Reality Demands

Reality demands
we also state the following:
life goes on.
It does so near Cannae and Borodino,
at Kosovo Polje and Guernica.

There is a gas station
in a small plaza in Jericho,
and freshly painted
benches near Bila Hora.
Letters travel
between Pearl Harbor and Hastings,
a furniture truck passes
before the eyes of the lion of Cheronea,
and only an atmospheric front advances
towards the blossoming orchards near Verdun.

There is so much of Everything
that Nothing is quite well concealed.
Music flows
from yachts near Actium
and couples on board dance in the sunlight.

So much keeps happening,
that it must be happening everywhere.
Where stone is heaped on stone,
there is an ice cream truck
besieged by children.
Where Hiroshima had been,
Hiroshima is again
manufacturing products
for everyday use.

Not without its charms is this terrible world,
not without its mornings
worth our waking.

In the fields of Maciejowice
the grass is green
and on the grass is — you know how grass is —
transparent dew.

Maybe there are no fields other than battlefields,
those still remembered,
and those long forgotten,
birch woods and cedar woods,
snows and sands, iridescent swamps,
and ravines of dark defeat
where today, in sudden need,
you squat behind a bush.

What moral flows from this? Maybe none.
But what really flows is quickly-drying blood,
and as always, some rivers and clouds.

On the tragic mountain passes
the wind blows hats off heads
and we cannot help–
but laugh.

by Wislawa Szymborska
from Poems New and Collected
Harcourt, 1998

Stanley Fish in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

The humanities are taking it on the chin. If there were any doubts about this proposition, they have been dispelled by the University of Wisconsin at Stevens Point’s proposal to eliminate 13 majors, including history, art, English, philosophy, sociology, political science, French, German, and Spanish. The administration cited large deficits, programs with a low enrollment, and a desire to play to its strengths — STEM subjects and training in technology. One professor of physics and astronomy (Ken Menningen) approved, declaring that the university was right to “pivot away from the liberal arts” and toward programs that students, concerned with career prospects, find attractive. That reasoning might make sense if Stevens Point were a trade school, but it is, at least by title and claim, a university, and there is an argument to be made that because the claim is now without support at Stevens Point, the title should be removed.

The philosopher and political theorist Michael Oakeshott would have thought so. Here is his account of the university: “It is a place where [the student] … is not encouraged to confuse education with training for a profession, with learning the tricks of a trade, with preparation for future particular service in society, or with the acquisition of a kind of moral and intellectual outfit to see him through life.” Note that Oakeshott lists in rapid succession the most often invoked defenses and justifications of liberal education, and note too that he immediately dismisses them as barely worth thinking about: “Whenever an ulterior purpose of this sort makes its appearance, education … steals out of the back door with noiseless steps.”

More here.

Michelle Nijhuis in The Atlantic:

In 2011, the wildlife biologist Justin Brashares and his students set up a series of camera traps in and around Ruaha National Park in southern Tanzania. They were studying the effects of human activities on antelope reproduction, but their cameras soon revealed an odd and far more obvious pattern. While the antelope inside the park were active during the day, those outside the park, closer to human settlements, were active primarily at night—even though lions, which prey on antelope both inside and outside the park, typically hunt at night. The contrast in behavior was so stark that when Brashares and one of his students looked at a plot of the data, they laughed in disbelief. When faced with a choice between humans and lions, it appeared, antelope preferred to tangle with lions, and they were going nocturnal to do so.

More here.

George Prochnik in The New Yorker:

The Austrian émigré writer Stefan Zweig composed the first draft of his memoir, “The World of Yesterday,” in a feverish rapture during the summer of 1941, as headlines gave every indication that civilization was being swallowed in darkness. Zweig’s beloved France had fallen to the Nazis the previous year. The Blitz had reached a peak in May, with almost fifteen hundred Londoners dying in a single night. Operation Barbarossa, the colossal invasion of the Soviet Union by the Axis powers, in which nearly a million people would die, had launched in June. Hitler’s Einsatzgruppen, mobile killing squads, roared along just behind the Army, massacring Jews and other vilified groups—often with the help of local police and ordinary citizens.

More here.

Kate Marvel in Scientific American:

The US Environmental Protection Agency has, of late, been operating on the principle that you can prevent environmental disasters by simply getting rid of the environment. As part of this mission, the EPA has considered a plan to put climate science up for public debate. This “Red Team, Blue Team” exercise would have pitted scientists against people who do not like them in order to cast doubt on the consensus that human activities are warming the planet. I am completely on board with this, as long as the Blue Team also gets private jets and enormous security details. We will, however, take a pass on the used Trump Hotel mattresses.

I’m kidding, of course. In fact, as a general rule, I refuse to debate basic science in public. There are two reasons for this: first, I’m a terribledebater and would almost certainly lose. The skills necessary to be a good scientist (coding, caring about things like “moist static energy”, drinking massive amounts of coffee) aren’t necessarily the same skills that will convince an audience in a debate format. It is very fortunate that things like the atomic model of matter do not rest on my ability to be charming or persuasive.

But second, and maybe more importantly: once you put facts about the world up for debate, you’ve already lost.

More here.

Alessandra Vespignani in Nature:

In 1998, Watts and Strogatz¹ introduced the ‘small-world’ model of networks, which describes the clustering and short separations of nodes found in many real-life networks. I still vividly remember the discussion I had with fellow statistical physicists at the time: the model was seen as sort of interesting, but seemed to be merely an exotic departure from the regular, lattice-like network structures we were used to. But the more the paper was assimilated by scientists from different fields, the more it became clear that it had deep implications for our understanding of dynamic behaviour and phase transitions in real-world phenomena ranging from contagion processes to information diffusion. It soon became apparent that the paper had ushered in a new era of research that would lead to the establishment of network science as a multidisciplinary field.

Before Watts and Strogatz published their paper, the archetypical network-generation algorithms were based on construction processes such as those described by the Erdös–Rényi model². These processes are characterized by a lack of knowledge of the principles that guide the creation of connections (edges) between nodes in networks, and make the simple assumption that pairs of nodes can be connected at random with a given connection probability. Such a process generates random networks, in which the average path length between any two nodes in the network — measured as the smallest number of edges needed to connect the nodes — scales as the logarithm of the total number of nodes. In other words, randomness is sufficient to explain the small-world phenomenon popularized as ‘six degrees of separation’^3,4: the idea that everyone in the world is connected to everyone else through a chain of, at most, six mutual acquaintances.

However, random construction fell short of capturing the local cliquishness of nodes observed in real-world networks.

More here.

Stan Carey in Sentence First:

Like has undergone radical developments in modern English. It can function as a hedge (‘I’ll be there in like an hour’), a discourse particle (‘This like serves a pragmatic function’), and a sentence adverb (‘It’s common in Ireland, like’). These and other non-standard usages are frequently criticised, but they’re probably older than critics think.

More recent is the so-called quotative like (‘I’m like, Whoa!’), also often disparaged. This became widely established impressively fast and is leading to some remarkable usages in younger generations: children saying things like ‘What’s Ernie like?’ to mean ‘What’s Ernie saying?’

So some uses of like are emerging right now, spreading through younger speech communities. In episode 278 of Australia’s Talk the Talk podcast, guest Alexandra D’Arcy – a linguistics professor who literally wrote the book on like – says that while she might say ‘at like the same time’, her son can say ‘at the like same time’, which is not in her grammar at all. It’s a subtle but striking difference.

It gets better. The latest novel use to which like is being put is as an infix. Infixes are a pretty small set in English, so a new one is a genuine surprise, linguistically. In some ways it is unlikeprecedented.

More here.

Jennifer Ouellette in Quanta:

Gerardo Ortiz remembers well the time in 2010 when he first heard his Indiana University colleague John Beggs talk about the hotly debated “critical brain” hypothesis, an attempt at a grand unified theory of how the brain works. Ortiz was intrigued by the notion that the brain might stay balanced at the “critical point” between two phases, like the freezing point where water turns into ice. A condensed matter physicist, Ortiz had studied critical phenomena in many different systems. He also had a brother with schizophrenia and a colleague who suffered from epilepsy, which gave him a personal interest in how the brain works, or doesn’t.

Ortiz promptly identified one of the knottier problems with the hypothesis: It’s very difficult to maintain a perfect tipping point in a messy biological system like the brain. The puzzle compelled him to join forces with Beggs to investigate further.

Ortiz’s criticism has beleaguered the theory ever since the late Danish physicist Per Bak proposed it in 1992. Bak suggested that the brain exhibits “self-organized criticality,” tuning to its critical point automatically. Its exquisitely ordered complexity and thinking ability arise spontaneously, he contended, from the disordered electrical activity of neurons.

More here.

Rory Smith at CNN:

IQ scores have been steadily falling for the past few decades, and environmental factors are to blame, a new study says.

The research suggests that genes aren’t what’s driving the decline in IQ scores, according to the study, published Monday.

Norwegian researchers analyzed the IQ scores of Norwegian men born between 1962 and 1991 and found that scores increased by almost 3 percentage points each decade for those born between 1962 to 1975 — but then saw a steady decline among those born after 1975.

Similar studies in Denmark, Britain, France, the Netherlands, Finland and Estonia have demonstrated a similar downward trend in IQ scores, said Ole Rogeberg, a senior research fellow at the Ragnar Frisch Center for Economic Research in Norway and co-author of the new study.

More here.

David French in National Review:

If you wade through the entire inspector general’s report, consider the content and tone of the FBI correspondence quoted within it, and ponder the timeline, you will finally get an answer to the key question I,  and millions of Americans, have asked: If key members of the FBI were actually biased against Donald Trump, why did the FBI so dramatically damage Hillary Clinton’s campaign in the last days before the election? Why did it draft a letter to Congress announcing that it was reopening its email investigation a month after it found Anthony Weiner’s laptop, a letter that detonated like a bomb in the campaign and had a measurable effect on Hillary’s polling?

Now we know. The decisions leading up to that moment were influenced by a toxic stew of anti-Trump bias and institutional self-interest. The combination of those two factors sent an FBI torpedo straight at the SS Hillary, blasting another hole in a ship that was already taking on water.

The vast majority of the report simply reaffirms and amplifies previous reporting. It provides an interesting window into the shock and concern inside the FBI when Barack Obama appeared to prejudge the case and exonerate Hillary. It details how the FBI focused on Hillary’s alleged intent, even though one of the relevant statutes imposes criminal penalties for mere “gross negligence,” when it declined to recommend Espionage Act charges against her. And it provides a blow-by-blow account of James Comey’s defiant decision to depart from DOJ policy and practice and make an independent announcement of the FBI’s recommendation.

But then, when the story moves into the fall, things change. The report has new details and a new narrative that provide the last, strange twist on the strangest election cycle of my lifetime.

More here.

Kenan Malik in Pandaemonium:

What do we mean by diversity? And why is it good – or not?

For all the myriad debates about diversity today, such questions are rarely addressed in any depth. The latest hoo-ha was generated by a Lionel Shriver column in the Spectator, which questioned publisher Penguin Random House’s pledge to make the company more diverse. ‘We want both our new hires and the authors we acquire to reflect UK society by 2025’, PRH announces on its website.

‘Drunk on virtue,’ Shriver wrote, ‘Penguin Random House no longer regards the company’s raison d’être as the acquisition and dissemination of good books.’ She went on: ‘Literary excellence will be secondary to ticking all those ethnicity, gender, disability, sexual preference and crap-education boxes.’ From now on, ‘a manuscript written by a gay transgender Caribbean who dropped out of school at seven and powers around town on a mobility scooter… will be published’ even if it is ‘incoherent, tedious, meandering’.

It was a bog-standard anti-diversity rant wrapped up in Shriveresque language, mixing valid criticisms with over-the-top assertions. The line about the ‘gay transgender Caribbean’ is a tired cliche, clearly satirical, but also clearly intended to provoke a response. And provoke it did.

More here.

Sarah Marshall in The New Republic:

I first encountered Lorrie Moore when I read “How to Become a Writer,” a mesmerizingly bleak story from her 1985 debut collection, Self-Help, which I imagine to be so frequently anthologized because editors want something of hers and because the title is so appealing. Besides, it’s a promising one, suggesting a clear set of instructions. Like much of Self-Help, the story is voiced in second-person imperative, but it can only offer directions down a road to nowhere: “First,” its opening lines instruct, “try to be something, anything, else.”

Did Lorrie Moore ever try to be anything else? Her collected nonfiction, in the newly-released See What Can Be Done, offers a few answers: some about Moore herself, and some about the intertwined joys and despairs of a writing life—and the futility, perhaps, of resisting one. As in her fiction—for which the vast majority of readers know her—Moore’s one-liners are tart, but never acid. “The clichés here,” she writes of James Cameron’s Titanic, “are sturdy to the point of eloquence.” Of George H.W. Bush in the 1992 election: “He was too proud to flirt.” She strikes the reader as someone who could silence a room with a few well-placed glances; the most withering thing she will say about the most ridiculous of passages is that it “gives one pause.” I was three-quarters of the way through this book before I realized—shocked, and then shocked at my shock—that it contains no hatchet jobs.

See What Can Be Done is mostly cultural criticism: a scabbard sheathing 34 years’ worth of American media, from Nora Ephron’s Heartburn to the 2016 election, but studded, here and there, with gem-dense personal essay. The most unsettling of all these is “One Hot Summer, or A Brief History of Time,” Moore’s essay on her own honeymoon, folded into a book that contains occasional tossed-over-the-shoulder references to male partners who alternately support and undermine women’s creative work. (Edna St. Vincent Millay, we learn, was married to “the stunning Eugen Boissevain,” who cooked her dinners and tried morphine to better understand his wife’s addiction and withdrawal.)

More here.

Father Arrives in the Triumphal Car