and my family and friends called me an extremist. At 30, I was an anonymous activist–who barely knew any activists. And now, at 37, I’m the Egyptian who just moved to the US and is once again struggling to prove his worth.

My early childhood seems to have been contained in a sheltered bubble I went to private schools in Saudi Arabia and Egypt, spent most of my time at home, and my parents knew everything about my friends. But at the age of 14, I burst that bubble. I decided to leave private school and join a public one.

On the first day in public school, I was shocked. Our classroom had benches for forty students but we were over seventy. There was no fan, no AC, no ventilation. The school yard was huge, but not enough to accommodate the thousands of students.

In my third day at school, a fight erupted in the yard. Kids were throwing rocks randomly in the middle of the yard. I saw blood, knives, and swords. The screams of anger and the ambulance sirens were all that I could hear.

More here.

Vidyan Ravinthiran at Poetry Magazine:

In “On the Move,” the verse-rhythm is already more susceptible, and uncertain, than it seems. The commas in the first two lines quoted are marvelously controlled — a delight for the savoring ear — but they also register that “doubt” which is eventually strapped in and hidden (where the fitting of rhyme to rhyme is the poet’s own 
version of this process). Writing of Thomas Hardy, Gunn says his “poetry is almost always robust, never fretful or neurotic.” Yet, in this poem, the hidden neurosis is acknowledged. And we shouldn’t miss, in either the essay on Hardy or “On the Move,” the genuinely mitigating (rather than habitual) word “almost” — as crucial here as when it appears twice at the close of Larkin’s “An Arundel Tomb,” from which it tends to vanish whenever that poem is sentimentally quoted. The internal rhyme with “dust” and “robust” emphasizes the word: Gunn won’t wholly idealize his kinetic toughs.

Comparing this with the verse of his following books, we see how Gunn gradually learned to combine his rhymes with soft-hard meter. “In Santa Maria del Popolo” is slicker, less insistent and more insinuating — the syntactical distensions have become second nature. In 1965, Gunn collaborated with his brother Ander on the photo-book Positives (only “The Old Woman” makes the cut here); two years later, Touch appeared, containing the sequence “Misanthropos” (solipsism 
diagrammed, with a diamond-point chisel), and also the famous title poem.

more here.

David A. Bell at The Nation:

Pinker might also have to concede that, especially outside of France, most Enlightenment thinkers did not oppose reason to religious faith, as his book implies. They certainly did not consider forms of belief “generators of delusions” or consider a belief in the existence of the soul dangerous. He might have to admit that it was not just brave atheists, but devout Christians, above all Quakers, who were among the first who organized to fight the most barbaric European practice of all, namely slavery.

Historians know that there was in fact no single, monolithic “Enlightenment project,” and that the Enlightenment can be generalized about only with great caution. Throwing this caution to the wind, Pinker has taken his own 21st-century values and projected them back onto the intellectual scene of the 18th century. He has described his work as an “evidence-based take on history,” but by “evidence” he clearly means numerical data. Aren’t books evidence as well?

Meanwhile, Pinker fails to acknowledge how very closely his own radical optimism echoes some of the wilder—and more misguided—pronouncements about the human future from the Enlightenment itself. “The human species…is capable of…unbounded improvement…mankind in a later age are greatly superior to mankind in a former age.”

more here.

Samanth Submaranian at The New Yorker:

Doshi was not alone in infusing Le Corbusier’s modernism with an Indian spirit. A small school of other architects—Charles Correa, Ranjit Sabikhi, Raj Rewal—joined him in this idiom between the nineteen-sixties and the eighties. The Indian state was still building itself out, so there were plenty of public commissions on offer, and the socialist temper of the times agreed with these architects’ interest in planning for utopia. They were displaced only a couple of decades ago, when the country’s economy opened up and a global design aesthetic blew in. Commissions now come from companies that seem to want their buildings to fit into a universal ideal of a central business district. The most ambitious government-funded project in decades—the design of Amaravati, a new state capital—lies in the hands of the world-trotting English starchitect Norman Foster.

India isn’t always a pleasant country for architects. “In some way, architecture has been associated with the country’s urban problems,” Gautam Bhatia, an architect in New Delhi, told me. “The housing is insufficient, the infrastructure is insufficient. When you have these problems, is it even ethical to worry about design? There’s a strange guilt the profession harbors.” Most architects, as a result, work on private commissions, Bhatia said.

more here.

Boris Kachka in The New York Times:

The novelist Mary Gordon, known for books like 1981’s “The Company of Women,” about a girl who escapes her sheltered upbringing to embrace rebellion in 1960s America, considers her lifelong admiration of British actor-politician Glenda Jackson a “romance.” Gordon was 16 when she first saw Jackson onstage, in the 1965 Broadway production of “Marat/Sade,” a philosophical investigation of the meaning of protest set during and after the French Revolution.

MG: How would you define yourself as an actor in the British tradition?

GJ: I benefited from that huge change in British theater otherwise known as [playwright] John Osborne. When I left drama school, the director said to me, “Don’t expect to work much before you’re 40, because you’re essentially a character actress.” And that was a very accurate assessment, because the British theater then was still essentially a middle-class world. Then Osborne wrote “Look Back in Anger” (1956), and the whole thing just exploded.

MG: I saw “Stevie” (1977) in the West End in London [starring Jackson as British poet Stevie Smith]. I adore her work, and she is just tough as an old boot. Funny, but looks at the darkest things. As Emily Dickinson said, “Tell the truth but tell it slant.”

GJ: I’m so pleased you said that, because I’m a big fan of Emily Dickinson. The view of both Stevie and Emily Dickinson seems to be that here were these two solitary, depressed, lonely women, but they lived in these fantastic worlds!

MG: They’re great, greater than anybody around at that time. But their forms are small. And so, female gets defined as minor. Some of American women writers’ best work was done in the form of the short story: Flannery O’Connor, Eudora Welty, Katherine Anne Porter, Jean Stafford. I think what’s funny is around the same time that Emily Dickinson wrote, “I’m nobody! Who are you?” Whitman wrote, “I am large, I contain multitudes.”

GJ: [Laughs] Well, we had a program, years I’m going back now. This woman went back to Oxford to speak at her college. There’d been a big upsurge in women going to university, but it was very rare that a woman had a first-class degree. So she asked her old professor why, and this professor — also a woman — said because their examiners are still in the main men, and they like a lot of flash and filigree, whereas women go to endless lengths of attribution and details.

MG: I teach at a women’s college, Barnard, across the street from Columbia, which used to be male for donkey’s years, and I say to my students, “Do not speak into your collar when you tell me your name. There are men across the street saying things of immense stupidity at the top of their lungs!”

More here.

Syntax

Occasionally a god speaks to you,
rutted tollway a flint knife breaching
gutted fields hung on event

horizon, clear cut contradiction
through soybeans and sheared corn: blue
pickup an orange blaze, white letters

blistered, boiling down to tarmac,
asphalt, sulfur fume cured by a methane
gas burn-off pipe, blue flame chipped

with white raising a buttress of weather
-burnt bricks, flaking wind
totem. We stopped to take some cargo

on, weighted October with a freight
of waiting snow traveling east, panic of
starlings startled from stubble husks

by a harvest moon dangled directly
ahead: drove into the pitted sphere, bloody
pearl punched in a sky just out of reach

(vanishing point retreating, peeling),
one of the yellowed streetlights
by now, dimming, diminishing. The road

says to perspective, wait.
.

by Reginald Shepherd
from Otherhood: Poems by Reginald Shepherd
University of Pittsberg Press

Mark Bittman and David L. Katz in Grub Street:

It’s beyond strange that so many humans are clueless about how they should feed themselves. Every wild species on the planet knows how to do it; presumably ours did, too, before our oversized brains found new ways to complicate things. Now, we’re the only species that can be baffled about the “right” way to eat.

Really, we know how we should eat, but that understanding is continually undermined by hyperbolic headlines, internet echo chambers, and predatory profiteers all too happy to peddle purposefully addictive junk food and nutrition-limiting fad diets. Eating well remains difficult not because it’s complicated but because the choices are hard even when they’re clear.

With that in mind, we offered friends, readers, and anyone else we encountered one simple request: Ask us anything at all about diet and nutrition and we will give you an answer that is grounded in real scientific consensus, with no “healthy-ish” chit-chat, nary a mention of “wellness,” and no goal other than to cut through all the noise and help everyone see how simple it is to eat well.

Here, then, are the exhaustively assembled, thoroughly researched, meticulously detailed answers to any and all of your dietary questions.

Just tell me. Ethical concerns aside, which diet is the best: vegan, vegetarian, or omnivorous?

We don’t know, because the study to prove that any one diet is “best” for human health hasn’t been done, and probably can’t be. So, for our health, the “best” diet is a theme: an emphasis on vegetables, fruits, whole grains, beans, lentils, nuts, seeds, and plain water for thirst. That can be with or without seafood; with or without dairy; with or without eggs; with or without some meat; high or low in total fat.

More here.

Issie Lapowsky in Wired:

The morning John Kennedy was set to testify last December, he woke up at 1:30 am, in an unfamiliar hotel room in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, adrenaline coursing through his veins. He'd never gone to court before for anything serious, much less taken the stand.

Some time after sunrise, he headed to the courthouse, dressed in a gray Brooks Brothers suit, and spent the next several hours reviewing his notes and frantically pacing the halls. “I think I made a groove in the floor,” Kennedy says.

By 3:30 pm, it was finally time. Kennedy’s answers started off slowly, as he worked to steady his nerves. Then, about an hour into his testimony, Exhibit 81 flashed on a screen inside the courtroom. It was a map of part of Pennsylvania’s seventh congressional district, but it might as well have been a chalk outline of a body.

“It was like a crime scene,” explains Daniel Jacobson, an attorney for Arnold & Porter, which represented the League of Women Voters in its bid to overturn Pennsylvania’s 2011 electoral map, drawn by the state’s majority Republican General Assembly. The edges of the district skitter in all manner of unnatural directions, drawing comparisons to a sketch of Goofy kicking Donald Duck.

As an expert witness for the League of Women Voters and a political scientist at West Chester University, Kennedy’s job was to show how the state’s map had evolved over time, and to prove that the General Assembly had drawn it specifically to ensure that Republicans would always win the most seats in Congress.

More here.

Paul Lewis and Paul Hilder in The Guardian:

The blueprint for how Cambridge Analytica claimed to have won the White House for Donald Trump by using Google, Snapchat, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube is revealed for the first time in an internal company document obtained by the Guardian.

The 27-page presentation was produced by the Cambridge Analytica officials who worked most closely on Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.

A former employee explained to the Guardian how it details the techniques used by the Trump campaign to micro-target US voters with carefully tailored messages about the Republican nominee across digital channels.

Intensive survey research, data modelling and performance-optimising algorithms were used to target 10,000 different ads to different audiences in the months leading up to the election. The ads were viewed billions of times, according to the presentation.

The document was presented to Cambridge Analytica employees in London, New York and Washington DC weeks after Trump’s victory, providing an insight into how the controversial firm helped pull off one of the most dramatic political upsets in modern history.

More here.

In a Station

once I walked through the halls of a station
someone called your name
in the streets I heard children laughing
they all sound the same

wonder, could you ever know me
know the reason why I live
is there nothing you can show me
life seems so little to give

once I climbed up the face of a mountain
and ate the wild fruit there
fell asleep until the moonlight woke me
and I could taste your hair

isn't everybody dreaming
then the voice I hear is real
out of all the idle scheming
can't we have something to feel

once upon a time leaves me empty
tomorrow never came
I could sing the sound of your laughter
still I don't know your name

must be some way to repay you
out of all the good you gave
if a rumor should delay you
love seems so little to say

by Richard Manuel
from Music From Big Pink

Paul Voosen in Science:

As a teenager in the 1950s, Vaclav Smil spent a lot of time chopping wood. He lived with his family in a remote town in what was then Czechoslovakia, nestled in the mountainous Bohemian Forest. On walks he could see the Hohenbogen, a high ridge in neighboring West Germany; less visible was the minefield designed to prevent Czechs from escaping across the border. Then it was back home, splitting logs every 4 hours to stoke the three stoves in his home, one downstairs and two up. Thunk. With each stroke his body, fueled by goulash and grain, helped free the sun's energy, transiently captured in the logs. Thunk. It was repetitive and tough work. Thunk. It was clear to Smil that this was hardly an efficient way to live.

Throughout his career, Smil, perhaps the world's foremost thinker on energy of all kinds, has sought clarity. From his home office near the University of Manitoba (UM) in Winnipeg, Canada, the 74-year-old academic has churned out dozens of books over the past 4 decades. They work through a host of topics, including China's environmental problems and Japan's dietary transition from plants to meat. The prose is dry, and they rarely sell more than a few thousand copies. But that has not prevented some of the books—particularly those exploring how societies have transitioned from relying on one source of energy, such as wood, to another, such as coal—from profoundly influencing generations of scientists, policymakers, executives, and philanthropists. One ardent fan, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates in Redmond, Washington, claims to have read nearly all of Smil's work. "I wait for new Smil books," Gates wrote last December, "the way some people wait for the next Star Wars movie."

Now, as the world faces the daunting challenge of trying to curb climate change by weaning itself from fossil fuels, Smil's work on energy transitions is getting more attention than ever. But his message is not necessarily one of hope. Smil has forced climate advocates to reckon with the vast inertia sustaining the modern world's dependence on fossil fuels, and to question many of the rosy assumptions underlying scenarios for a rapid shift to alternatives. "He's a slayer of bullshit," says David Keith, an energy and climate scientist at Harvard University. ive Smil 5 minutes and he'll pick apart one cherished scenario after another. Germany's solar revolution as an example for the world to follow? An extraordinarily inefficient approach, given how little sunlight the country receives, that hasn't reduced that nation's reliance on fossil fuels. Electric semitrailers? Good for little more than hauling the weight of their own batteries. Wind turbines as the embodiment of a low-carbon future? Heavy equipment powered by oil had to dig their foundations, Smil notes, and kilns fired with natural gas baked the concrete. And their steel towers, gleaming in the sun? Forged with coal.

"There's a lot of hopey-feely going on in the energy policy community," says David Victor, an expert on international climate policy at the University of California, San Diego. And Smil "revels in the capability to show those falsehoods."

More here.

Jon Cruddas at Prospect Magazine:

James Bloodworth’s unflinching account of life and work in the towns we have come to know as being “left behind” exposes the mercilessness of the low-wage economy and modern capitalism. Working in a warehouse, a call centre, as a care worker and an Uber driver, he finds insecurity, ruthless discipline, surveillance, atomisation, underpayment and underemployment.

Workers are treated as mere units of production, squeezed for maximum efficiency. Nor does the exploitation end at work: the unscrupulousness of agencies and landlords—one of the rooms he stays in has a cardboard partition—drain any sense of control from the lives of his subjects.

While not romanticising the working class, Bloodworth is critical of some liberals who caricature them as uneducated and intolerant. He exposes how degrading working and living conditions shape how people see their relationships, bodies, diets and other people—not least immigrants and politicians.

Hired is a refreshing antidote to the fashionable post-work theses written from steel-and-ivory towers, which want us to sidestep the political imperative of improving the quality of work in favour of demanding full automation and free money. Bloodworth’s interviews reveal that meaningful work offers a sense of dignity, solidarity, support networks and community identity.

more here.

Armin Rosen at Harper's Magazine:

Since 2003, al-Qassemi has accumulated around 1,000 modern and contemporary works by Arabic-speaking artists or artists of Arab heritage. Under the guidance of three curators, works rotate through his Barjeel Foundation space, a small public gallery inside of a large arts center in al-Qassemi’s home city of Sharjah, about twenty minutes north of Dubai. Between 200 and 300 pieces are lent to museums around the world each year, something from which al-Qassemi derives no financial benefit. The collection, now one of the most important of its kind, is so vast and geographically scattered that there are major pieces al-Qassemi hasn’t actually seen before. At an opening of an exhibition of his works at Washington’s American University in September, he confronted an eerily static blown-up photo of exploding mortar shells by the Lebanese artist Akram Zaatari for the first time, and uttered a long, guttural “wow.”

Until the UAE joined in the Saudi-led boycott of Qatar this past summer, al-Qassemi hosted a show on Al Jazeera’s AJ+ where he walked viewers through collection highlights. He had over 500,000 Twitter followers before he deactivated his account, and was one of Gulf Business’s one hundred most powerful Arabs of 2017, falling within respectable distance of Gigi Hadid.

more here.

Thomas Nagel at the NYRB:

Kwame Anthony Appiah is a writer and thinker of remarkable range. He began his academic career as an analytic philosopher of language, but soon branched out to become one of the most prominent and respected philosophical voices addressing a wide public on topics of moral and political importance such as race, cosmopolitanism, multiculturalism, codes of honor, and moral psychology. Two years ago he even took on the “Ethicist” column in The New York Times Magazine, and it is easy to become addicted to his incisive answers to the extraordinary variety of real-life moral questions posed by readers.

Appiah’s latest book, As If: Idealization and Ideals, is in part a return to his earlier, more abstract and technical interests. It is derived from his Carus Lectures to the American Philosophical Association and is addressed first of all to a philosophical audience. Yet Appiah writes very clearly, and much of this original and absorbing book will be of interest to general readers.Its theme and its title pay tribute to the work of Hans Vaihinger (1852–1933), a currently neglected German philosopher whose masterwork, published in 1911, was called The Philosophy of “As If.” Vaihinger contended that much of our most fruitful thought about the world, particularly in the sciences, relies on idealizations, or what he called “fictions”—descriptions or laws or theories that are literally false but that provide an easier and more useful way to think about certain subjects than the truth in all its complexity would.

more here.

Melissa Dahl in the New York Times:

In the 1960s, a chimpanzee named Washoe learned how to sign. Shortly thereafter, as Byrne tells us in this entertaining and thought-provoking book, she learned how to swear.

Roger Fouts — now a respected primatologist; then a lowly research assistant — was tasked with potty-training Washoe, who lived with researchers almost as if she were a human member of their family. Eventually, Washoe internalized the notion that “dirty” (the sign for feces) was shameful outside of the toilet. Soon, “dirty” became her favorite insult. “Dirty monkey,” she signed at the macaque that scared her. “Dirty Roger,” she signed at Fouts when he refused to let her out of her cage.

The potty-mouthed Washoe may help us understand what happened when early humans learned to lob the idea of excrement at one another instead of the real thing. Swearing, Byrne argues, helped us begin to form stronger societies. Today, a well-placed curse word at work can help colleagues bond; studies have also found that swearing, curiously, often indicates that someone is less likely to become physically violent. Perhaps it’s a little like the way toddlers finally, blessedly, learn to use their words instead of their fists, or their teeth.

More here.

Carl Zimmer in the New York Times:

In less than three years, Dr. Reich’s laboratory has published DNA from the genomes of 938 ancient humans — more than all other research teams working in this field combined. The work in his lab has reshaped our understanding of human prehistory.

“They often answer age-old questions and sometimes provide astonishing unanticipated insights,” said Svante Paabo, the director of the Max Planck Institute of Paleoanthropology in Leipzig, Germany.

Dr. Reich, Dr. Paabo and other experts in ancient DNA are putting together a new history of humanity, one that runs in parallel with the narratives gleaned from fossils and written records. In Dr. Reich’s research, he and his colleagues have shed light on the peopling of the planet and the spread of agriculture, among other momentous events.

In a book to be published next week, “Who We Are and How We Got Here,” Dr. Reich, 43, explains how advances in DNA sequencing and analysis have helped this new field take off.

“It’s really like the invention of a new scientific instrument, like a microscope or a telescope,” he said. “When an instrument that powerful is invented, it opens up all these horizons, and everything is new and surprising.”

More here.