Anuschka de Rohan in The Guardian:

At the Institute for Marine Mammal Studies in Mississippi, Kelly the dolphin has built up quite a reputation. All the dolphins at the institute are trained to hold onto any litter that falls into their pools until they see a trainer, when they can trade the litter for fish. In this way, the dolphins help to keep their pools clean.

Kelly has taken this task one step further. When people drop paper into the water she hides it under a rock at the bottom of the pool. The next time a trainer passes, she goes down to the rock and tears off a piece of paper to give to the trainer. After a fish reward, she goes back down, tears off another piece of paper, gets another fish, and so on. This behaviour is interesting because it shows that Kelly has a sense of the future and delays gratification. She has realised that a big piece of paper gets the same reward as a small piece and so delivers only small pieces to keep the extra food coming. She has, in effect, trained the humans.

Her cunning has not stopped there. One day, when a gull flew into her pool, she grabbed it, waited for the trainers and then gave it to them. It was a large bird and so the trainers gave her lots of fish. This seemed to give Kelly a new idea. The next time she was fed, instead of eating the last fish, she took it to the bottom of the pool and hid it under the rock where she had been hiding the paper. When no trainers were present, she brought the fish to the surface and used it to lure the gulls, which she would catch to get even more fish.

More here.

Sarah Zhang at The Atlantic:

In the decades after Hernán Cortés invaded Mexico, one of the worst epidemics in human history swept through the new Spanish colony. A mysterious disease called “cocolitzli” appeared first in 1545 and then again in 1576, each time killing millions of the native population. “From morning to sunset,” wrote a Franciscan friar who witness the epidemic, “the priests did nothing else but carry the dead bodies and throw them into the ditches.”

In less than a century, the number of people living in Mexico fell from an estimated 20 million to 2 million. “It’s a massive population loss. Really, it’s impressive,” says Rodolfo Acuña-Soto, an epidemiologist at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. What can even kill so many people so quickly?

The Spanish, infamously, brought a litany of diseases unknown to the indigenous population—smallpox, measles, typhus—so some experts have suggested cocoliztli is simply one of those. Others, like Acuña-Soto, have argued it is an unknown viral hemorrhagic fever native to Mexico. The cause of cocoliztli has never been conclusively identified.

more here.

Adam Kirsch in The Atlantic:

The reviews of Fire and Fury are in, and they are pretty furious themselves. Michael Wolff, author of the best-selling expose of the Trump White House, has been accused of every kind of journalistic malfeasance: reconstructing scenes he couldn’t have witnessed, retelling gossip as if it were gospel, letting his sources’ agendas drive his portrayals. President Trump himself has attacked the book as “a work of fiction,” and many of the journalists who have weighed in on it basically agree. At least, they complain, there’s no way to tell if the stories Wolff retails are true. To anyone who pays attention to actual American fiction, such attacks have a familiar ring. For the last 15 years—ever since the publication of James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces, a book sold as a memoir that turned out to be heavily fictionalized—American literature has been obsessed with the blurriness of the line separating fact and fiction. When it comes to genre, most book-buyers are literalists: If it says memoir or nonfiction on the dust jacket, everything inside is supposed to be 100 percent accurate. If it turns out not to be, they feel defrauded. Frey’s publisher had to offer refunds to disgruntled readers who thought they were getting a transcript, but had to make do with a story.

More here.

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor at The Paris Review:

In a posthumously published essay, Martin Luther King, Jr. pointed out that the “black revolution” had gone beyond the “rights of Negroes.” The struggle, he said, is “forcing America to face all of its interrelated flaws—racism, poverty, militarism and materialism. It is exposing the evils that are rooted deeply in the whole structure of our society. It reveals systemic rather than superficial flaws and suggests that radical reconstruction of society itself is the real issue to be faced.”

But it had not started out that way. Over the course of a decade, the black struggle opened up a deeper interrogation of U.S. society, and King’s politics traversed the same course.

Indeed, in the early 1960s, the Southern movement coalesced around the clearly defined demands to end Jim Crow segregation and secure the right of African Americans to unfettered access to the franchise. With clear targets and barometers for progress or failure, a broad social movement was able to uproot these systems of oppression. King was lauded as a tactician as well as someone who could articulate the grievances and aspirations of black Southerners.

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Fouad Khan in Nautilus:

"I have a secret to tell you about my city,” she says. “It has to do with what Eve Ensler calls the feminine cell.” It was the autumn of 2016. I’d met her in Quito, Ecuador, at the United Nations’ Habitat III, the biggest global urban development conference in two decades. After a week spent pondering cities, we found ourselves talking to each other like strangers often do in the tired, busy evenings that follow a day’s hustle. “What’s the feminine cell?” I ask. “It’s empathy. It’s respect for the human experience. It’s being aware of the space you take up in the world and how that relates to the commons.” Outside the colors of Quito were drenched in rain as the bars filled with eager conference attendees and locals alike. In the second year of a post-doc studying energy footprint reduction in cities, I was just about beginning to see the connections between social justice, the urban experience, and what makes a city “tick.” “My city is always looking for solutions,” she continued. “There is no ‘place’ in my city. There are only points and routes that connect those points.”

America is having a bit of a moment right now. Powerful men long considered beyond retribution are being called out for their transgressions. Behavior long tolerated in a culture where female objectification is in the very air we breathe is being re-examined. It reminds me of the conversation I had in Quito two years ago.

As we look again at our culture, why stop with behavior? It is also time to re-examine the hardware of our societies. The very infrastructure that we have built—roads, buildings, public spaces, steel, dirt, and concrete—encodes a set of values too. Are these the values we aspire to as a society and civilization? The cities we’ve built don’t provide perfectly equal access to everyone. An obvious case in point: wheelchair ramps, or lack thereof. But even healthy, active residents of all genders may not consider all of a city accessible to them. Men, for instance, typically don’t consider a dimly lit street lined by bars or clubs an unsafe or inaccessible part of town. For women, braving the same street past midnight has completely different connotations. Like video game players who have been leveled up, men can simply access a much larger part of a city or town at a wider variety of times. One Europe-wide survey found that 30 percent of all physical violence and 16 percent of sexual violence against women happens in bars, clubs, discos and other public places²—something that women are very much aware of and which influences how they move around a city.

More here.

Erica Wagner at The New Statesman:

If you have been to the North, you will know that you are at its mercy. In winter the sun barely peers over the horizon; in summer the nights stretch on and on into dawn. The cold won’t nip your nose: it will kill you. Volcanoes erupt and swallow the land. Humanity’s neat ideas about nationhood and identity seem especially fragile: human beings are not the ones in control. In The Dark Blue Winter Overcoat, a collection of stories “from the North”, the editors – Ted Hodgkinson (senior programmer for literature and spoken word at London’s Southbank Centre) and the Icelandic writer Sjón – find a common thread of storytelling across these chill and beautiful lands.

For the book’s purposes nine regions and cultures are included: not just Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Iceland and Finland but also Greenland, the Faroe Islands, the Åland Islands and Saami Norway in that country’s far north; a huge geographical span brought together in narrative and united against the elements. The old Nordic sagas are full of magic and terror: their modern equivalents, this book reveals, have many of the same sensibilities.

more here.

Freedom

Freedom is not following a river.
Freedom is following a river,
though, if you want to.
It is deciding now by what happens now.
It is knowing that luck makes a difference.

No leader is free; no follower is free—
the rest of us can often be free.
Most of the world are living by
creeds too odd, chancy, and habit-forming
to be worth arguing about by reason.

If you are oppressed, wake up about
four in the morning: most places,
you can usually be free some of the time
if you wake up before other people.
.

William Stafford
from The Way It Is
Graywolf Press, 1998
.

James Lindsay in Quillette:

It is true that gender studies, which conceptually encompasses feminist theory, maintains almost no representation within the one thousand most significant academic journals (Gender & Society, the top among them, proudly ranks 824among all academic journals), but it’s difficult to ignore many of the more recent real-world applications of feminist theory. I could point to obvious egregious abuses here, like the shameful excesses on college campuses and outsized moral panic about sexual harassment, yet I’m even more compelled by “shrill” feminist popularizer Lindy West’s recent tirade against men in the the New York Times. Even more worrying, this screed echoes feminist scholar Lisa Wade’s weeks-earlier definitely-not-man-hating assertion that “the problem is not toxic masculinity; it’s that masculinity is toxic,” and that “we need to call masculinity out as a hazardous ideology and denounce anyone who chooses to identify with it.” For those who don’t realize, “toxic masculinity” is a technical term originating from within feminist theorizing, not some cute turn of phrase invented by edgy writers with an axe to grind.

More here.

Erin Hengel in VOX EU:

According to raw numerical counts, women produce less than men. For example, female real estate agents list fewer homes (Seagraves and Gallimore 2013); female lawyers bill fewer hours (Azmat and Ferrer 2017); female physicians see fewer patients (Bloor et al. 2008); and female academics write fewer papers (Ceci et al. 2014).

Yet there is another side to female productivity that is often ignored – when evaluated by narrowly defined quality measures, women often outperform. For example, houses listed by female real estate agents sell for higher prices (Salter et al. 2012, Seagraves and Gallimore 2013); female lawyers make fewer ethical violations (Hatamyar and Simmons 2004); and patients treated by female physicians are less likely to die or be readmitted to hospital (Tsugawa et al. 2017).

In a recent study, I show that female economists surpass men on another dimension: writing clarity (Hengel 2017). Using five readability measures, I find that female-authored articles published in top economics journals are better written than equivalent papers by men.

Why? Because they have to be. In a model of an author's decision-making process, I show that tougher editorial standards and/or biased referee assignment are uniquely consistent with women's observed pattern of choices. I then document evidence that higher standards affect behaviour and lower productivity.

Higher standards impose a quantity/quality trade-off that likely contributes to academia’s ‘publishing paradox’ and ‘leaky pipeline’. Spending more time revising old research means there's less time for new research. Fewer papers results in fewer promotions, possibly driving women into fairer fields. Moreover, evidence of this trade-off is present in a variety of occupations – such as doctors, lawyers and real estate agents — suggesting higher standards distort women’s productivity, more generally.

More here.

Patrick Blanchfield in n+1:

EDGAR ALLAN POE’S “THE PURLOINED LETTER” is a strange sort of mystery—a story of palace intrigue and cognitive blind spots. The gumshoe, C. Auguste Dupin, is presented with a case that has left the police befuddled. An unscrupulous Minister has stolen a compromising letter written by a certain noblewoman, which he intends to use as blackmail and as leverage against the ruling Queen. The Minister’s apartment is the only place the letter could be, but exhaustive searches have yielded nothing. Investigators have combed through books, probed furniture for hidden compartments, deployed literal microscopes, and still, nothing, though there is no doubt that the Minister is the thief. The comprehensiveness of the police’s efforts gives the canny Dupin the only clue he needs. Paying the blackmailer a visit, Dupin stages a distraction and plucks the letter from its hiding place, which isn’t really a hiding place at all, but rather a simple card-rack sitting blatantly on a mantelpiece. Concealed in plain sight, the purloined letter has gone unseen the whole time.

Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House is a kind of “Purloined Letter” for the dark 21st century. A chronicle of the first eight months of the Donald Trump Administration, the book promises revelations that the author has suggested will bring down the presidency. Fire and Fury does contain plenty of palace intrigue and compromising stories, but its promised revelations are not really revelations at all. The fundamental scandal, the book’s centerpiece truth—that the President is breathtakingly unfit, and his administration is a slow-motion train wreck—has been obvious all along. The Trump catastrophe has not been hidden in plain sight. It has filled our entire national field of vision such that, for those who follow the news even irregularly, there is little else to see. From scandal to scandal, from outrage to outrage, in a steady stream of cringe-inducing video clips and erratic tweets, this President and his administration have shown us who they are time and again. Yet as the past year has shown, this onslaught of the obvious can actually impose its own kind of normality, a learned posture of dumbstruck exhaustion and enervated disgust.

More here.

Anjali Puri in The Wire:

Krishnamurthy’s 1-800 Worlds, The Making of the Indian Call Centre Economy brings to life the world of young people working phones all night, trying to be intelligible and efficient to sometimes irate customers in Europe or North America.

At the heart of the book is Krishnamurthy’s own four-month stint, while she was a doctoral student, as a voice and accent-trainer at a leading business-process outsourcing (BPO) outfits in Pune. She assumed an American accent for her job interview, worked through the night, and lived the call-centre life so intensely that she was eventually sad to leave.

Her book traces the divergent narratives that formed around the transnational call centre industry which took root in India in 1998, boomed in the mid-2000s and then began to decline as multinational corporations found greener locales for voice-based operations. While industry and government extolled call centres as an advanced solution for literate populations in newly-liberalised countries, media focused on the cultural alienation and exploitation of workers. Consumer-goods and advertising companies avidly eyed young employees earning more than twice as much as comparable Indian workers – leading to other debates about the supposedly hedonistic and promiscuous lifestyles fostered by call-centre work.

This study – a scholarly work that is also deeply empathetic and at times playful – illuminates this heady, fraught world without simplistic narratives or judgement.

More here.

Amy Chozick in The New York Times:

Hillary Clinton, the first woman who had a real shot at the presidency, has finally set off a national awakening among women. The only catch? She did it by losing. In the year since a stoic Mrs. Clinton watched as Donald J. Trump was sworn in as the 45th president, a fervor has swept the country, prompting women’s marches, a record number of female candidates running for office and an outcry about sexual assault at all levels of society. Even those women who disliked Hillary-the-candidate or who backed her opponent Senator Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primary now credit the indignities and cynicism Mrs. Clinton faced in the 2016 election and her unexpected loss to Mr. Trump, an alleged sexual abuser, for the current moment. We wouldn’t be here — black gowns at the Golden Globes, sexual assault victims invited to the State of the Union address, a nationwide, woman-led voter registration drive timed to the anniversary of the Women’s March — without Mrs. Clinton’s defeat.

And yet, for Mrs. Clinton, it’s the latest — and perhaps last — cruel twist in a public life full of them. Her loss to Mr. Trump helped ignite the kind of movement she’d once been poised to lead but that she now mostly watches from the sidelines. Ever since she wielded a bullhorn at Wellesley in the late 1960s and later instructed her classmates to “practice politics as the art of making what appears to be impossible possible,” Hillary Rodham seemed destined to empower women. But over the next several decades, the promise of that young activist collided with the realities of presidential elections and her husband’s personal scandals.

Mrs. Clinton — scarred by the blowback for saying she chose to pursue a career rather than staying home to bake cookies, chastised by her husband’s West Wing aides for declaring that “women’s rights are human rights” in Beijing in 1995 and warned by her 2016 campaign chairman to avoid talking about glass ceilings — came to adopt a more tentative embrace of how she talked about her gender.

More here.