Edward Carlson in Black Perspectives:

On the occasion of a dual anniversary—the year we ponder the 50^th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination and recognize the 150^th anniversary W.E.B. Du Bois’s birth—the intersection of their legacy offers fertile ground for reflection.

More here. (Note: Throughout February, at least one post will be dedicated to honor Black History Month)

Nicolas Pelham in More Intelligent Life:

Zack Bornstein in The New Yorker:

Midnight–8 a.m.: Vividly hallucinate while paralyzed atop a cushion-topped box of metal springs.

8-8:05 a.m.: A small plastic box generates fast-moving vibrations strong enough for my eardrums to register them and communicate to my brain that it is time to switch from a hallucinating state to a state of gathering food and information. I smack the box.

8:05-8:15 a.m.: Spin a dial to release water that has travelled from the top of a mountain through a maze of lead pipes onto my outermost epidermal layer in order to rinse away the salty liquid that my body secreted through thousands of holes while I was hallucinating.

8:15-8:17 a.m.: Agitate a brush created by children halfway around the world to remove minuscule invisible creatures from the bones in my mouth that I use to turn all my food into soup before swallowing it. Spit out excess soap that is chemically designed to taste like food, but isn’t. “Forget” to floss.

8:17-8:20 a.m.: Tunnel my body into shapes made from interwoven threads of dyed plant refuse which have been pieced together by poor people a third of the way around the world to match the shapes of my limbs and my trunk.

8:20-8:23 a.m.: Tunnel my body into a different set of interwoven threads because the first one didn’t satisfactorily create the illusion that my body is desirably healthy for copulation as judged by a theoretical stranger whom I may encounter during the day.

8:23-8:25 a.m.: Look for my wallet.

8:25-9 a.m.: Strap myself into a small rocket-room that is powered by the burnt remains of prehistoric kelp, in which I avoid dying by spinning a plastic circle wrapped in optional cow skin.

More here. [Thanks to Elizabeth Cornell.]

David Wootton in the Times Literary Supplement:

This book consists essentially of seventy-two graphs – and, despite that, it is gripping, provocative and (many will find) infuriating. The graphs all have time on the horizontal axis, and on the vertical axis something important that can be measured against it – life expectancy, for example, or suicide rates, or income. In some graphs the line, or lines (often the graphs compare trends in several countries) fall as they go from left to right; in others they rise. In every single one, the overall picture (with the inevitable blips and bounces) is of life getting better and better. Suicide rates fall, homicides fall, incomes rise, life expectancies rise, literacy rates rise and so on and on through seventy-two variations. Most of these graphs are not new: some simply update graphs which appeared in Pinker’s earlier The Better Angels of Our Nature (2011); others come from recognized purveyors of statistical information. The graphs that weren’t in Better Angels extend the argument of that book, that war and homicide are on the decline across the globe, to assert that life has been getting better and better in all sorts of other respects. The claim isn’t new: a shorter version is to be found in Johan Norberg’s Progress (2017). But the range and scope of the evidence adduced is new. The only major claim not supported by a graph (or indeed much evidence of any kind) is the assertion that all this progress has something to do with the Enlightenment.

Since the argument of the book is almost entirely contained in the graphs, those who want to attack the argument are going to attack the figures on which the graphs are based. Good luck to them: arguments based on statistics, like all interesting arguments, should be tested and tested again. Better Angels caused a vitriolic dispute between Pinker and Nassim Nicholas Taleb as to whether major wars are becoming less frequent. In Taleb’s view the question is a bit like asking whether major earthquakes are getting less frequent or not: they happen so rarely, and so randomly, that you would need records going back over a vast stretch of time to reach any meaningful conclusion; a graph showing falling death rates in wars over the past seventy years won’t do the job. But it certainly will tell you that lots of generalizations about modern war are wrong. Much, indeed most, of Pinker’s argument survived Taleb’s attack, which in any case was directed at only one graph among many.

More here.

James Ryerson in the New York Times:

Over the past few years, many scientific researchers, especially those working in psychology and biomedicine, have become concerned about the reproducibility of results in their field. Again and again, findings deemed “statistically significant” and published in reputable journals have not held up when the experiments were conducted anew. Critics have pointed to many possible causes, including the unconscious manipulation of data, a reluctance to publish negative results and a standard of statistical significance that is too easy to meet.

In their book TEN GREAT IDEAS ABOUT CHANCE (Princeton University, $27.95), a historical and philosophical tour of major insights in the development of probability theory, the mathematician Persi Diaconis and the philosopher Brian Skyrms emphasize another possible cause of the so-called replication crisis: the tendency, even among “working scientists,” to equate probability with frequency. Frequency is a measure of how often a certain event occurs; it concerns facts about the empirical world. Probability is a measure of rational degree of belief; it concerns how strongly we should expect a certain event to occur. Linking frequency and probability is hardly an error. (Indeed, the notion that in large enough numbers frequencies can approximate probabilities is Diaconis and Skyrms’s fourth “great idea” about chance.) But failing to distinguish the two concepts when testing hypotheses, they warn, “can have pernicious effects.”

More here.

Mark Schmitt in the Boston Review:

A month before the 2008 presidential election, the cover of The American Prospect, which I edited at the time, depicted an empty Oval Office and the headline, “The President Doesn’t Matter (As Much As You Think).” Inside we ran articles about the institutions of Washington, such as the Senate Finance Committee—and its feckless chairman, Max Baucus—and the Federal Reserve, explaining the limits they would impose on the scope of change that might be possible under an Obama administration.

The issue fell flat on the newsstand, and the Prospect’s board of directors was apoplectic about the cover. Even if my colleagues and I were right, the publisher complained, the cover “wasn’t appropriate to the moment.”

We were right, as it turns out. But it’s also true that it wasn’t an appropriate moment to make that point, because no one wanted to hear it. Remember when all we could talk about was the possibility of a “transformational president”? In the thrill of what was, for many of us, the first decisive Democratic victory in our lifetimes, and what seemed to be—and probably is—a demographic shift in the electorate toward the younger, the nonwhite, and the socially tolerant, it was too easy to imagine that the 30-year conservative era dating from roughly halfway through the Carter administration had ended with a bang and that change on the scale of an FDR or a Reagan was possible.

In that moment, many liberals forgot an insight that they had painstakingly learned—or should have learned—in the Bush era: conservative dominance was not just a matter of electing a president, but of building, in the words of former Senator Bill Bradley, “a stable pyramid” of organizations focused on policy development, grass-roots mobilization, and media, “at the top of which you’ll find the president.” That president could be almost anyone—even, as if to prove the point, George W. Bush—because the ideological and organizational infrastructure is more important. Democrats, Bradley argued in a 2005 New York Times op-ed, “invert the pyramid,” vesting all hope in individual presidential candidates, who are expected to build their entire infrastructure from scratch. Three years later Obama did exactly that.

More here.

The Lamentation of the Old Pensioner

Although I shelter from the rain
Under a broken tree,
My chair was nearest to the fire
In every company
That talked of love or politics,
Ere time transfigured me.

Though lads are making pikes again
For some conspiracy,
And crazy rascals rage their fill
At human tyranny,
My contemplations are of Time
That has transfigured me.

There's not a woman turns her face
Upon a broken tree,
And yet the beauties that I loved
Are in my memory,
I spit into the face of Time
That has transfigured me.

W.B. Yeats
from The Last Romantic
publisher: Clarkson N. Potter, 1990

More here. (Note: Throughout February, at least one post will be dedicated to honor Black History Month)

Jan Steyn at The Quarterly Conversation:

Whether The Exploded View is a novel in four parts or a collection of four longish stories is a question akin to whether South Africa is a nation of peoples or a collection of nations. The four parts of The Exploded View are indeed linked, through setting and theme, but it doesn’t have the marked through-line of the short story cycles that so often come out of MFA programs here in the U.S. For one thing, the links between stories are underplayed, their fragmentation being essential to the structure as well as the governing visual and epistemological theme. Vladislavić’s reluctance to give a whole and holistic image of post-apartheid South African society has earned him some critics. As the idiom has it, “when Johannesburg catches a cold, South Africa sneezes.” So a representation of the fractured, divided city, with little cause for optimism about those divisions being overcome, has been sometimes read as a sign of Afro-pessimism and willful naysaying of the entire national project. Now, in 2017, not only do these critiques seem quaint and outdated, stemming as they do from a moment of unfounded optimism when the “Rainbow Nation” and the “African Renaissance” seemed plausible projects, but The Exploded View also seems more globally relevant than ever. The world is sneezing, and while Johannesburg’s cold is not the cause, it is certainly one of the clearest presentations of the symptoms.

more here.

Andrew Meier at Bookforum:

Steve Coll is the closest thing American journalism has to a High Priest of Foreign Correspondence. Two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, former managing editor of the Washington Post, former president of the New America Foundation, staff writer for the New Yorker, and current dean of the Columbia School of Journalism, Coll still manages to practice high-minded reportage, the species now maladroitly branded “fact-based.” Coll began his rise nearly thirty years ago in New Delhi, as “a wide-eyed rookie newspaper correspondent” for the Post. In 1993, after jihadists detonated a truck bomb beneath the World Trade Center, his editors called. Posted to London, Coll caught wind of a “wealthy Saudi exile in Sudan,” Osama Bin Laden. Not many had yet heard of Al Qaeda. In Ghost Wars, Coll’s acclaimed 2004 history “of the often-secret actions, debates, and policies that had led to Al Qaeda’s rise amid Afghanistan’s civil wars and finally to the September 11 attacks,” he returned to the region. Now, after a decade of research and 550 interviews, he offers Directorate S, an epic sequel that picks up on the eve of Massoud’s assassination.

Coll has proven himself an obsessive devotee of geopolitical catastrophe of the Central Asian variety. He is also a deft guide to the shadow world. Few books delve as deeply into the personnel of the CIA and the Taliban, offering a daunting array of characters (the cast list alone runs five pages).

more here.

Jonathan Meades at The Guardian:

According to the Dutch architect Reinier de Graaf, the people – planners, utopian environmentalists, sociologists, quango soldiers, free-range urbanists, demographic strategists, “place makers”, soi-disant visionaries, soothsayers and, of course, architects – who attend portentously entitled, quasi-academic conferences on, say, The Final Favela, The Shapes of Sprawl to Come or Agglomerative Control Theory are “united through the frank admission that we do not have a clue”.

Cluelessness has done nothing to inhibit a thriving cottage industry publishing countless tracts and manifestos wrought in the deadening locutions of conference-speak. Urbanist shall speak unto urbanist. And only unto urbanist, because any passing civvy or “lay person” can only improbably be bothered to decipher what’s being said. The ideal of the open city is described in closed terms that unwittingly emphasise the gulf between those who confer and the overwhelming majority who don’t, between those who build or, more likely, try to influence what is built, and those who dwell – whether as passive patients or as engaged participants.

more here.

Melinda D. Anderson in The Atlantic:

Brighton Park is a predominantly Latino community on the southwest side of Chicago. It’s a neighborhood threatened by poverty, gang violence, ICE raids, and isolation—in a city where income, race, and zip code can determine access to jobs, schools, healthy food, and essential services. It is against this backdrop that the Chicago teacher Xian Franzinger Barrett arrived at the neighborhood’s elementary school in 2014.

Recognizing the vast economic and racial inequalities his students faced, he chose what some might consider a radical approach for his writing and social-studies classes, weaving in concepts such as racism, classism, oppression, and prejudice. Barrett said it was vital to reject the oft-perpetuated narrative that society is fair and equal to address students’ questions and concerns about their current conditions. And Brighton Elementary’s seventh- and eighth-graders quickly put the lessons to work—confronting the school board over inequitable funding, fighting to install a playground, and creating a classroom library focused on black and Latino authors.

“Students who are told that things are fair implode pretty quickly in middle school as self-doubt hits them,” he said, “and they begin to blame themselves for problems they can’t control.”

Barrett’s personal observation is validated by a newly published study in the peer-reviewed journal Child Development that finds traditionally marginalized youth who grew up believing in the American ideal that hard work and perseverance naturally lead to success show a decline in self-esteem and an increase in risky behaviors during their middle-school years.

More here.

James Ryerson in the New York Times:

The “paradox of the heap” seems at first like a trick, a brainteaser that must have some clever catch. But it reveals itself, as it defies easy understanding, to be a philosophical problem. You might approach it as a puzzle, only to end up devising a solution so deep that it would challenge our thinking about language, knowledge and the nature of reality. By the time of her death from brain cancer in July at 48, Delia Graff Fara, a philosopher at Princeton, had done just that.

Start with a heap of sand. If you remove a single grain, it remains a heap. Repeat this process enough times, however, and you have a heap of sand that contains, say, one grain. This is absurd: One grain is not a heap. Something has gone wrong, but it is not obvious what. Either there is a precise number of grains at which point a heap becomes a nonheap, or there is no such thing as a heap, or classical logic is flawed (perhaps it is only ever sort of true that something is a heap). Which bullet to bite?

This paradox, which originated with the ancient Greeks, is troubling because it is ubiquitous. It applies not just to being a heap but also to being tall, or red, or bald, or soft — or any other gradient-like property. When Fara began working on this paradox as a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the 1990s, philosophers had come to view it as an instance of a larger problem: vagueness. We want to take seriously our talk of hot and cold weather, bald and full-haired men, day and night, but the boundaries that distinguish such things can seem blurry to the point of incoherence.

More here.