From DilDev's Blog:

He dueled him for many a long minute, and then trapping him at the end of a gantry, removed his hand from his wrist. Luke was surprised, but said not a word beyond his cry of pain. After a silence of several minutes, Vader came towards him in an agitated manner, and thus began,

“In vain have I struggled. It will not do. My feelings will not be repressed. You must allow me to offer you a place at my side to throw down the Emperor and reign over this galaxy.”

Luke’s astonishment was beyond expression. He stared, coloured, doubted, and was silent. This Vader considered sufficient encouragement, and the avowal of all that he felt immediately followed. He spoke well, but there were feelings besides those of the heart to be detailed, and he was not more eloquent on the subject of tenderness than of ambition.

“You do not yet realize your importance, and only now have begun to discover your power. Join me and I will complete your training. With our combined strength, we can end this destructive conflict and bring order to the galaxy.”

More here.

Gregory F. Tague in the ASEBL Journal:

Stephen Asma’s The Evolution of Imagination is a required addition to the library of academics interested in evolutionary studies. The well-organized book is thoroughly researched, engagingly written, and fortuitously illustrated by the author, who is also an accomplished jazz musician and philosopher. Asma is also fluent in the culture and philosophy of Asian countries, which impact directly on his main points and discussion, especially concerning creativity, self, meditation, mindfulness, and morality. No doubt this is a book I will refer to in the future, and I recommend it to philosophers of biology and neuroscience. I’d also recommend this book to scientists who wish to see how philosophy and the creative mind accommodate their research. Artists who are curious about the nature of their creativity will also learn much from this book. Stephen Asma’s beautifully-written scholarly study of the evolution of imagination is a powerful new approach to the adaptation of creative improvisation.

Broad areas Asma covers in terms of imaginative creativity include culture, storytelling, consciousness, and ethics. Lev Shestov said that all things are possible. Stephen Asma says that all things are possible because of the human imagination. What he sees as a mistake is how philosophers characterize imagination as cognition and not as action. Rather than ambiguous concepts and universals, Asma homes in on the particulars of sensation and emotion. What does it feel like to imagine oneself as…? There is an adaptive advantage to imaginative, playful what ifs. The imagination is physical sense that prompts one to improvise creatively. In evolutionary terms, then, the imagination helped us survive and reproduce in unprecedented ways. Improvisation especially helped us, says Asma, thrive in its inventive environment, but less as a computational and more as an emotional action. To be precise, imagination is not necessarily useful as noun; it’s more effective a gerund – imagining or the act of making.

More here.

Jeffrey Tayler in Quillette:

Editor’s note: As we enter 2018, brave women are protesting Islamic modesty culture and laws in Iran. Jeffrey Tayler has documented women’s protests against modesty culture in Europe for years. What follows is an interview conducted by Tayler with Femen’s leader, Inna Shevchenko, in 2017.

A female activist has just sawed down a giant Christian cross on the central square of the capital city of Ukraine, in protest against the prison sentence meted out to Pussy Riot band members for the “punk prayer” they had performed in a Moscow cathedral earlier that year. What fate awaits her when she flees, personally threatened by her country’s president for her audacious deed, to France, the self-proclaimed “homeland of human rights?” Upon her arrival in Paris, do orchestras greet her with rousing renditions of La Marseillaise? Do accolades of support pour in from the French media? Does she settle, finally, into secure environs, certain, for the first time in her young but politically active life, that she can pursue unhindered her feminist struggle for human rights and the propagation of atheism? And, in the country that enshrines laïcité (secularism) in Article 1 of its constitution, does she find her staunchly godless views lauded?

Quite the contrary! The now twenty-seven-year-old Inna Shevchenko, the leader of the international topless protest movement Femen, had, in August 2012, barely taken up residence in the attic of France’s historic Théâtre du Lavoir (which would become Femen’s headquarters), when she found herself and her activists under threat.

More here.

Nigel Warburton in Five Books:

First on your list you’ve got a historical book, The Infidel and the Professor, about David Hume and Adam Smith. Why are you excited about this book?

I love Hume as a writer. He had a fascinating life that is pretty well documented considering he lived in the 18th century—probably because he was a prolific letter writer and many of his letters have survived. The odd thing about this book is that it’s about the friendship between Hume and Adam Smith of which there isn’t that much surviving evidence, in terms of letters. Smith was keen to destroy lots of personal writing, unfinished drafts and all kinds of manuscripts—and it was done pretty efficiently.

So this book is largely a speculative reconstruction based on published books and the little that is known about their friendship, which lasted for 25 years. Hume was 12 years older than Adam Smith, and something of a hero of his.

Apparently, Smith first read David Hume’s Treatise when he was a student at Balliol in Oxford. The authorities confiscated it, because it was too seditious. The reason was Hume’s ‘irreligion,’ his antipathy towards religion—what we would probably now call his atheism.

Some people claim that Hume was merely an agnostic, to be consistent with his philosophy: he was a mitigated sceptic. He didn’t think that there was absolute proof that God didn’t exist, though the balance of evidence was clearly against it. But, actually, in his posthumously published Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, he tears apart most of the classic arguments for God’s existence, so it’s pretty clear that Hume, if he wasn’t an atheist, was so close to it that we would probably call him one.

Interestingly Adam Smith, as he emerges from this book, probably shared many of Hume’s anti-religious beliefs, but kept much, much quieter about it. As a result, he was able to become a professor at Glasgow University—a professor of logic.

More here.

Simon Barnes in New Statesman:

Ludwig Wittgenstein once observed, “If a lion could speak, we could not understand him.” But Ludo, mind if I ask how much time you’ve actually spent with lions? Thought not. Because that’s rubbish, at least in the sense that humans and lions couldn’t possibly have common ground for a conversation. Wittgenstein can beat me in any logico-philosophical contest of his or anyone else’s choosing, but he hasn’t spent as much time as I have hanging out in the bush with lions. It was a few weeks ago in the Luangwa Valley in Zambia. Six lionesses had just slain an antelope and were avidly devouring it. From where I was, a quarter of a mile off, all I could see of this meal was a companionable rosette of tawny fur. Near me, a lone nomad male lion was also watching. He had picked up an injury and had been unable to hunt for a few days. He was very hungry; you could count the ribs. He had no pride of his own; he wasn’t yet big enough, or strong enough, or confident enough to attempt a takeover. He had to kill for himself and he couldn’t. He was watching a vision of everything he wanted in the world: food, the blessed intimacies of pride life and the company of those six sexy lionesses. He wanted more than anything to join them. But something very powerful stopped him from doing so. They wouldn’t have welcomed him. They would have chased him off; it would have ended in violence; it was no good. But he couldn’t stop himself watching. He made a series of retreats, each time stopping and staring back longingly. Eventually, like Andrew Lincoln fighting the pangs of his unrequited love for Keira Knightley in Love Actually, he pulled himself together and forced himself to leave the world of longing and get back to reality. He walked into the river and swam decisively across: enough! Had he stopped to talk about that experience, I would have understood. So would we all. Loneliness, longing, hunger, despair, desire: are these things so remote from our own experience?

…For years, it was accepted that the issue was binary. You could be objective, or you could be sentimental. Scientific orthodoxy stated that animals had no emotions or personalities: even to consider such a matter was a sin. This was not something to be investigated or put to the test. It was an error that could be corrected with a single word: anthropomorphism. Mary Midgley, the ethical philosopher, wrote about mahouts, elephant riders, and how, if they failed to take into account “the basic everyday feelings – about whether their elephant is pleased, annoyed, frightened, excited, tired, sore, suspicious or angry – they would not only be out of business, they would often simply be dead”. Anthropomorphise or die. Anyone who works with horses knows that. Peter Wohlleben had a hit with his book The Hidden Life of Trees. In this, he described the fungal connections between tree and tree, which he interpreted as highways of communication and wittily called “the wood-wide web”. He made trees the sort of living thing that we humans can empathise with, rather than pieces of rural furniture.

More here.

Siddhartha Mukherjee in The New York Times:

Of the many small humiliations heaped on a young oncologist in his final year of fellowship, perhaps this one carried the oddest bite: A 2-year-old black-and-white cat named Oscar was apparently better than most doctors at predicting when a terminally ill patient was about to die. The story appeared, astonishingly, in The New England Journal of Medicine in the summer of 2007. Adopted as a kitten by the medical staff, Oscar reigned over one floor of the Steere House nursing home in Rhode Island. When the cat would sniff the air, crane his neck and curl up next to a man or woman, it was a sure sign of impending demise. The doctors would call the families to come in for their last visit. Over the course of several years, the cat had curled up next to 50 patients. Every one of them died shortly thereafter. No one knows how the cat acquired his formidable death-sniffing skills. Perhaps Oscar’s nose learned to detect some unique whiff of death — chemicals released by dying cells, say. Perhaps there were other inscrutable signs. I didn’t quite believe it at first, but Oscar’s acumen was corroborated by other physicians who witnessed the prophetic cat in action. As the author of the article wrote: “No one dies on the third floor unless Oscar pays a visit and stays awhile.” The story carried a particular resonance for me that summer, for I had been treating S., a 32-year-old plumber with esophageal cancer. He had responded well to chemotherapy and radiation, and we had surgically resected his esophagus, leaving no detectable trace of malignancy in his body. One afternoon, a few weeks after his treatment had been completed, I cautiously broached the topic of end-of-life care. We were going for a cure, of course, I told S., but there was always the small possibility of a relapse. He had a young wife and two children, and a mother who had brought him weekly to the chemo suite. Perhaps, I suggested, he might have a frank conversation with his family about his goals?

But S. demurred. He was regaining strength week by week. The conversation was bound to be “a bummah,” as he put it in his distinct Boston accent. His spirits were up. The cancer was out. Why rain on his celebration? I agreed reluctantly; it was unlikely that the cancer would return. When the relapse appeared, it was a full-on deluge. Two months after he left the hospital, S. returned to see me with sprays of metastasis in his liver, his lungs and, unusually, in his bones. The pain from these lesions was so terrifying that only the highest doses of painkilling drugs would treat it, and S. spent the last weeks of his life in a state bordering on coma, unable to register the presence of his family around his bed. His mother pleaded with me at first to give him more chemo, then accused me of misleading the family about S.’s prognosis. I held my tongue in shame: Doctors, I knew, have an abysmal track record of predicting which of our patients are going to die. Death is our ultimate black box.

More here.

Not to Choose

I should be someplace else!
but pace around in the sweats
of inhumane endeavor and its trash:
goods, deeds, credits, debts.
Have it your own way, life:
I'm just here to die, but I
would rather live it out as a fool
and have a short life in contempt
and idle graces, but, instead,
the office telephone goes off
and voices out of its dark night
command me, "Choose, Choose,"
while women's angel voices call
the cities and their numbers. Then,
when I do choose, "I run away!"
the shop door opens and a cop
or statue stand there in the way.
What does he want? Blood. Oh
let me tumble in the wards, bolts
and chambers of a police lock, locked
so I can get to sleep again,
warm in the guaranteed steel!
Instead, I have to fake him off
with promises to pay. Cash!
How cold action is. I should
do spiritual exercises toward
the body of this world
and get in shape for choices,
choices, No! Instead, I leave
the dirty business by the back
window, climb down the fire escape,
and sneak out of town alive
with petty cash and bad nerves in
an old Ford with a broken muffler!
So here I am again, July,
vacationing in your country broke,
in debt, not bankrupt yet!
and free to get your message!
What is it?
To begin again in another state!

Alan Dugan
from New and Collected Poems 1961-1983
Ecco Press, 1983

James Risen in The Intercept:

I was sitting in the nearly empty restaurant of the Westin Hotel in Alexandria, Virginia, getting ready for a showdown with the federal government that I had been trying to avoid for more than seven years. The Obama administration was demanding that I reveal the confidential sources I had relied on for a chapter about a botched CIA operation in my 2006 book, “State of War.” I had also written about the CIA operation for the New York Times, but the paper’s editors had suppressed the story at the government’s request. It wasn’t the only time they had done so.

Bundled against the freezing wind, my lawyers and I were about to reach the courthouse door when two news photographers launched into a perp-walk shoot. As a reporter, I had witnessed this classic scene dozens of times, watching in bemusement from the sidelines while frenetic photographers and TV crews did their business. I never thought I would be the perp, facing those whirring cameras.

As I walked past the photographers into the courthouse that morning in January 2015, I saw a group of reporters, some of whom I knew personally. They were here to cover my case, and now they were waiting and watching me. I felt isolated and alone.

My lawyers and I took over a cramped conference room just outside the courtroom of U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema, where we waited for her to begin the pretrial hearing that would determine my fate. My lawyers had been working with me on this case for so many years that they now felt more like friends. We often engaged in gallows humor about what it was going to be like for me once I went to jail. But they had used all their skills to make sure that didn’t happen and had even managed to keep me out of a courtroom and away from any questioning by federal prosecutors.

Until now.

My case was part of a broader crackdown on reporters and whistleblowers that had begun during the presidency of George W. Bush and continued far more aggressively under the Obama administration, which had already prosecuted more leak cases than all previous administrations combined.

More here. [Thanks to Corey Robin.]

Fabian Schmidt in APS Physics:

Our current theory of gravity, general relativity (GR), has been spectacularly successful. It accurately describes the dynamics of astronomical objects over a vast range of sizes from planets and stars, to black holes, all the way to galaxies. GR also predicts the expansion of the Universe as a whole.

But the theory has fallen short in one respect: explaining the finding that the Universe is expanding at an accelerating rate. According to GR, the sum of all known radiation, visible matter, and dark matter should exert an inward “tug” on the Universe, slowing down its rate of expansion over time. So to account for acceleration, physicists have been forced to consider three possibilities [1], all of which are often loosely referred to as “dark energy.” The first option—and also the simplest and most favored—is the existence of a cosmological constant, or vacuum energy, which counteracts gravity by exerting a constant negative effective pressure. The second imagines that the cosmological constant is actually dynamical. Finally, the third possibility is that gravity behaves differently on large distance scales, requiring a modification of GR. Using the recent detection of a gravitational wave and light from a distant binary neutron merger, four research groups have now placed some of the tightest constraints to date on this third scenario [2–5].

The extraordinary observation that made this work possible occurred on August 17, 2017, when the gravitational-wave detectors at the Advanced LIGO and Advanced Virgo experiments picked up a loud signal [6]. Within 2 s of the event, known as GW170817, an instrument onboard the Fermi gamma-ray satellite detected a short burst of gamma rays from a similar location in the sky [7]. Follow-up observations by telescopes across the globe confirmed that the gravitational wave and gamma rays came from the same source—a binary neutron star merger in the NGC 4993 galaxy, approximately 130 million light years away from Earth (see 16 October 2017 Viewpoint). The fact that the two signals traveled from such a great distance, yet arrived at Earth just a few seconds apart, implies that gravitational waves travel at the same speed as light to within 1 part in 10151015 [8]. Previous constraints on the relative speeds had only been at the level of 1 part in 5, so this single observation improved our knowledge of a fundamental property of nature by 14 orders of magnitude.

More here. [Thanks to Farrukh Azfar.]

Frederick Crews in Skeptic:

In June 2012, the 68-year-old Jerry Sandusky, for three decades a successful and admired assistant to Pennsylvania State University’s legendary football coach, Joe Paterno, was found guilty on 45 counts of child molestation and was remanded to prison for, effectively, the rest of his life. Sandusky was exposed as a serial pedophile on a scarcely imaginable scale, and 10 of his victims—presumably a small sample—were featured in his trial. Penn State would eventually pay $109 million (and counting) in compensation to at least 35 men who had been schoolboys at the time of their reported abuse. And presumably there were hundreds more victims. Since 1977 Sandusky had led a substantial program of his own devising for disadvantaged youth, The Second Mile, that was thought to have served him as a “candy store,” affording opportunities to “groom” neglected boys and then to have his way with them.

The Sandusky case was so mortifying that it triggered the firing of Penn State’s president, Graham Spanier, a vice president, Gary Schultz, its athletic director, Tim Curley, and the idolized Joe Paterno himself, at age 84 and after 61 years of service, for having abetted Sandusky’s crimes. Specifically, they had failed to take action after one horrific incident had been called to their notice. Paterno died of lung cancer two months after his shaming. Schultz and Curley, later indicted on felony charges, pleaded guilty to a compromise charge of child endangerment, for which they each received a two-year jail sentence (not entirely served). President Spanier protested his innocence but was convicted of the same offense and sentenced to four to 12 months of combined jail time and house arrest.

More here. [Thanks to Daniel Dennett.]

John Banville at The Guardian:

In the palmy days between, say, the end of the second world war and the late 1970s, when New York was the capital of the literary world – when there was still a literary world to speak of – new novels from Saul Bellow or John Updikeor Mary McCarthy, or poetry collections from Robert Lowell or Elizabeth Bishopor John Ashbery, were anticipated with a level of excitement only slightly keener than that with which we waited upon the critical responses of the likes of Edmund Wilson or Lionel Trilling or Elizabeth Hardwick. Fiction and poetry mattered then, not as subjects for jaded gossip or to be wagered on to win a prize, but as works of art to delight and quicken the mind, and as some sort of indication of the health or otherwise of the culture in general.

The professional reputation of the critic and novelist Hardwick was for a long time eclipsed by the gargantuan shadow of Lowell, to whom she was married for 23 years, and who, in 1970, notoriously left her for Caroline Blackwood, and thereafter used her private letters to him, sometimes in bleeding verbatim chunks, in the poems in his late volumes For Lizzie and Harriet and The Dolphin, both published in 1973. In “Epilogue” from the 1977 collection Day By Day, Lowell famously posed the question, “Why not say what happened?”, by which time he had said so, over and over, and with a vengeance.

more here.

Michael Dirda at the Washington Post:

In 1893 the young John Galsworthy booked passage on the clipper Torrens, then sailing from the South Seas to England. During this voyage the future author of “The Forsyte Saga” happened to become friendly with the ship’s first mate. In a letter home he described this “capital chap”— of Polish origin — as “a man of travel and experience in many parts of the world,” with “a fund of yarns.” Seven years after their shipboard conversations, Joseph Conrad — who else could it have been? — would dedicate his most famous novel, “Lord Jim,” to Galsworthy. In 1932 Galsworthy would be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature; Conrad, of course, is now universally regarded as one of the greatest novelists of all time.

Both these writers counted themselves proteges of Edward Garnett (1868-1937), the subject of Helen Smith’s prizeworthy literary biography, “An Uncommon Reader.” No ordinary acquisitions editor or publisher’s reader, Garnett devoted his life to fostering, with tough love, the work of many young, and now famous, authors. Besides Galsworthy and Conrad, who became his close friends, he championed Stephen Crane, helped D.H. Lawrence reconfigure “Sons and Lovers,” urged T.E. Lawrence to publish “Seven Pillars of Wisdom,”lent moral and financial support to Edward Thomas — “the finest poet of his generation” — and produced the first major essay on Thomas’s American friend Robert Frost.

more here.

Geoff Wisner at The Quarterly Conversation:

Few of Thoreau’s best-known quotations take the form of a question. Yet those that do cut deep. They get under our skin. “Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed, and in such desperate enterprises?” Thoreau asks in Walden. “What is the use of a house if you haven’t got a tolerable planet to put it on?” he writes in a letter to H.G.O. Blake.

One of the few Thoreau scholars to recognize the importance of Henry’s questions is Jeffrey Cramer, whose collection The Quotable Thoreau devotes a section to questions. In doing so, he recognizes that Thoreau was not necessarily the man with all the answers.

“Thoreau,” writes Cramer, “was the vegetarian who ate meat; the conservationist who surveyed woodlots in Walden Woods; the pacifist who endorsed violence; the hermit who loved gossip.” Thoreau was no hypocrite, as he has often been painted: he was “a questioner of the very concepts we have come to associate with his name.”

more here.

—for H & J

Choosing a Dog

"It's love," they say. You touch
the right one and a whole half of the universe
wakes up, a new half.

Some people never find
that half, or they neglect it or trade it
for money or success and it dies.

The faces of big dogs tell, over the years,
that size is a burden: you enjoy it for a while
but then maintenance gets to you.

When I get old I think I'll keep, not a little
dog, but a serious dog,
for the casual, drop-in criminal—

My kind of dog, unimpressed by
dress or manner, just knowing
what's really there by the smell.

Your good dogs, some things that they hear
they don't really want you to know—
it's too grim or ethereal.

And sometimes when they look in the fire
they see time going on and someone alone
but they don't say anything.
.

William Stafford
from The Way It Is
Graywolf Press, 1998

John Sutherland in The New York Times:

I recall Noel Annan, the provost of University College London, declaring in the 1970s that the English literature department, historically the first such in England, was the “very heart” of the school. Any college president making such a claim as Annan’s today could await the men in white coats. It’s with exhilaration, then, that one hails Martin Puchner’s book, which asserts not merely the importance of literature but its all-importance. “Literature,” the first page declares, “since it emerged 4,000 years ago,” has “shaped the lives of most humans on planet Earth.” We are what we read.

“The Written World” makes this grand assertion on the basis of a set of theses. Storytelling is as human as breathing. When fabulation intersected with writing, stories were empowered to propagate themselves in society and around the world as civilization-forming “foundational texts.” Puchner opens, by way of illustration, with Alexander the Great. Under his pillow at night he had, alongside his dagger, a copy of the “Iliad.” His literary GPS, we understand. As important as the epic’s originally oral story of great conquest was the script it was written in: That too would conquer worlds. This review is printed in a variant of it. The narrative gallops on to Mesopotamia, Nineveh, clay tablets, cuneiform and Gilgamesh. Puchner explains it all with brio. By Page 50 Ashurbanipal is a name the reader will feel able to drop knowingly into any conversation on literary matters. In chronological procession there follow Buddha, Confucius (a notably brilliant chapter), “The Tale of Genji” (hooray, at last, for the woman author), the Mayas (a dark episode), the Gospels, Gutenberg, Muhammad, Luther, Cervantes, Goethe, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Marx and Engels, the African epic of Sunjata — on, on and on to Derek Walcott (“new nations need stories to tell them who they are,” writes Puchner) and Harry Potter (“repetitive,” alas). The invention and spread of paper gave literature wings. So too did print and in our day, the web. Looking at his screen, Puchner wonders what foundational texts will flicker down to us. There is a joyous personality in this book. Puchner gives more of himself to the reader than most literary historians. As a child, he confides, he was entranced by the “Arabian Nights” — only cliff-hanging bedtime stories to her husband can save Scheherazade from being a one-night queen and next morning’s bridal corpse. But who originated this bundle of tales? The question nags at Puchner. He has a dream that he describes at length. What does the dream tell him? Stop looking. Searching is futile.

More here.