Miriam Markowitz in GQ:

The people of Louisiana first began to call themselves the Cajun Navy during Katrina, when people like Todd Terrell went to rescue their neighbors in New Orleans. They revived the name last year when Baton Rouge experienced what residents now call the Great Flood. In swampy Louisiana, the old joke says, at any one time half the state is under water and the other half is under indictment. There are the big storms that capture the attention of the public, like Hurricane Betsy in 1965, and Katrina, 40 years later—but every year that Louisiana doesn’t get a named storm, it floods just the same. Today there are at least three separate outfits who go by the Cajun Navy moniker, and dozens more who’ve been inspired by it, including but not limited to the Cajun Army (for people without boats), the Cajun Special Forces, the Cajun Airlift, and the Cajun Green Cross, as well as the Texas Navy and the Cracker Navy in Florida, which was formed during Hurricane Irma. In Texas, during the week that Harvey hit, pretty much every Louisiana man with a boat identified himself as Cajun Navy, as did many more who weren’t from Louisiana but were among the thousands who converged in Texas from across the country.

More here.

Robbie Gonzalez in Wired:

On July 1, 2013, Amos Joseph Wells III went to his pregnant girlfriend's home in Fort Worth, Texas and shot her multiple times in the head and stomach. He then killed her mother and her 10-year-old brother. Wells surrendered voluntarily within hours, and in a tearful jailhouse interview told reporters, "There's no explanation that I could give anyone, or anybody could give anyone, to try to make it seem right, or make it seem rational, to make everybody understand."

Heinous crimes tend to defy comprehension, but some researchers believe neuroscience and genetics could help explain why certain people commit such atrocities. Meanwhile, lawyers are introducing so-called neurobiological evidence into court more than ever.

Take Wells, for instance. His lawyers called on Pietro Pietrini—director of the IMT School for Advanced Studies in Lucca, Italy and an expert on the neurobiological correlates of antisocial behavior—to testify at their client's trial last year. “Wells had several abnormalities in the frontal regions of his brain, plus a very bad genetic profile," says Pietrini. Scans of the defendant's brain showed abnormally low neuronal activity in his frontal lobe, a condition associated with increased risk of reactive, aggressive, and violent behavior.

More here.

Dag Herbjørnsrud in Aeon:

As the story usually goes, the Enlightenment began with René Descartes’s Discourse on the Method (1637), continuing on through John Locke, Isaac Newton, David Hume, Voltaire and Kant for around one and a half centuries, and ending with the French Revolution of 1789, or perhaps with the Reign of Terror in 1793. By the time that Thomas Paine published The Age of Reason in 1794, that era had reached its twilight. Napoleon was on the rise.

But what if this story is wrong? What if the Enlightenment can be found in places and thinkers that we often overlook? Such questions have haunted me since I stumbled upon the work of the 17th-century Ethiopian philosopher Zera Yacob (1599-1692), also spelled Zära Yaqob.

Yacob was born on 28 August 1599 into a rather poor family on a farm outside Axum, the legendary former capital in northern Ethiopia. At school he impressed his teachers, and was sent to a new school to learn rhetoric (siwasiw in Geéz, the local language), poetry and critical thinking (qiné) for four years. Then he went to another school to study the Bible for 10 years, learning the teachings of the Catholics and the Copts, as well as the country’s mainstream Orthodox tradition. (Ethiopia has been Christian since the early 4th century, rivalling Armenia as the world’s oldest Christian nation.)

More here. [Thanks to Ruth Marshall.]

Sue Rabbitt Roff in The Independent:

Jeremy Hutchinson, who died earlier this month aged 102, was one of England’s finest criminal barristers, and the counsel of choice for some of the most high-profile cases of his era. He defended the likes of Christine Keeler and Great Train robber Charles Wilson and also obscenity cases against novels such as Fanny Hill and Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Later known as Lord Hutchinson of Lullington, his role defending Penguin Books after it published the unexpurgated version of the DH Lawrence classic is particularly memorable. It remains the landmark case in British obscenity law. But look at the details and something extraordinary emerges: Penguin’s decision to publish 200,000 copies on the advice of Hutchinson and joint lead counsel Gerald Gardiner was a massive gamble. It set up a case that were it not for the incompetence of the prosecution could easily have gone the other way.

Lady Chatterley’s Lover had only ever been legally published in abridged versions in the UK, starting in 1932. Though by 1960 the unexpurgated edition was sold in Europe and America and could be obtained under the counter in London if you knew where to go, Penguin co-founder Allen Lane wanted to publish a cheap paperback of the full thing. The idea was to put it out at 3s 6d, the same price as 10 cigarettes, to make it affordable for the “young and the hoi polloi”. The excuse was the 30th anniversary of Lawrence’s death from tuberculosis at the age of 45. When Penguin consulted Hutchinson and Gardiner, the lawyers retreated to reflect. A trial under the new Obscene Publications Act seemed inevitable. The act’s first paragraph stated that material will be deemed obscene if it contains elements that tend as a whole “to deprave and corrupt persons who are likely … to read, see or hear” it. The act included a new defence in cases where the offending segments were “for the public good on the ground that [they are] in the interests of science, literature, art or learning”. In consultation with several literary experts, Hutchinson and Gardiner felt most of the racy scenes and bad language – including (30) “f***s” and (14) “c***s” – could fall under this defence. Lawrence, after all, was one of the most highly regarded writers of his era.

More here.

Jennifer Couzin-Frankel in Science:

Each year, millions of people suffer life-threatening scarring in their lungs, heart, and other organs. Doctors have few tools to combat this fibrosis, other than an organ transplant. Now, new research offers clues for how to selectively destroy the cells known as myofibroblasts that drive the condition. In mice, this appeared to halt or even reverse fibrosis’s damaging effects. The research is preliminary, but it gets to the root of an often intractable condition, says John Varga, a rheumatologist at Northwestern University in Chicago, Illinois, who was not involved in the work. “This idea of selectively killing [myofibroblasts] is extremely appealing.” In healthy people, myofibroblasts self-destruct after they finish repairing damaged tissue. But sometimes, they don’t respond to the “self-destruct” signal and keep working away when they’re not supposed to. This leads to areas of scarring caused by a buildup of stiff connective tissue, and it can prevent organs from working properly.

In the new study, the scientists homed in on one of the most dramatic examples of a fibrotic disease, the autoimmune condition scleroderma. In the condition, skin slowly hardens and tightens, and the illness can progress to internal organs like the lungs. In the most heartbreaking cases, “your whole gas exchange is messed up, [and] you suffocate to death,” says Boris Hinz, a cell biologist who studies fibrosis at the University of Toronto in Canada. The new study’s senior author, physician Andrew Tager, spent years researching lung fibrosis at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) in Boston, but died of pancreatic cancer last summer. His former mentee who spearheaded the project, MGH tissue regeneration specialist David Lagares, shepherded the work through publication. Along with colleagues, the pair focused on a core challenge: how to coax myofibroblasts to self-destruct, a cellular process called apoptosis. Intriguingly, they found that in the activated myofibroblasts driving scleroderma, the mitochondria—the powerhouses of the cell—are loaded with an apoptosis-triggering protein called BIM. And yet, the cells don’t die. “They are primed for death but for some reason don’t execute this program,” Lagares says. Based on earlier work by their group and others, the researchers eyed a family of proteins called BCL-2. These proteins can both induce or prevent apoptosis, and the team suspected that the balance between these proteins was disrupted in the overactive myofibroblasts. Gene profiling of cells from scleroderma mouse models backed this up. In particular, a protein in that family, Bcl-xL, stops apoptosis and was ramped up in the myofibroblasts. If only they could knock down Bcl-xL, the researchers reasoned, the cells might then self-destruct.

As it happened, a drug compound called ABT-263, or navitoclax, which is now in clinical trials for various types of cancer, did exactly that. Giving affected mice this drug wiped out the damaging myofibroblasts. It also seemed to target the cells selectively, because only myofibroblasts, which travel to the scene of an injury, were expressing lots of Bcl-xL. The drug appeared not just to halt, but to reverse the effects of fibrosis, the team reports today in Science Translational Medicine. The stiff, scarred tissue seemed to “melt,” Lagares says, though exactly how and why that happened still isn’t clear.

More here.

Dinah Birch at the TLS:

Enthusiasts for Ruskin are a motley crew, largely because his legacy is so diverse. Whatever their interests or their politics, they can usually claim that Ruskin was on their side, at least at some point in his long creative life. Selective reading is expected. Even the most committed of Ruskin’s followers rarely try to digest his writing in its entirety. He was on their side in this, too. Despite the enormous body of work represented by his books, lectures, essays, letters and articles, he never really believed that literature of any kind could change the world. People who make things – painters, sculptors, builders and craftsmen – meant as much to him as writers. His own drawings and paintings are of distinctive beauty, and if he were not famous for other reasons his reputation as an artist might stand higher. His most sympathetic readers are often of a practical disposition, and find their way to him through a concern for the environment, or buildings, or the teaching of drawing, or through his broader work in education.

For all the richness of his ideas, Ruskin was not a methodical thinker, and he did not trouble himself unduly with any kind of abstraction. This is one reason for the fact that professional academics don’t dominate the community of his readers. Though he was an academic pioneer in that he became Oxford’s first Slade Professor of Fine Art, he was suspicious of universities.

more here.

Anthony Gottlieb at Lapham's Quarterly:

When Descartes made his concession to Elisabeth—telling her, in effect, that it was all right to regard the soul as material—he immediately added that “one would not cease to know…that the soul is separable from [the body].” This suggests that what mattered most to him in his “dualism” was providing support for immortality. Many of the details were, perhaps, negotiable. Further evidence of the role that immortality played in his thinking about the mind is found in some remarks he made about animals. Writing to William Cavendish, the first marquess of Newcastle, who was particularly fond of horses, Descartes confessed that he found it hard to believe that beasts can have mental lives like ours, because “if they thought as we do, they would have an immortal soul like us.” This is unlikely, Descartes continued, because if you believe this of some creatures, there is no reason not to believe it of all, and “many of them, such as oysters and sponges, are too imperfect for that to be credible.”

What was to have been Descartes’ final word on the relation between mind and body never appeared, quite possibly because he was struggling to address Elisabeth’s difficulties. When Principles of Philosophy was published in 1644, it contained only four parts of a projected six. The first four dealt with “The Principles of Human Knowledge,” “The Principles of Material Things,” “The Visible Universe,” and “The Earth.” Parts five and six were to have covered “Plants and Animals” and “Man,” but Descartes wrote, “I am not yet completely clear about all the matters I would like to deal with there.”

more here.

Cynthia Haven at The Quarterly Conversation:

The conference has been called “epochal,” “a watershed,” “a major reorientation in literary studies,” “the French invasion of America,” the “96-gun French dispute,” the equivalent of the Big Bang in American thought.

To hear the superlatives, one would have thought that “The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man” symposium held at Johns Hopkins for a few frantic days from 18 to 21 October 1966 was the first gathering of its kind ever held. It wasn’t, but it did accomplish a feat that changed the intellectual landscape of the nation: it brought avant-garde French theory to America. In the years that followed, René Girard would champion a system of thought that was both a child of this new era and an orphan within it. He was at once proud of his role in launching the symposium, and troubled by some of its consequences. Let us consider what happened during this watershed autumn.

The event itself was René Girard’s inspiration. He had assumed the chair of the Romance Languages Department from Nathan Edelman the year before, and became one of the triumvirate who brought the symposium together. Another was that brilliant figure who has been somewhat overlooked in American intellectual history—the restless, quicksilver Eugenio Donato.

more here.

Anthony Gottlieb in Lapham's Quarterly:

There is an “official theory” about the nature of minds that “hails chiefly from Descartes,” wrote Gilbert Ryle, an Oxford philosopher. According to the theory, each person has a mind that is a private, inner world. It has no spatial dimensions and is not subject to laws that govern physical objects, yet it is mysteriously connected to a material body during a person’s earthly life. Ryle dubbed this “the dogma of the Ghost in the Machine.”

People have not always thought of the mind and the body in this way. Homer’s heroes are not depicted as composites that are only partly physical. Their awareness, intelligence, and other mental activities are part of their bodily lives. And although the shades of the dead lurk in the Homeric underworld, these etiolated creatures are little more than fading echoes of the living. Some later Greek philosophers explicitly stated that the soul is made of physical stuff. For Democritus, it was tiny units of solid matter. For the Stoics, it was a mixture of fire and air.

Unlike Homer and the Greek materialists, Plato did believe in something like René Descartes’ ghost in the machine. A person has an inner rational self, according to Plato, which can escape its bodily imprisonment with its powers intact. Yet Ryle was right to single out Descartes even though parts of the “official theory” can be traced to Plato. Descartes sharpened the concepts of mind and matter, crystallizing ideas that took shape in the seventeenth century and giving us the modern form of the so-called mind-body problem.

In his Meditations on First Philosophy, published in 1641, Descartes announced that he was essentially a thinking thing: “Thought…alone is inseparable from me.” There is an outer world, which includes my body, but I could still exist even if it were all destroyed. And what exactly is a thinking thing? Something that is aware. Descartes explained that by “thought” he meant “everything that is within us in such a way that we are immediately aware of it.” This included sensation, will, intellect, and imagination. Thus Descartes made consciousness the distinguishing mark of the mental.

More here.

Samantha Cole at Vice:

There’s a video of Gal Gadot having sex with her stepbrother on the internet. But it’s not really Gadot’s body, and it’s barely her own face. It’s an approximation, face-swapped to look like she’s performing in an existing incest-themed porn video.

The video was created with a machine learning algorithm, using easily accessible materials and open-source code that anyone with a working knowledge of deep learning algorithms could put together.

It's not going to fool anyone who looks closely. Sometimes the face doesn't track correctly and there's an uncanny valley effect at play, but at a glance it seems believable. It's especially striking considering that it's allegedly the work of one person—a Redditor who goes by the name 'deepfakes'—not a big special effects studio that can digitally recreate a young Princess Leia in Rogue One using CGI. Instead, deepfakes uses open-source machine learning tools like TensorFlow, which Google makes freely available to researchers, graduate students, and anyone with an interest in machine learning.

Like the Adobe tool that can make people say anything, and the Face2Face algorithm that can swap a recorded video with real-time face tracking, this new type of fake porn shows that we're on the verge of living in a world where it's trivially easy to fabricate believable videos of people doing and saying things they never did. Even having sex.

More here.

Les Hatton and Gregory Warr in Times Higher Education:

Given the entirely appropriate degree of respect that science has for data, the ongoing discussion of peer review is often surprisingly data-free and underlain by the implicit assumption that peer review – although in need of improvement – is indispensable.

The thing is, the peer review of scientific reports is not only without documented value in advancing the scientific enterprise but, in a manner that few care to acknowledge openly, primarily serves ends that are less than noble. Peer review is widely assumed to provide an imprimatur of scientific quality (and significance) for a publication, but this is clearly not the case.

While the many flaws of peer review are clearly laid out in the literature, its failure to protect the integrity of the scientific enterprise is notable. An estimated cost of irreproducible biomedical research is $28 billion (£20 billion) a year and“currently, many published research findings are false or exaggerated, and an estimated 85 per cent of research resources are wasted”, one paper found.

A prime example of the failure of peer review is the tainting of a significant segment of the biomedical literature by the use of misidentified and contaminated cell lines pointing, at best, to a culture of carelessness in cell biology research and the clear failure of peer review to discover and correct erroneous research.

There are many reasons why scientific peer review is ineffective.

More here.

Shehryar Fazli in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

It’s worth starting with a few words about the recent controversy around Taibbi, related to a 2000 memoir, The eXile: Sex, Drugs, and Libel in the New Russia, he co-wrote with Mark Ames about their time editing an alt-weekly in Moscow during the 1990s. In one chapter, Ames described sexual harassment of female colleagues, which in the wake of the Weinstein affair has provoked fresh debate about Taibbi’s past conduct. In a late October Facebook post, after he faced questions about this while promoting the current book, Taibbi acknowledged that the behavior described in The eXile was “reprehensible” but also fictional, and denied having made “advances or sexually suggestive comments to any co-worker in any office, here or in Russia.” He said the memoir “was conceived as a giant satire” about Americans in post-Soviet Russia: “In my younger mind this sounded like a good idea, a cross of Andrew Dice Clay, The Ugly American and Charlie Hebdo. But in practice it was often stupid, cruel, gratuitous and mean-spirited.” To my knowledge, no one has accused either Taibbi or Ames of harassment.¹

Taibbi’s career since The eXile has not been without controversy — a satirical 2005 New York Press essay titled “The 52 Funniest Things About the Upcoming Death of the Pope” led to his editor being fired — but in the process he’s also become the angry and eloquent writer these times need. His penchant for burlesque, like that of his Rolling Stone predecessor Hunter S. Thompson, is grounded in contempt at ruling classes and structures. Like Thompson, he can turn this contempt into powerful and elegant prose. His July 2009 essay, “The Great American Bubble Machine,” in which he memorably described Goldman Sachs as “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money,” expanded our vocabulary for the Great Recession.

More here.

Sam Sacks at Open Letters Monthly:

Sir Frank Kermode once compared novels to angels. At first glance, this seems like an unfortunately saccharine proposition, inconsistent with the dignity and seriousness of a British knight, King Edward VII Professor of English Literature at Cambridge, and one of the most distinguished men of letters of the 20th century. But like all of Kermode’s ideas, it is based on a set of extraordinarily complex connections and is central to his lifelong investigation into some of the irreducible questions of literature: What is the purpose of fiction? Why do we read it?

These questions nip at the heels of all of Kermode’s books, but the comparison between angels and literature is made specifically in his evergreen study The Sense of an Ending, drawn from a series of lectures he gave at Bryn Mawr College in 1965. The year is important because the threat of nuclear annihilation lent intense clarity to Kermode’s main point: Humans, personally and collectively, are preoccupied with trying to understand their deaths. For life to have meaning, to amount to more than just a sequence of events, that meaning must be projected backwards from an ending that provides the key to interpreting everything that preceded it.

more here.

Gill Partington at the LRB:

Behind the handsome 18th-century façade of The Hague’s Museum Meermanno, ‘the House of the Book’, pages are turning. Everywhere you look they are turning over, but also turning into other things: screens, data, moving image, sound, even skin. The Art of Reading: From William Kentridge to Wikipedia is not so much an exhibition of contemporary book artists as an attempt to use their work to ask what reading is. The question has increasingly exercised theorists and scholars as the printed book loses its dominance, but here the overfamiliar act is scrutinised through the lens of art.

A series of thematically arranged installations lead you to consider it from various angles: touching; seeing; remembering; concentrating; reacting. The cumulative effect makes reading sufficiently alien to leave you wondering how on earth you perform this weird feat. What does it mean to see written marks and transform them into meaning, or into speech? Does reading take place in the mind, the eye, the body, or in the digital devices on which we increasingly rely?

more here.

Kyle Harper at First Things:

The Roman Empire that nurtured Stoic moralists such as Musonius and Epictetus was really an agglomeration of societies connected by bustling roads and busy sea-lanes. It was a sprawling, polyglot, and agrarian empire. The empire was home to a galaxy of cities—some one thousand of them, most of them smaller than their proud marble ruins might suggest. A grievously poor and unlettered peasantry constituted the silent majority, and some 10 or 15 percent of the empire’s inhabitants had the misfortune of finding themselves in bondage, as chattel slaves whose bodies could as well have been inert matter in the moral imagination of ancient philosophers. Life expectancy at birth was in the mid-twenties. The evanescence of all life turned eros into a divine blessing to be enjoyed in proper season. But the grim realities of Roman life expectancy also made reproduction urgent. Epictetus’s short list of human duties encompassed “citizenship, marriage, child production, piety to God, care of one’s parents.” Sex was a civic duty.

This was the scene onto which the Christians came loudly striding. The Christian movement’s sexual demands were not just austere or unusual. They were jolting, and deliberately so. The apostolic generation did not pour out of the Levant onto the open roads of the empire with anything like a detailed packet of sexual rules. Paul’s letters show us that Christian sexual morality was settled on the go, adapting the gospel’s searing ethic of radical love and interior purity to the realities of life in the towns of the empire.

more here.

Massimo Pigliucci in Plato's Footnote:

During the last several weeks I’ve been sparring on Twitter with Bryan van Norden, a self-described “leading scholar” of Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism, based in Singapore. He has written a book, just out, entitled Taking Back Philosophy: A Multicultural Manifesto, in support of which he has published a piece in Aeon magazine. It is that piece that has triggered our back and forth, which has, unfortunately, reached rare levels of unpleasantness.

The title of the Aeon article is “Why the Western Philosophical canon is xenophobic and racist,” a rare instance of vilification of an entire field and of an indiscriminate attack on every professional working within it. Is van Norden justified in his accusations? Is such an obvious clickbait the best way to foster a constructive dialogue about the problem? Let’s take a look.

First though, let me make clear that I agree with some of the substance of van Norden’s article (and, presumably, book). Philosophy departments the world over — not just in North America or Europe — should indeed be teaching as many of the varied philosophical traditions as logistically possible. Then again, that goes also for history departments, or literature, and so forth, I would think.

Second, the crucial kernel of truth in van Norden’s argument is the problem famously identified by Edward W. Said in his 1978 book, Orientalism.

More here.

Allie Brosh in Hyperbole and a Half:

The year I learned that Christmas did not, in fact, originate as a celebration of my amazing ability to temporarily transform into a "good" child for a few weeks was the year my grandparents took me to see their church's nativity play. My dad's parents were heavily involved in their church and felt that, at six years old, it was time that I start appreciating the miracle of Jesus instead of using Christmas as an excuse to whore out my integrity for presents. Even though my parents weren't religious, they let me go to the play because it was important to my grandparents.

From my grandparents' flowery explanation and frequent use of the word "miracle," I went in expecting to be blown away by the production. Unfortunately, the church moms and the pathetic excuses for actors that they called their offspring failed to bring the characters to life in the way I had hoped. And the story just seemed to center around everyone being really impressed with Jesus and there wasn't much suspense and not a single battle scene.

I could see that the story had potential, but I was deeply disappointed by the whole experience.

By the time my grandparents dropped me off at home, I had convinced myself that I needed to take matters into my own hands and reinvent the birth of Christ so that it conformed to my expectations. My parents and I lived with my maternal grandmother and my aunt, so I would have more than enough talent to work with – all I had to do was create a compelling story line.

I walked through my front door with purpose and gathered my family members in the living room to tell them about my vision. I was going to rewrite the birth of Jesus Christ and I was going to make it POP.

More here. [Thanks to Margaret Morgan.]