Ed Yong in The Atlantic:

In 2019, if everything goes according to plan, the much-delayed James Webb Space Telescope will finally launch into orbit. Once assembled, it will use an array of 18 hexagonal mirrors to collect and focus the light from distant galaxies. This segmented-mirror design was developed in the 1980s, and it has been so successful that it will feature in almost all the large telescopes to be built in the near future.

But as always, nature got there first. For millions of years, scallops have been gazing at the world using dozens of eyes, each of which has a segmented mirror that’s uncannily similar to those in our grandest telescopes. And scientists have just gotten a good look at one for the first time.

Yes, those scallops—the pan-seared pucks of white flesh that grace our dinner plates. Those pucks are just the muscles that the animals use to close their beautiful shells. Look at a full, living scallop, and you’ll see a very different animal. And that animal will be looking right back at you, using dozens of eyes that line the fleshy mantle on the inner edges of its shell. Some species have up to 200 eyes. Others have electric-blue ones.

Inside the eyes, the weirdness deepens. When light enters a human eye, it passes through a lens, which focuses it onto the retina—a layer of light-sensitive cells. When light enters a scallop eye, it passes through a lenslike structure, which … doesn’t seem to do anything. It then passes through two retinas, layered on top of each other. Finally, it hits a curved mirror at the back of the eye, which reflects it back onto the retinas. It’s this mirror, and not the lens, which focuses the incoming light, in much the same way that those in segmented telescopes do.

More here.

Ed Pilkington in The Guardian:

The United Nations monitor on extreme poverty and human rights has embarked on a coast-to-coast tour of the US to hold the world’s richest nation – and its president – to account for the hardships endured by America’s most vulnerable citizens.

The tour, which kicked off on Friday morning, will make stops in four states as well as Washington DC and the US territory of Puerto Rico. It will focus on several of the social and economic barriers that render the American dream merely a pipe dream to millions – from homelessness in California to racial discrimination in the Deep South, cumulative neglect in Puerto Rico and the decline of industrial jobs in West Virginia.

With 41 million Americans officially in poverty according to the US Census Bureau (other estimates put that figure much higher), one aim of the UN mission will be to demonstrate that no country, however wealthy, is immune from human suffering induced by growing inequality. Nor is any nation, however powerful, beyond the reach of human rights law – a message that the US government and Donald Trump might find hard to stomach given their tendency to regard internal affairs as sacrosanct.

The UN special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, Philip Alston, is a feisty Australian and New York University law professor who has a fearsome track record of holding power to account.

More here.

David Sirota in AlterNet:

You argue that capitalism needs to be saved, but what is your response to polls showing many Americans want an alternative to capitalism?

If we could come up with something that was much different, we might want to try that, but even the Chinese who call themselves a communist nation practice a form of capitalism in terms of private property and the free exchange of goods and services. I think the real question is what I meant by ‘saving capitalism’: saving capitalism from the moneyed interests that are now distorting our system of capitalism in ways that make it very difficult for most people to get ahead.

The issue is not capitalism versus some other ism, because there really isn't another ism around. The question is how to organize capitalism so that big money doesn't make the rules.

The idea that there is a free market out there some place in nature that can exist without rules, without rules that are generated by politics, by government, by federal agencies and departments and state agencies and departments and legislatures and courts is absurd on its face.

These rules are necessary. They are constantly being changed and adapted and altered. They are, right now, more than at any time since the 1880s and the 1890s, the Gilded Age of the robber barons, they are being made by and for very, very big companies, corporations, Wall Street and economic elite of very wealthy individuals who were politically active. This is a huge problem. This generates the distress and cynicism and anger about a rigged economy and a rigged system that contributed to Donald Trump becoming president.

More here.

From The New Criterion:

In 1750, Jean-Jacques Rousseau won the prize at the Academy of Dijon for his essay answering the set question, “Has the restoration of the arts and sciences had a purifying effect upon morals?” Rousseau’s answer, in what came to be known to posterity as the First Discourse, was a resounding, if also a prolix, No. “Our minds,” said the sage of Geneva, “have been corrupted in proportion as the arts and sciences have improved.” How’s that for challenging expectations? Rousseau excelled at that. Common, unenlightened people might think that the arts and sciences are beneficent because they elevate the spirit and lighten the burdens of everyday life. Rousseau, a beneficiary of centuries of human ingenuity, came to tell them that the arts and sciences are dangerous distractions from virtue, which he urged his readers to pursue with single-minded devotion. “Virtue! Sublime science of simple minds . . . . Are not your principles graven on every heart? Need we do more, to learn your laws, than examine ourselves and listen to the voice of conscience?” In this artfully turned piece of rhetoric, Rousseau disparaged men who “know how to speak” in favor of those who “know how to act aright.” “Let men learn,” he intoned, “that nature would have preserved them from science, as a mother snatches a dangerous weapon from the hands of her child. Let them know that all the secrets she hides are so many evils from which she protects them.”

Take, for example, the art and science of printing, which Rousseau argued was a baneful invention. “The frightful disorders which printing has already caused in Europe,” he wrote in his widely disseminated essay, will convince responsible sovereigns “to banish this dreadful art form from their dominions.” But presumably not until after everyone had had the benefit of reading this bulletin by J.-J. Rousseau.

More here.

David Salle in The New York Review of Books:

After we’re done shaking our heads at what they had to endure, we project onto our long-lived women artists a mystique that’s as old as history—that of the sorceress or the good witch. These women have a secret. We want them to tell us everything, but maybe they don’t want to. If we can gain access to their magical workshop, squeezing through a narrow corridor to find the door, we might be privy to some important mysteries. The veils will be unwound, and finally we will look life in the face and weep for all that was lost to get us here. In her long life, Louise Bourgeois experienced both extremes of the female artist story—marginalization, even invisibility early on, and decades later a fierce and passionate following by younger artists and curators. Her status was based on an independence from fashion, and on calling attention to emotions that most people prefer to keep hidden: shame, disgust, fear of abandonment, jealousy, anger. Occasionally, joy or wonder would surface, like a break in the clouds. But Bourgeois was an artist, not a therapist. Her imagination was tied to forms, and how to make them expressive. Her gift was to represent inchoate and hard-to-grasp feelings in ways that seem direct and unfiltered.

Dylan Scott and Alvin Chang in Vox:

America’s rich have gotten richer for decades, while the middle class and poor have seen meager gains. Since the mid-20th century, the top 1 percent have more than doubled their share of the nation’s income, from less than 10 percent to more than 20 percent.

Donald Trump said he was going fix it — that he would represent the forgotten men and women, the people who had been left behind in this widening of income inequality.

But the tax overhaul his Republican Party passed through the Senate early Saturday morning would make America’s income inequality worse. Maybe a lot worse, economists say.

“The bill is investing heavily in the wealthy and their children — by boosting the value of their stock portfolios, creating new loopholes for them to avoid tax on their labor income, and cutting taxes on massive inheritances,” Lily Batchelder, a New York University professor who worked as an economist under President Barack Obama, said. “At the same time, it leaves low- and middle-income workers with even fewer resources to invest in their children, and increases the number of Americans without health insurance.”

The centerpiece of the Republican tax plan is a massive corporate tax cut, from 35 percent to 20 percent, which is expected to disproportionately benefit the wealthy.

More here.

Joseph Schreiber at The Quarterly Conversation:

Long after he escaped East Germany to settle in the West, where he continued to reside until his death in 2007, Wolfgang Hilbig remained bound to the darkened landscapes of the GDR. He was not one to downplay the bleak and oppressive qualities of life amid the abandoned mines and crumbling factories of his hometown, Meuselwitz, and his dense, swirling prose evokes a world of strange, suffocating beauty. But his emotional attachment to his birthplace and his complicated misgivings about the benefits of reunification, left him forever torn between East and West—a conflict captured clearly in the stories that comprise the second part of the collection The Sleep of the Righteous. By contrast, Old Rendering Plant, the latest Hilbig offering to be released in English, presents a narrative firmly planted in the GDR that does not travel far beyond the immediate environs of the narrator’s home; yet this tightly defined arena affords the perfect space for a multi-layered exploration of one man’s struggle to define himself against the restrictions and expectations imposed by family, class, history, and circumstance.

Wolfgang Hilbig was born in 1941 in Meuselwitz, near Leipzig. His father disappeared at Stalingrad, so he was raised by his mother and grandparents. His illiterate Polish-born grandfather served as an important father figure, encouraging his aptitude for sports. However, as translator Isabel Fargo Cole notes in her afterword to the novel I, his early obsession with reading and writing soon alienated him from his own family.

more here.

Craig Morgan Teicher at the LA Times:

Galway Kinnell was often compared to his favorite poet, Walt Whitman, whose “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” Kinnell movingly read aloud every year on the far side of the Brooklyn Bridge at a benefit for the New York poetry library Poets House. Like Whitman, Kinnell — who died in 2014 having won the Pulitzer, the National Book Award and a MacArthur, among other honors for books published between the 1960 and 2006 — was a poet of capacious interest in the natural world, profound commitment to social justice, and deep sympathy for the people he saw.

He was a poet of his time, meaning both that he depicts the world, concerns and values of the last third of the 20th century, and that his poems are like those of many of his peers born at the end of the 1920s — A.R. Ammons, Philip Levine, W.S. Merwin and Adrienne Rich — who broke free of the strict formalism of 1950s American poetry to create the more impressionistic, sometimes surreal, nature-focused poetry of the late 1960s and 1970s. For many, Kinnell’s poems are exactly what one thinks of when one thinks of contemporary poetry. All of his books are collected here, along with a handful of late poems. It is impossible to consider the landscape of the last 50 years of American poetry without Kinnell.

more here.

Michael Dirda at The Washington Post:

As that suggests, “Ka” is nothing if not syncretic. More than a book of stories nested in stories, it is, as the Skeleton implied, a book about Story. Dar Oakley discovers that he himself is “inside a story, which was also inside him.” The well read will pick up faint echoes and submerged allusions to, for example, Robert Graves’s “The White Goddess,” the Brazilian myths decoded by anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, the legendary voyages of Saint Brendan, the allegorical visions of William Blake, Native American legends, any number of bird and animal fables, striking lines from Christopher Marlowe and Walt Whitman, and, at one point, wordplay that recalls Wallace Stevens’s famous poem about the snowman who beholds “nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.”

In sum, “Ka” is just the kind of deeply moving, deeply personal “late work” that a great artist sometimes produces at the end of his or her career. I mustn’t, however, close without indicating something of the serene beauty of Crowley’s prose.

more here.

Simon Winchester in The New York Times:

Recently in our household it was stir-up Sunday, the invariably chilly late autumn afternoon when all gather in the kitchen to give the last ritual touches to the making of this year’s Christmas pudding. The fragrant, brandy-soaked mess of fruits will have been readied in its great earthenware bowl, to be steamed in the Aga’s lower oven for 12 full hours. But before then everyone will place a firm hand on the big wooden spoon and together give the mixture a ceremonial last turn, always east to west in honor of the wise men coming to Bethlehem, to add a final dash of quite another kind of spirituality to the booze-sodden ingredients.

The old cookbooks — as Lizzie Collingham reminds us in her joyously delicious account of Britain’s gastronomic influence on the world — employed Christmas recipes like this to offer children a geography lesson. The currants, we were told, were Australian, the raisins from South Africa, the suet from New Zealand. Demerara sugar was shipped in from Barbados, the eggs came from chickens in the Irish Free State. The cinnamon was from Ceylon, the cloves from Zanzibar. There was Malayan nutmeg, Cypriot brandy, Jamaican rum. Only the bread crumbs, the flour and the porter came from home, from England. My mother would buy all these ingredients each Christmas season, invariably at the closest thing to a supermarket in the London suburb where I grew up — which was called, appropriately, The Home and Colonial. It was one of a chain of grocery stores so familiarly central to English life of the 1950s that it came to be memorialized in poetry. John Betjeman, known for his sentimental odes to the ordinary, wrote of his Welsh sylph Myfanwy with a still-remembered stanza: “Smooth down the Avenue glitters the bicycle,/ Black-stockinged legs under navy blue serge/ Home and Colonial, Star, International,/ Balancing bicycle leant on the verge.” Few here in America could imagine the Safeway or the Piggly Wiggly to be deserving of such verse or such sentiment.

More here.

Nancy Fraser in American Affairs:

At first sight, today’s crisis appears to be political. Its most spectacular expression is right here, in the United States: Donald Trump—his election, his presidency, and the contention surrounding it. But there is no shortage of analogues elsewhere: the UK’s Brexit debacle; the waning legitimacy of the European Union and the disintegration of the social-democratic and center-right parties that championed it; the waxing fortunes of racist, anti-immigrant parties throughout northern and east-central Europe; and the upsurge of authoritarian forces, some qualifying as proto-fascist, in Latin America, Asia, and the Pacific. Our political crisis, if that’s what it is, is not just American, but global.

What makes that claim plausible is that, notwithstanding their differences, all these phenomena share a common feature. All involve a dramatic weakening, if not a simple breakdown, of the authority of the established political classes and political parties. It is as if masses of people throughout the world had stopped believing in the reigning common sense that underpinned political domination for the last several decades. It is as if they had lost confidence in the bona fides of the elites and were searching for new ideologies, organizations, and leadership. Given the scale of the breakdown, it’s unlikely that this is a coincidence. Let us assume, accordingly, that we face a global political crisis.

More here.

It may seem mean-spirited to remember the great Jerry Fodor by posting a critique of his work so soon after his death, but I think Steven Pinker's engagement with his thought brings out some of what made Fodor great. I met Fodor as a young man in my twenties at Rutgers once and he was kind and encouraging of my plans to go to grad school in philosophy (I was working as an engineer at the time). I ended up reading a lot of Fodor in grad school and seldom agreed with him but I recognized that he certainly made all his opponents think more clearly. (In case you are wondering about the title of this post, Fodor often invoked his grandmother in his philosophical papers!) Anyhow, here's Steven Pinker, writing in 2005:

In 2000 Jerry Fodor published a book called The Mind Doesn’t Work That Way (hereafter: TMDWTW). The way that the mind doesn’t work, according to Fodor, is the way that I said the mind does work in my book How the Mind Works (HTMW).1 This essay is a response to Fodor, and one might think its title might be Yes, It Does! But for reasons that soon become clear, a more fitting title might be No One Ever Said it Did.

Fodor calls the theory in How the Mind Works the New Synthesis. It combines the key idea of the cognitive revolution of the 1950s and 1960s—that the mind is a computational system—with the key idea of the new evolutionary biology of the 1960s and 1970s—that signs of design in the natural world are products of the natural selection of replicating entities, namely genes. This synthesis, sometimes known as evolutionary psychology, often incorporates a third idea, namely that the mind is not a single entity but is composed of a number of faculties specialized for solving different adaptive problems. In sum, the mind is a system of organs of computation that enabled our ancestors to survive and reproduce in the physical and social worlds in which our species spent most of its evolutionary history.

Readers who are familiar with Fodor’s contributions to cognitive science but who have not read TMDWTW might be puzzled to learn that Fodor begs to differ so categorically. The first major theme of HTMW is computation, and Fodor, more than anyone, has defended what he calls the computational theory of mind: that thinking is a form of computation. The second major theme is specialization, and Fodor’s most influential book is called The Modularity of Mind, a defense of the idea that the mind is composed of distinct faculties rather than a single generalpurpose learning device or intelligent algorithm. The third theme is evolution, the source of innate biological structure, and Fodor, like many evolutionary psychologists, is willing to posit far more innate structure than is commonly accepted in contemporary philosophy and psychology. So it is surprising that Fodor insists that HTMW is wrong, wrong, wrong. Fodor and I must disagree on how the concepts of computation, faculty psychology (specialization), and innate biological organization should be applied to explaining the mind. This essay will be organized accordingly.

More here. [Especially for Morgan Meis.]

Andrés Felipe Solano in Literary Hub:

Today we rode in the world’s most beautiful cab. A few minutes after we’d gotten in, the driver—middle-aged, and wearing glasses—passed us a notebook. Soojeong thought for a moment it was a Christian ambush, but the man explained that the book was where his clients wrote messages. While I was adding something, my wife found a second notebook, apparently much older. The first entry was from 2010. Fifteen minutes later we left the cab in Yeouido. Soojeong, who had been reading throughout the entire journey—she never does this as she suffers from car sickness—had tears in her eyes. She had read several messages, and even a short poem about the wind written by the cabdriver. It was a simple poem, pretty, not at all sentimental, she told me. But what impressed her most was that almost every one of the messages had an intimate, confessional tone. It was as if all those people had been waiting for that particular cab to unburden themselves. “I feel alone, my wife is hardly ever home, my son hates me.” “I’ve just come out of hospital. Apparently the diagnosis is more serious than I thought, I don’t know what’s going to happen now.” “On my way to see her for the second time. Very excited. I think she’s the best girl I’ve met in a long time.” “Our mother died today.” I guess it was life in a pure state, and for that reason my eyes also misted.

More here.

Natalie Wolchover in Quanta:

Among the brilliant theorists cloistered in the quiet woodside campus of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, Edward Witten stands out as a kind of high priest. The sole physicist ever to win the Fields Medal, mathematics’ premier prize, Witten is also known for discovering M-theory, the leading candidate for a unified physical “theory of everything.” A genius’s genius, Witten is tall and rectangular, with hazy eyes and an air of being only one-quarter tuned in to reality until someone draws him back from more abstract thoughts.

During a visit this fall, I spotted Witten on the Institute’s central lawn and requested an interview; in his quick, alto voice, he said he couldn’t promise to be able to answer my questions but would try. Later, when I passed him on the stone paths, he often didn’t seem to see me.

Physics luminaries since Albert Einstein, who lived out his days in the same intellectual haven, have sought to unify gravity with the other forces of nature by finding a more fundamental quantum theory to replace Einstein’s approximate picture of gravity as curves in the geometry of space-time. M-theory, which Witten proposed in 1995, could conceivably offer this deeper description, but only some aspects of the theory are known. M-theory incorporates within a single mathematical structure all five versions of string theory, which renders the elements of nature as minuscule vibrating strings. These five string theories connect to each other through “dualities,” or mathematical equivalences. Over the past 30 years, Witten and others have learned that the string theories are also mathematically dual to quantum field theories — descriptions of particles moving through electromagnetic and other fields that serve as the language of the reigning “Standard Model” of particle physics. While he’s best known as a string theorist, Witten has discovered many new quantum field theories and explored how all these different descriptions are connected. His physical insights have led time and again to deep mathematical discoveries.

More here.

C. P. Heiser in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

Launching one of the world’s most exciting literary festivals, in the middle of the world’s densest megacity, is accomplishment enough. But managing it year after year, meeting increased expectations, and handling the particular challenges of a place like Bangladesh, make the Dhaka Lit Fest one of the most remarkable literary events in the world.

I met all three founders on my first visit in 2014, and was struck not only by their commitment to the mission of the festival but by the diversity of their backgrounds. Sadaf Saaz is a poet, writer, entrepreneur and women’s rights activist. She co-founded the festival in 2011 in partnership with the Hay Festival. London-based Ahsan Akbar is a poet who also runs a media and PR agency, Zephyr: Media PR. An author and frequent contributor to the Wall Street Journal and New York Times, K. Anis Ahmed is the founder of the University of Liberal Arts Bangladesh and Denver-based Teatulia, the first certified organic tea brand from Bangladesh to be sold in the US. He is also the publisher of Dhaka Tribune, a national daily newspaper.

C.P. HEISER: The Dhaka Lit Fest started seven years ago, originally sponsored by the Hay Festival. You quickly outgrew that umbrella. What made you want to strike out with your own brand, so to speak?

ANIS AHMED: I’d say what made the three of us want to re-brand the festival as Dhaka Lit Fest was basically the simple desire to give it a name that would more directly convey its mission — to showcase Bangladeshi writing and writers to the world. We always felt that despite a vibrant literary tradition, Bangladeshi literary culture had become too hidebound. Our writers were not reading outsiders enough, let alone being in touch with them. And the world too had not done enough to ask itself, Oh, let’s go see what’s happening in the world’s seventh most spoken language!

SADAF SAAZ: An interesting aside on our origins as the Hay Festival Dhaka: it’s not quite as if Hay decided to simply come here. Rather, in its first year, Hay was trying out three different locations in the Indian subcontinent — Kerala, Kolkata, and Dhaka. Kerala and Kolkata, both in India, have vastly more English speakers, and arguably more literary audiences. Yet, through the quality of our organization on ground and the level of engagement by our audience, Dhaka was chosen by Hay organizers to continue, and it ran as the Hay Festival Dhaka ran until 2014.

AHSAN AKBAR: It should also be mentioned that in our first year as Dhaka Lit Fest, in 2015, we faced a crises after the so-called “blogger killings.” In all fairness to Hay, it’s doubtful they could have gone ahead with a festival in a place that was so far away for them. That year we faced 19 cancellations in the final 30 days leading up to the festival; still, we forged ahead and it was bigger than any year before.

More here.