Christian Smith in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

BS is the university’s loss of capacity to grapple with life’s Big Questions, because of our crisis of faith in truth, reality, reason, evidence, argument, civility, and our common humanity.

BS is the farce of what are actually "fragmentversities" claiming to be universities, of hyperspecialization and academic disciplines unable to talk with each other about obvious shared concerns.

BS is the expectation that a good education can be provided by institutions modeled organizationally on factories, state bureaucracies, and shopping malls — that is, by enormous universities processing hordes of students as if they were livestock, numbers waiting in line, and shopping consumers.

BS is universities hijacked by the relentless pursuit of money and prestige, including chasing rankings that they know are deeply flawed, at the expense of genuine educational excellence (to be distinguished from the vacuous "excellence" peddled by recruitment and "advancement" offices in every run-of-the-mill university).

BS is the ideologically infused jargon deployed by various fields to stake out in-group self-importance and insulate them from accountability to those not fluent in such solipsistic language games.

More here.

Mystic Bounce

Even if you love the racket of ascension,
you must know how the power leaves you.
And at this pitch who has time for meditation?
the sea walled in by buildings. I do miss
the quiet, don't you? When I said, "Fuck the deer
antlered and hithered in fur," it was because
I had seen the faces of presidents balled into a fist.
If I were in charge, I would know how to fix
the world: free health care or free physicals,
at least, and an abiding love for the abstract.
When I said, "All of history is saved for us,"
it was because I scorned the emancipated sky.
Does the anthem choke you up? When I asked
God if anyone born to slaves would die
a slave, He said: "Sure as a rock descending
a hillside." That's why I'm not a Christian.

by Terrence Hayes
from Poetry, March 2008

Kevin Duong at berfrois:

It is often observed that the French Revolution was a revolution of scientists. Nourished by airy abstractions and heartfelt cries to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, its leaders sought a society grounded, not in God or tradition, but in what Edmund Burke decried as “the conquering empire of light and reason”. To be sure, if we tallied the professional affiliations of the members of the first National Assembly, we would find it overwhelmingly populated by lawyers. But the revolution’s symbols and motifs were not derived from legal practices and traditions, and it was not as men of law that Maximilien Robespierre and Jean-Paul Marat called for the death of their king and the creation of a democratic republic. Rather, they did so as scientists—middle class intellectuals who saw in government a field ripe for experimentation, innovation, and improvement.

Nowhere was this as clear as their approach to “the will of the people”. Of the many puzzles to which revolutionaries applied themselves as scientists, few seemed so pressing and so intractable. It is obvious what a king’s will looks like, or so we like to think. Kings are individuals, they have bodies, and they can tell us what to do. However they choose to communicate their will — through voice, a gesture, a written pronouncement — it is relatively clear when such acts belong to them.

more here.

Taney Roniger at The Brooklyn Rail:

While proponents of sci-art are given to citing the commonalities between the two fields (the primacy of curiosity and imagination, the thirst for disclosing the invisible) and their ostensive original unity, the impassable fact is that the two represent fundamentally dissimilar epistemological approaches: one that aspires to objective knowledge, and the other whose meaning derives from the production and transmission of tacit, or implicit, knowledge. While accuracy, precision, and discursive reason are indispensible to the one, the other tends to become sclerotic in their presence, relying instead on ambiguity, multivalence, and internal contradiction for its power. With such vastly different approaches to meaning, how can what’s essential to each remain intact in a synthesis?

The nagging question at the center of sci-art, then, is twofold. First, with the claim of “convergence,” is it really a synthesis of the two fields that’s being proposed, or something more like a complementary relationship? And if it’s the latter, what does each truly stand to gain from the partnership? On this there are some facile answers, but none withstands much critical scrutiny. On the side of art, the ostensive gains are clear: with its wealth of imagery, new technologies, and ever-more fantastical discoveries, science presents as an endless source of timely and relevant subject matter.

more here.

Josephine Balmer at the New Statesman:

“The cities are down,” observed George Steiner of the poem, “and survivors wander the face of the earth as pirates or beggars.” But late last year, Emily Wilson’s new translation appeared, like one of Zeus’s thunderclaps, to part the clouds. Heavily promoted by her publisher as the first by a woman in English verse (Anne Dacier produced a French prose version in 1708, used as a crib by Alexander Pope, while in 1952, the children’s author Barbara Leonie Picard published a complete prose retelling), some of the subsequent critical amazement perhaps recalls Samuel Johnson’s verdict of a woman preaching, “surprised to find it done at all”. As Butler countered the argument that only a male poet could have written the battle-hardened Odyssey: “A woman can kill… on paper as well as a man can.”

So what does Wilson, a renowned classical scholar and translator, bring to the text? Rather than any feminist revisioning as in Margaret Atwood’s 2005 novella, The Penelopiad, Wilson’s fluid and immensely readable versification harks back to Lattimore’s close rendition of Homer’s original. She maintains line lengths – no easy task in a non-inflected, word-hungry language such as English – and writes in iambics, “the conventional meter for regular English narrative verse” as she explains.

more here.

From Phys.Org:

A team of researchers with the Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology in the Republic of Korea has developed a glucose monitoring contact lens that its makers claim is comfortable enough to wear. In their paper published on the open access site Science Advances, the group describes their contact lens and suggests it could be ready for commercial use within five years. Diabetes results in unmanageable glucose levels, requiring those who have the disease to monitor and adjust them with insulin or medicine. Monitoring, unfortunately, requires pricking a finger to retrieve a blood sample for testing, which most people do not like. For that reason, scientists seek another way. A new method employs a contact lens. Prior research has shown glucose levels in tears follows that of glucose levels in the blood in many respects. To date, there are no commercially available contact lens products because, as the researchers note, they are made of hard materials that are uncomfortable in the eye. They claim to have overcome that problem by breaking apart the pieces of their sensing device and encapsulating each in a soft polymer and then connecting them together in a flexible mesh.

The polymer is the same type used in conventional contact lenses. The components of the device consist of a graphene-based sensor, a rectifier, LED display and a stretchable antenna. Power for the sensor is still external—it is held in the air a minimum of nine millimeters from the lens. The LED glows during normal conditions and turns off when high levels of glucose are detected. The flexibility of the lens and sensor components also allows for removal of the device in the same way as normal contact lenses—by grabbing and bending.

More here.

Maren Meinhardt at the TLS:

Humboldt’s subordination of himself does not always make comfortable reading, especially as it clearly wasn’t even particularly welcome: “Every day this love and affection increases, the expression of which is so often irritating to you”. Nonetheless, he suggested that Haeften retire from his regiment in the next few months, and that “all of us (including my brother) move to Italy for a few years . . . . We’d fit perfectly into one carriage, and my brother with wife and child would fill the other”. Naturally, all would be subject to Haeften’s whim and pleasure: “where and how you want to travel, how soon you’d like to leave Italy – I shall vouch for it with my character, as well as with the record of our relations thus far, that you can command over me as over your child, and will encounter obedience without so much as a grumble”. After their return from Italy, they would all settle down together – “it doesn’t matter where, best in a place where nature is friendly and where old ties won’t embarrass us. There’s a lot to be said for Cleves [Haeften’s home town]. . .”.

more here.

Gavin Francis at the LRB:

The first case of Spanish flu was recorded on 4 March 1918, when a military mess cook called Albert Gitchell in Camp Funston, Kansas, reported sick with a headache and fever. By the following day a hundred others had reported the same symptoms. A hangar was requisitioned to house the men, but flu has an incubation period of a couple of days, and had already moved on, aided by the war machine. By mid-April it had reached the Western Front, where three-quarters of French troops and half the British fell ill; 900,000 German soldiers were taken out of action. In April it also surfaced in South-East Asia, and in May, as the Spanish cabinet took to their beds, it was spreading through North Africa. On 1 June the New York Times reported it spreading through China (possibly for the second time), and later that summer it reached Australia. That was the first wave; through the summer of 1918 the pandemic seemed to be on the wane.

But in August a second and more deadly wave struck all at once in Sierra Leone, Boston and Brest. The virus seems to have mutated, making it more transmissible and provoking a more florid inflammatory reaction. Ten thousand died in Addis Ababa; Haile Selassie said that he fell ‘gravely ill’, but ‘was spared from death by God’s goodness’. In Prague Kafka became ill; in Dublin Yeats’s pregnant wife, Georgie, was stricken, as was Ezra Pound in London.

more here.

Aaron Peck at the NYRB:

When the French artist Gus Bofa died in 1968, his obituary in Le nouveau planetedescribed him as “a profound thinker… a bilingual philosopher who knew how to tell us about fear in words and images.” As an editor, writer, and illustrator, Bofa stands at a crossroads between numerous art forms: book illustration, comics, poster-art, aphorisms, and visual biography. Bofa’s drawings evoke the anxious spirit of the early twentieth century, images of urban alienation and war but also of fantasy, a mixture he shared with his friend the novelist Pierre Mac Orlan. Words, either Bofa’s or others’, are central to his oeuvre. His drawings suggest the existential darkness that overtook a Europe defaced by war and modernization. The illustrations he made for Mac Orlan’s moody novel of espionage Mademoiselle Bambù—of spies, prostitutes, sailors, and drifters—compliment the tale of a web of interconnected characters as they circulated around Europe’s port cities, a depiction of the dark unease of the early twentieth century. Bofa’s contributions appear in rough black and white, sketch-like, as if somehow disappearing into themselves. In these drawings, his style is dark, almost resembling the aesthetics of film noir, though at times it is also goofy or playful.

more here.

Kaite Welsh in The Guardian:

ll around the world, haggis is being toasted, bagpipes being piped and neeps and tatties roasted as poetry lovers in Scotland and elsewhere – as well as anyone looking for an excuse to pour a generous dram of whisky – celebrate Thursday’s birthday of Robert Burns, a candidate for the #MeToo movement if ever there was one. Behind every celebration of a great man lies a woman who could be equally venerated, but usually isn’t. Virginia Woolf, whose contribution to and influence on literature has been immense, was born on the same day as Ayrshire’s favourite son – yet year after year, no one shows up to her party. The past decade alone has seen big anniversaries for Shakespeare, Martin Luther, Charles Dickens and Anthony Burgess, chock-full of biographies, documentaries and public talks. This February sees celebrations for the centenary of that staple of Edinburgh literature, Muriel Spark (although she lived the bulk of her adult life in Tuscany), and Emily Brontë’s bicentenary is due in July.

But women’s writing is valued differently – that is, less – and the public attention (and public money) spent on celebrating it misses an opportunity to do something truly radical and get people thinking about literature and who produces it in a different way. These celebrations could be used not just to celebrate the work of well-known writers but to bring the lesser-known ones to light. Give us Aphra Behn or Radclyffe Hall if you want historical figures, or celebrate the likes of Jackie Kay and Liz Lochhead while they’re still around to appreciate it. als have taken to reading work only by women or writers of colour; efforts that do, in a small way, tackle the prejudices underpinning what is published, reviewed and read in the UK. But when literary history is whitewashed to erase or minimise women’s contributions, except for the occasional centenary celebration, this is a gesture tantamount to fighting fire with a water pistol.

Of course, Burns Night isn’t solely about Burns, and suggesting that we spend even one 25 January celebrating the work of a queer woman with mental illness over one of Scotland’s biggest exports is guaranteed to get some people frothing at the mouth.

More here.

Vijay Pande in NYT:

John Naughton in Prospect:

The “dust of exploded beliefs,” the English aphorist Geoffrey Madan once wrote, “may make a fine sunset.” We’re beginning to see that glow over the internet which, if you count back to the design phase in the autumn of 1973, is now over four decades old.

From the moment the internet first opened for semi-public use in January 1983, it evoked utopian dreams. It was easy to see why. Cyberspace—the term coined by the novelist William Gibson for the virtual space behind the screen—really did seem to be a parallel universe to “meatspace,” the term invented by Grateful-Dead-lyricist-turned-essayist John Perry Barlow for the messy physical world that we all inhabit. Cyberspace in the 1980s was a glorious sandpit for geeks: a world with no corporations, no crime, no spam, no hate speech, relatively civil discourse, no editorial gatekeepers, no regulation and no role for those meatspace masters whom Barlow called the “weary giants of flesh and steel.”

But then, gradually, the internet was commercialised and those two parallel spaces merged to create our networked world, in which the affordances of cyberspace combine with surveillance and corporate control. Of course, the internet has brought huge benefits in terms of access to information and efficiency of communication: try imagining our home or work lives without it. But there are serious worries. The online world is populated by several billion mostly passive addicts of devices, apps and services created by a handful of corporate giants. Prying governments and giant companies have acquired the capacity to surveil our every move, both on the internet and, now that so many devices have built-in GPS, in the real world too. Through their ability to monitor our searches these companies—as well as the governments they co-operate with—are able to see our innermost thoughts and desires. (Yes, even our desires: what people search for on Google is incredibly revealing.)

It all creates the potential for unprecedented manipulation, and—rather suddenly—worries are piling up about how that network technology is disrupting our society, warping our children’s development, our politics and our lives. Even the digital evangelists are having second thoughts.

More here.

Charles C. Mann in Wired:

None of this is why Guy Callendar’s name will be boldfaced in tomorrow’s textbooks. Instead it will be because he was willing to delve into fields he knew nothing about, atmospheric science among them. Nobody knows why he got so interested in the air. Callendar himself attributed it to ordinary curiosity: “As man is now changing the composition of the atmosphere at a rate which must be very exceptional on the geological time-scale, it is natural to seek for the probable effects of such a change.”

In the early 1930s Callendar began collecting measurements of the properties of gases, the structure of the atmosphere, the sunlight at different latitudes, the use of fossil fuels, the action of ocean currents, the temperature and rainfall in weather stations across the world, and a host of other factors. It was a hobby, but a remarkably ambitious one: He was producing the first rough draft of the huge climate models familiar today.

More here.

Zadie Smith has been a vital literary voice since her first novel, White Teeth, became an instant bestseller. Here she answers questions from famous fans, including Teju Cole, Philip Pullman and Sharmaine Lovegrove.

From The Guardian:

Zadie Smith’s second collection of essays, Feel Free, could be described as a tour through her enthusiasms punctuated with diversions. She writes with equal fervour about Jay-Z’s rapping, which “pours right into your ear like water from a tap”, as about Edward St Aubyn’s “rich, acerbic comedy”. Her early dislike of Joni Mitchell is used as a segue into a discussion of philistinism and taste. A booklet on early Italian masterpieces sparks an examination of the concept of corpses and the unthinkability of death.

Although the subjects may seem wide-ranging, she says, “they always seem very narrow to me. I’m very familiar with what I’m enthusiastic about, and it’s hard to see variety in your own tastes.” The only thing they all have in common is how passionately she feels about them. “I like to know I love something before I pitch it. For me, writing 3,000 words about something you don’t really like is a kind of torture.”

Written between 2008 and 2017, the 33 essays, columns and reviews were, in a way, a respite from her fiction. “Usually an essay comes when I’m playing hookey from novel writing,” she says. “Writing a novel is like doing a long-distance race, and writing an essay in the middle of one is like turning left off the route, finding a cafe and paying close attention to something different. It’s a form of relief.” They are also fundamentally different writing practices. “Fiction is messier. Essay is, for me, an attempt at a kind of clarity. I have a very messy and chaotic mind, but when I’m writing an essay I find I can exert a bit more control over it.”

More here.

Univited Poem

Rude poem broke into
my conversation with myself,
not making lots of sense,
used inappropriate words,
things out of context,
whined of its lot—
“damned if it did,
damned if it didn’t”—
swapped things for non-things,
hummed some,
talked so long,
repeating much,
rain began falling.
I heard it in the leaves.
I gave up, gave in to listening,
said to myself, That does make sense.

Small Trek

snowbound
homebound
hidebound
hamstrung
hogtied

in a corner
up a tree
down the river

nosedive
headway
deadmarch
footloose
pointblank
playground
..

by Elanor Ross Taylor
from Poetry Foundation
.

Mark Bould in the Boston Review:

Fredric Jameson’s essay in An American Utopia (2016) begins with the observation, “We have seen a marked diminution in the production of new utopias over the last decades (along with an overwhelming increase in all manner of conceivable dystopias, most of which look monotonously alike).” Jameson recognizes the profligacy with which capitalism, its eye always on the main chance, belches dystopias. At the same time, he regrets its dulling of human creativity and, thus, its homogenization of dystopia. Yearning for richness, he finds formulaic reiteration. Risk-averse publishers gamble millions on the tried-and-tested strategy of more of the (slightly re-jigged) same. As does Hollywood, albeit on greater orders of magnitude.

Nearly 300 pages further into the same book, Slavoj Žižek insists that the “dystopias that abound in recent blockbuster movies and novels (Elysium, The Hunger Games), although apparently leftist (presenting a postapocalyptic society of extreme class divisions), are unimaginative, monotonous, and also politically wrong.”

Where the Marxist locates monotony in the similarity between dystopias, the Lacanian implies that each individual example is tedious, hackneyed, and wrongheaded. I am not entirely convinced by either one.

More here.

Ed Yong in The Atlantic:

It took just three weeks for two-thirds of all the world’s saiga to die. It took much longer to work out why.

The saiga is an endearing antelope, whose bulbous nose gives it the comedic air of a Dr. Seuss character. It typically wanders over large tracts of Central Asian grassland, but every spring, tens of thousands of them gather in the same place to give birth. These calving aggregations should be joyous events, but the gathering in May 2015 became something far more sinister when 200,000 saiga just dropped dead. They did so without warning, over a matter of days, in gathering sites spread across 65,000 square miles—an area the size of Florida. Whatever killed them was thorough and merciless: Across a vast area, every last saiga perished.

Richard Kock, a veterinarian and conservationist from the Royal Veterinary College, saw it all. He and his team were there on a routine monitoring trip to check the health of the population. “Mass mortality events are never nice things and I’ve experienced quite a few,” he says. “But the experience of the saiga was unprecedented, and unworldly. Even after 40 years of work, I just said: I don’t understand.”

More here.

Simon van Zuylen-Wood in New York Magazine:

It’s 10:45 p.m. Rio de Janeiro time. Glenn Greenwald and I are finishing dinner at a deserted bistro in Ipanema. The restaurant, which serves its sweating beer bottles in metal buckets and goes heavy on the protein, is almost aggressively unremarkable (English menus on the table, a bossa-nova version of “Hey Jude” on the stereo). Greenwald avoids both meat and alcohol but seems to enjoy dining here. “I really believe that if I still lived in New York, the vast majority of my friends would be New York and Washington media people and I would kind of be implicitly co-opted.” He eats a panko-crusted shrimp. “It just gives me this huge buffer. You’ve seen how I live, right? When I leave my computer, that world disappears.”

Greenwald, now 50, has seemed to live in his own bubble in Rio for years, since well before he published Edward Snowden’s leaks and broke the domestic-spying story in 2013 — landing himself a Pulitzer Prize, a book deal, and, in time, the backing of a billionaire (that’s Pierre Omidyar) to start a muckraking, shit-stirring media empire (that’s First Look Media, home to the Intercept, though its ambitions have been downgraded over time). But he seems even more on his own since the election, just as the agitated left has regained the momentum it lost in the Obama years.

The reason is Russia. For the better part of two years, Greenwald has resisted the nagging bipartisan suspicion that Trumpworld is in one way or another compromised by a meddling foreign power. If there’s a conspiracy, he suspects, it’s one against the president; where others see collusion, he sees “McCarthyism.” Greenwald is predisposed to righteous posturing and contrarian eye-poking — and reflexively more skeptical of the U.S. intelligence community than of those it tells us to see as “enemies.”

And even if claims about Russian meddling are corroborated by Robert Mueller’s investigation, Greenwald’s not sure it adds up to much — some hacked emails changing hands, none all that damaging in their content, maybe some malevolent Twitter bots.

More here.