Thomas Lin in Quanta:

Freeman Dyson — the world-renowned mathematical physicist who helped found quantum electrodynamics with the bongo-playing, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman and others, devised numerous mathematical techniques, led the team that designed a low-power nuclear reactor that produces medical isotopes for research hospitals, dreamed of exploring the solar system in spaceships propelled by nuclear bombs, wrote technical and popular science books, penned dozens of reviews for The New York Review of Books, and turned 90 in December — is pondering a new math problem.

“There’s a class of problem that Freeman just lights up on,” said the physicist and computational biologist William Press, a longtime colleague and friend. “It has to be unsolved and well-posed and have something in it that admits to his particular kind of genius.” That genius, he said, represents a kind of “ingenuity and a spark” that most physicists lack: “The ability to see further in the mathematical world of concepts and instantly grasp a path to the distant horizon that’s the solution.”

Press said he’s posed a number of problems to Dyson that didn’t “measure up.” Months and years went by, with no response. But when Press asked a question about the “iterated prisoner’s dilemma,” a variation of the classic game theory scenario pitting cooperation against betrayal, Dyson replied the next day. “It probably only took him a minute to grasp the solution,” Press said, “and half an hour to write it out.”

Together, they published a much-cited 2012 paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

More here.

Julian Baggini in Microphilosophy:

Last week I was set to appear on Radio Four’s Today programme to discuss self-help books with the concert pianist James Rhodes. Rhodes has suffered depression and attempted suicide, which makes his new “anti-self help” book Fire on All Sides a more interesting attack on the genre than most.

In the end I didn’t appear because one of the editors had noticed I’d been on the programme before Christmas and there’s only so much Baggini the broadcaster can inflict on the British people.

Rhodes made an eloquent and persuasive case in the discussion. His main complaint is that the self-help culture encourages us to think we are more perfectible than we are. The “good-enough human being” should indeed be good enough. “The human condition is one of fragility,” he said. “Just because we are not happy it doesn’t mean that we are unhappy. There is a huge amount of space between happiness and unhappiness and someone in between is OK.” Well said.

Rhodes acknowledged that many self-help books do contain nuggets of truth but insisted most of these are just common sense. That’s true, but as his interlocutor Dr Adrian James pointed out, often “common sense” is just what we lack and is only obvious when pointed out.

More here.

Charles C. Mann in The Atlantic:

In 1970, when I was in high school, about one out of every four people was hungry—“undernourished,” to use the term preferred today by the United Nations. Today the proportion has fallen to roughly one out of 10. In those four-plus decades, the global average life span has, astoundingly, risen by more than 11 years; most of the increase occurred in poor places. Hundreds of millions of people in Asia, Latin America, and Africa have lifted themselves from destitution into something like the middle class. This enrichment has not occurred evenly or equitably: Millions upon millions are not prosperous. Still, nothing like this surge of well-being has ever happened before. No one knows whether the rise can continue, or whether our current affluence can be sustained.

Today the world has about 7.6 billion inhabitants. Most demographers believe that by about 2050, that number will reach 10 billion or a bit less. Around this time, our population will probably begin to level off. As a species, we will be at about “replacement level”: On average, each couple will have just enough children to replace themselves. All the while, economists say, the world’s development should continue, however unevenly. The implication is that when my daughter is my age, a sizable percentage of the world’s 10 billion people will be middle-class.

More here.

Chantel Tattoli in The Paris Review:

“Zora!” Alice Walker howled in the cemetery. “I hope you don’t think I’m going to stand out here all day, with these snakes watching me and these ants having a field day.” It was August 1973. Zora Neale Hurston, who was then thirteen years dead, was a mudslinging protofeminist novelist-folklorist-playwright-ethnographer, not to be crossed, and she had climbed to minor literary stardom in the thirties with her accounts of the Southern African American experience, specifically black Southern womanhood. She was, in the words of her friend Langston Hughes, “the most amusing” among New York’s “Niggerati.” She hailed herself as their queen. But Hurston was complicated. “Someone is always at my elbow reminding me that I am the granddaughter of slaves,” she once wrote. “It fails to register depression with me. Slavery is sixty years in the past. The operation was successful and the patient is doing well, thank you.” She declined to recall a single memory of racial prejudice in her autobiography. Her sycophantic attitude toward her white patrons, Red-baiting, and eventual criticism of Brown v. Board of Education had rotted her name. “She was quite capable of saying, writing, or doing things different from what one might have wished,” Walker admitted. But she forgave Hurston. As Hurston herself declared, “How can any deny themselves the pleasure of my company?”

And so: nearly a decade before Walker published The Color Purple, a sister masterpiece to Their Eyes Were Watching God, the contributing editor at Ms. magazine stood in weeds up to her waist in Florida while sand and bugs poured into her shoes, looking for Hurston. Walker had flown from Jackson, Mississippi, to Orlando and driven to nearby Eatonville, the prideful all-black town where Hurston was raised, but not, as Walker learned from an octogenarian former classmate—Mathilda Moseley, teller of “woman-is-smarter-than-man” tales in Hurston’s Mules and Men—where she was put under.

Walker’s quest took her to Fort Pierce, on the Atlantic Coast, to the dead end of Seventeenth Street, to the Garden of Heavenly Rest. "In fact, I’m going to call you just one or two more times,” Walker swore. Hurston was somewhere in the crummy segregated burial ground; trouble was, her grave was unmarked. “Zo-ra!” Walker roared. And, as if Hurston had shoved her, Walker stumbled into a sunken rectangle in the heart of the yard: presumably Zora.

More here.

Haley Cohen in The Economist:

As the Arizonan sun begins to rise, Brian Tierce guides a bay gelding into a round pen and closes the steel gate behind them. Tierce, thick-necked with grey-blue eyes, leads his charge to the centre of the pen and picks up a Styrofoam saddle pad he had left in the dirt earlier. He holds the pad forward and the gelding, named Obi Wan after the Jedi Master in “Star Wars”, sniffs it suspiciously. Suddenly frightened, the horse snorts and strains his neck away. Tierce lowers the pad to his side and says soothingly: “It’s okay, boy. You’re okay.” He waits for a full minute, watching to see if Obi’s head sinks into a more relaxed position. When it does, Tierce tries again, gently sliding the pad down the horse’s muzzle and across his cheeks. He explains: “He’s never had this on him, ever. I could probably get this on him today – the saddle. But I’m not trying to put the saddle on the horse; I’m trying to get the horse to accept the saddle.”

Nick Bilton in Vanity Fair:

Years ago, long before Mark Zuckerberg became Mark Zuckerberg, the young founder reached out to a friend of mine who had also started a company, albeit a considerably smaller one, in the social-media space, and suggested they get together. As Facebook has grown into a global colossus that connects about a third of the globe, Zuckerberg has subsequently assumed a reputation as an aloof megalomaniac deeply out of touch with the people who use his product. But back then, when he only had 100 million users on his platform, he wasn’t perceived that way. When he reached out to my friend, Zuckerberg was solicitous. He made overtures that suggested a possible acquisition—and once rebuffed, returned with the notion that perhaps Facebook could at least partner with my friend’s company. The chief of the little start-up was excited by the seemingly harmless, even humble, proposition from the growing hegemon. Zuckerberg suggested that the two guys take a walk.

Taking a walk, it should be noted, was Zuckerberg’s thing. He regularly took potential recruits and acquisition targets on long walks in the nearby woods to try to convince them to join his company. After the walk with my friend, Zuckerberg appeared to take the relationship to the next level. He initiated a series of conference calls with his underlings in Facebook’s product group. My friend’s small start-up shared their product road map with Facebook’s business-development team. It all seemed very collegial, and really exciting. And then, after some weeks passed, the C.E.O. of the little start-up saw the news break that Facebook had just launched a new product that competed with his own.

Stories about Facebook’s ruthlessness are legend in Silicon Valley, New York, and Hollywood. The company has behaved as bullies often do when they are vying for global dominance—slurping the lifeblood out of its competitors (as it did most recently with Snap, after C.E.O. Evan Spiegel also rebuffed Zuckerberg’s acquisition attempt), blatantly copying key features (as it did with Snapchat’s Stories), taking ideas (remember those Winklevoss twins?), and poaching senior executives (Facebook is crawling with former Twitter, Google, and Apple personnel). Zuckerberg may look aloof, but there are stories of him giving rousing Braveheart-esque speeches to employees, sometimes in Latin.

More here. [Thanks to Ali Minai.]

Rafia Zakaria in The Guardian:

No man who has read a page of Indian history will ever prophesy about the Frontier. We shall doubtless have trouble there again.” So wrote Lord Curzon, then viceroy, in 1904. The British were by then a little weary of the burdens of empire; they were having trouble with the tribespeople of the Frontier, who seemed uninterested in the sort of governance the colonialists wished for them. The smugly racist Curzon blamed it on the “fanaticism and turbulence” that “ferment in the blood” of the Pashtun. The neocolonialists of today cannot explain things away so easily. As Steve Coll documents in Directorate S, the current war has for ever altered the fates of all three countries involved – the US, Afghanistan and Pakistan – and, after 15 years, there is no end to the “trouble” in sight.

Directorate S, from which the book gets its title, lies buried deep in the bureaucracy of the ISI (Inter-Services Intelligence), Pakistan’s spy agency. Ensconced thus, the directorate works to “enlarge Pakistan’s sphere of influence in Afghanistan”. It goes about this task, Coll explains, by supplying, arming, training and generally seeking to legitimise the Taliban, the AK-47 toting terrorists who took over Afghanistan in 1992, stringing up decapitated corpses in town squares and shoving women into the confines of their homes. Nobody paid much attention then, and perhaps never would have, had the Taliban not become host to Osama bin Laden.

Bin Laden, the architect and financier of the 9/11 attacks, was the US’s most obvious target, and in order to get him, sights had to be set on Afghanistan. The scene Coll paints is riveting.

More here.

Lorraine Berry in Signature:

It is difficult to comprehend that The Vagina Monologues, Eve Ensler’s performance piece about women, their bodies and sexuality, is only celebrating its 20^th anniversary. Difficult because its impact – over $100 million raised for programs aimed at stopping violence against women – has been global, and each February, productions are ubiquitous. Performances have taken place in disparate locations, ranging from the bright lights of Broadway to underground performances mounted in secret in cities such as Islamabad, Pakistan.

Each year at around Valentine’s Day, hundreds of college campuses across the United States and the world present The Vagina Monologues as fundraisers for various local women’s agencies in each production’s area. In addition, other moneys can be donated to “VDay,” the foundation bringing attention to women all over the world that have been affected by violence. These college productions feature students, staff members, and faculty in the speaking roles and as part of the production staff. Some of the monologues require a chorus of voices, while others require the single voice of individual women – many of whom have no prior acting experience – but who are animated in their desires to articulate each story, written by Ensler after she had interviewed over 200 women and got them to talk about their vaginas.

The stories have moments of side-splitting humor, and other moments that make audience members weep. But a common reaction to being in the audience is the desire to get organized to resist the forces that keep women vulnerable to violence. And the play has new elements each year, as Ensler writes a new monologue for that year’s performances in response to current issues. The 20^th anniversary edition of The Vagina Monologuescontains a number of these new monologues, in addition to a history of the play’s production and reception.

More here.

John Domini at The Quarterly Conversation:

No longer than the lead piece in the latest literary quarterly, yet unearthing a teleology for some of humanity’s oldest stories, The Tongue of Adam sets a reader thinking of noble forebears. W.G. Sebald comes to mind, though there’s no meandering involved, and Anne Carson, though there’s no anachronism or toying with form. Jorge Luis Borges, especially, casts his shadow, given the erudite cool with which this text handles Adam and Eve, Eden and Babel, effortlessly switching between Quranic (as spelled by Kilito) sources and Judeo-Christian. Similar material, in the hands of the great Argentine, resulted in amazing aesthetic objects, and to say the latest from Abdelfattah Kilito doesn’t shrivel in comparison—well, that’s high praise. Even more noteworthy, however, may be what the book accomplishes, at this hour of the world, for Arab civilization in general.

The Tongue of Adam began as a series of lectures at a French university, as one of the author’s colleagues explains in the introduction (sensitive, if at times gushing). Then following seven short chapters—essays, meditations—Kilito himself provides the afterward, revealing that he taught in French, and often French literature, for forty years. Nonetheless this epilog, like his text, makes an argument for his culture of origin.

more here.

Jordan Lawson at Bookforum:

A woman with a set of fake names—Kata, Katya, Kasia, Katushka—has returned to New York after eighteen years in Dubai. Glass towers now crowd the Williamsburg waterfront and women yell at her to get out of the bike lane. Bodega cigarettes cost fourteen dollars and smoking in bars is against the law. It’s unclear why she’s come back, and even more unclear why, at eighteen, she left in the first place. “New York wants to trick me, make me think it’s gone soft,” she thinks. But bricks of heroin still come stamped: VERSACE and HERMÈS, then DRONE, RIHANNA, ISIS. She still works as a prostitute. “I have given myself a year to quit: heroin, whoring,” she announces, but life slides by all the same. “Again and again on a different day I wake up in New York.”

Ultraluminous, Katherine Faw’s second novel, envisions a life lived at the intersection of valuable and expendable. The book tracks the slight shifts and changes that its many-named protagonist—"K" for short—makes in her life as she half-heartedly wrestles with the forces that both ensure her survival and hasten her demise. In Faw’s cruel world there’s little to hope for, but plenty to fear. K wants a different life, but her days creep along with enough success to warrant surrender. In a universe trending only toward chaos, the novel seems to ask, how can you risk change?

more here.

Blake Morrison at The Guardian:

Should a murderer be allowed to serve as a minister of the church? Is such a person suitable to conduct marriages, open coffee mornings and suffer little children to come to them? Such were the questions facing the Church of Scotland in 1984, when a licence was sought by James Nelson, who after his release from prison on parole, having served a 10-year sentence, had studied divinity at St Andrews and taken up preaching. With the tabloids closely following the story (Nelson, not averse to publicity, had given an interview to the Glasgow Herald the year before), the Kirk’s General Assembly knew it would be criticised, whatever its decision. But after a three-hour debate, by 622 votes to 425, with a courage it’s hard to imagine today, they gave their approval to Nelson, thus making him, it seems, the first convicted killer to be ordained into the Christian church.

The Nelson case is the core of Stuart Kelly’s fascinating book. But it ranges widely, digressively, Shandyesequely even, to encompass so much more: theology, philosophy, literary criticism, the nature of evil and Kelly’s own intellectual development and struggle with faith: “Nelson for me is the keyhole through which I can see issues and ideas that have troubled and intrigued me for decades.”

Daybreak

Hands and lips of wind
heart of water
…………………..eucalyptus
campground of the clouds
the life that is born every day
the death that is born every life

I rub my eyes
the sky walks the land
.

Nightfall

What sustains it,
half-open, the clarity of nightfall,
the light let loose in the gardens?

All the branches,
conquered by the weight of birds,
lean toward the darkness.

Pure, self-absorbed moments
still gleam
on the fences.

Receiving night,
the groves become
hushed fountains.

A bird falls,
the grass grows dark,
edges blur, lime is black,
the world is less credible.
.

by Octavio Paz
from The Collected Poems 1957-1987
Carcanet Books
Translation: Eliot Weinberger
.

Joana Ramiro in New Humanist:

Brigitte Fielder in Avidly:

At the 2017 Women’s March in Madison, Wisconsin, I carried a sign that read “I AM A WOMAN’S RIGHTS. –Sojourner Truth, 1851” I was citing an account of a speech Truth gave at the first National Woman’s Rights Convention, as it was recorded in the Anti-Slavery Bugle, an essay I often teach in courses on nineteenth-century African American women’s writing. Given mainstream white feminism’s habitual marginalization of nonwhite women’s voices, I deliberately chose to carry the words of a woman of color and to gesture towards black women’s long history of contributing to U.S. feminist discourse. I’d written the letters out in block form, mimicking the iconic “I AM A MAN” signs of the 1968 Memphis Sanitation Worker’s Strike. The comparison reminded me not only of the history of civil rights protest in the U.S. between Truth’s moment and my own, but also of Truth’s challenge to gender stereotypes. In this speech and others, she referred to her own physical size and strength. Truth was six feet tall and spoke and sang with a deep voice; on at least one occasion of her public speech on women’s rights, she was heckled by the crowd and accused of being a man.

Kathryn Schulz in The New Yorker:

I didn’t know who William Kelley was when I found that book but, like millions of Americans, I knew a term he is credited with first committing to print. “If You’re Woke, You Dig It” read the headline of a 1962 Op-Ed that Kelley published in the New York Times, in which he pointed out that much of what passed for “beatnik” slang (“dig,” “chick,” “cool”) originated with African-Americans.

A fiction writer and occasional essayist, Kelley was, himself, notably woke. A half century before the poet Claudia Rankine used her MacArthur “genius” grant to establish an institute partly dedicated to the study of whiteness, Kelley turned his considerable intellect and imagination to the question of what it is like to be white in this country, and what it is like, for all Americans, to live under the conditions of white supremacy—not just the dramatic cross-burning, neo-Nazi manifestations of it common to his time and our own but also the everyday forms endemic to our national culture.

Kelley first addressed these issues at length in his début novel, “A Different Drummer.” Published three weeks after that Times Op-Ed, when he was twenty-four, it promptly earned him comparisons to an impressive range of literary greats, from William Faulkner to Isaac Bashevis Singer to James Baldwin. It also got him talked about, together with the likes of Alvin Ailey and James Earl Jones, as among the most talented African-American artists of his generation.

More here.

Stuart Russell, Anthony Aguirre, Ariel Conn and Max Tegmark in IEEE Spectrum:

Paul Scharre’s recent article “Why You Shouldn’t Fear ‘Slaughterbots’” dismisses a video produced by the Future of Life Institute, with which we are affiliated, as a “piece of propaganda.” Scharre is an expert in military affairs and an important contributor to discussions on autonomous weapons. In this case, however, we respectfully disagree with his opinions.

We have been working on the autonomous weapons issue for several years. We have presented at the United Nations in Geneva and at the World Economic Forum; we have written an open letter signed by over 3,700 AI and robotics researchers and over 20,000 others and covered in over 2,000 media articles; one of us (Russell) drafted a letter from 40 of the world’s leading AI researchers to President Obama and led a delegation to the White House in 2016 to discuss the issue with officials from the Departments of State and Defense and members of the National Security Council; we have presented to multiple branches of the armed forces in the United States and to the intelligence community; and we have debated the issue in numerous panels and academic fora all over the world.

Our primary message has been consistent: Because they do not require individual human supervision, autonomous weapons are potentially scalable weapons of mass destruction (WMDs); essentially unlimited numbers can be launched by a small number of people. This is an inescapable logical consequence of autonomy. As a result, we expect that autonomous weapons will reduce human security at the individual, local, national, and international levels.

More here.