Chelsy Clammer in TNB:

“I have a secret,” David said. Then, silence. No secret spilled. Not for another three months. Next, his outbursts, explosions of anger. Throwing glass on the floor, acting up at home, punches thrown, and goes to preschool with the same attitude—rage snapping at random. But he still couldn’t say what he had to say, and even if he did, would anyone listen? Children are to be seen, not heard. Though actions, of course, speak louder than words. When a four-year-old throws his puppy across the backyard, it’s hard not to hear how he needs to speak. Though there’s the fact of that antiquated thought, a belief born and raised in the Victorian era, one that has sustained centuries of adherence: Children should be seen, not heard. In other words, this ageist slogan is saying that children are inherently unruly. Disruptive. Each one of them. And rude. Absolutely. They run around restaurants and twirl around stores, cartwheel down aisles breaking every social more, every code of conduct we’ve put in place to police our interactions. Kids are inconsiderate and cause breakables to crash to the floor, because they insist on seeing with their hands, not with their eyes. But we were all children at one point—have all experienced the ways in which kids are shushed. We all know how it feels to be seen as just a kid who gets on adults’ nerves, especially when shouting just to be heard. So what’s a kid to do if he needs to speak up? Speak out? What’s a kid to do when an adult sees him with more than just his eyes and then he’s told not to tattle—or else? Violence is suspended in the onslaught of his silence. What about when that adult doesn’t know how to keep his hands to himself?

Heather Murphy in The New York Times:

He sat by his phone, skeptical that it would ring. “I didn’t think that anyone would want to respond,” said Samuel D. Smithyman, now 72 and a clinical psychologist in South Carolina. But the phone did ring. Nearly 200 times. At the other end of the line were a computer programmer who had raped his “sort of girlfriend,” a painter who had raped his acquaintance’s wife, and a school custodian who described 10 to 15 rapes as a means of getting even with “rich bastards” in Beverly Hills. By the end of the summer, Dr. Smithyman had completed 50 interviews, which became the foundation for his dissertation: “The Undetected Rapist.” What was particularly surprising to him was how normal these men sounded and how diverse their backgrounds were. He concluded that few generalizations could be made. Over the past few weeks, women across the world have recounted tales of harassment and sexual assault by posting anecdotes to social media with the hashtag #MeToo. Even just focusing on the second category, the biographies of the accused are so varied that they seem to support Dr. Smithyman’s observation.

But more recent research suggests that there are some commonalities. In the decades since his paper, scientists have been gradually filling out a picture of men who commit sexual assaults. The most pronounced similarities have little to do with the traditional demographic categories, like race, class and marital status. Rather, other kinds of patterns have emerged: these men begin early, studies find. They may associate with others who also commit sexual violence. They usually deny that they have raped women even as they admit to non-consensual sex. Clarifying these and other patterns, many researchers say, is the most realistic path toward curtailing behaviors that cause so much pain.

More here.

Hannah Gais at The Baffler:

Formed in the outskirts of Detroit, ICP really came into its own in the early 1990s, after Violent J had an epiphany featuring a terrifying vision of a clown and a carnival of horrors—one that was, in his words, “twisted and strange as fuck.”[*] J’s experience encouraged the band, which at the time was known as Inner City Posse, to undergo an overhaul of its aesthetic, eventually topping off the change with a new band name: Insane Clown Posse. Numerous critics have been tempted to brush ICP off as a shallow, noxious rap group with not only vapid, but occasionally violent, misogynistic, and homophobic lyrics, and a gaggle of hedonistic and occasionally crazy fans—known as “juggalos” (male) or “juggalettes” (female).

By 2011, a string of crimes perpetrated by individuals self-identifying as juggalos prompted the FBI to designate ICP’s entire fan base as a gang. The move had profound consequences for fans throughout the country, causing some to lose their jobs, their children, or even be denied military service. Aside from the obvious free speech violations wrought by the FBI’s decision, the fact that ICP’s fan base skews poor and rural has had profound economic consequences as well. Their willingness to stand up to the federal government has earned them fans on both the left and the right. Yet thanks to Trump’s ascendency, juggalos’ call for justice took on new meaning for parts of the left: they were standing up to fascism.

more here.

Kathryn Nuernberger at The Paris Review:

According to Joseph Glanvill’s 1681 volume Saducismus triumphatus, or, Full and plain evidence concerning witches and apparitions in two parts: the first treating of their possibility, the second of their real existence, the convicted witch Elizabeth Styles’s offering to the investigators in 1664 was that her demon sucked blood. He came to her often. Even when she was tied up in a dungeon, still he came to her pole in the form of a butterfly, to suck her blood as he always did.

Though it may seem strange to us now, that the devil came as an apparition of a butterfly was very old news in 1664. Only the bloodsucking was new. Even the great botanist and first ecologist Maria Sibylla Merian, who discovered and documented insect metamorphosis in the same century, had to be careful about her reputation and keep her room of silkworms and caterpillars very secret, because there were many who still believed in witches and their power to take the form of butterflies and spoil the milk.

The Greeks, who had a rich tradition of witchcraft, called butterflies “psyches,” the same word they used for souls. I wonder about that, and about what in each of us is a little bit witch.

more here.

Gavin Francis at the London Review of Books:

One of the elm trees near my clinic seems to me different from all the others not because of its size, or the pattern of its limbs, but because one of my patients once fell twenty feet from it. Gary Hobbes wasn’t normally a tree-climber: he was a young man with schizophrenia who, after taking a cocktail of MDMA, became convinced he had transformed into a cat. Witnesses recounted that on the day of his fall he had been prowling the local streets examining the contents of bins, before scaling the elm to hiss at passers-by. The police were called; he climbed higher. A dog-walker approached to watch; Gary recoiled and screeched, demonstrating a previously unexpressed terror of dogs. The police were debating how to get him down when he slipped and fell, breaking his wrist on impact. He knocked his head too and lay mewling on the grass, concussed enough to be transferred to the emergency department.

The following morning Gary woke up on an orthopaedic ward with a plaster cast on his arm, reluctant to talk to the hospital psychiatrist. He was discharged back to his supported accommodation – a complex of small apartments with a warden on hand to help. On visits I’d see opened cat food tins in his kitchen and wonder if he might be eating them. From time to time I’d ask him about that night, but he changed the subject. The last I heard, he’d adopted a pair of street cats as pets, and had cat flaps put in the apartment door.

more here.

by Thomas Manuel

In a society that tries its best to be portrayed as meritocratic, Arora focuses on the invisible lines that divide it – lines of religion, caste, class, language and gender. Interestingly, Arora is the poster child of the reigning Indian Dream, i.e., to immigrate to America and achieve the American Dream. He's upper-caste and upper-class, urbane and tech-savvy, ex-IIT and ex-Silicon Valley – the last person you would imagine writing about the game being rigged. But the game is rigged and those with the odds in their favour have a poor track record of acknowledging it.

Arora is painstakingly sensible in most of his opinions. He's the perfect liberal. In his introduction, he deconstructs the various privileges that enabled his success and poses vital questions to himself and his readers: How much of his success was him versus his inherited background? How much of it was him versus his socially conditioned ambition and drive? This tone of unsentimental confession permeates the entire work. In many places, it feels less like an argument than an educational text. Arora isn't writing for the seasoned campaigner – his conclusions are too unspectacular for that. With careful reasoning and persuasive personal anecdote, Arora's essays seems to be introducing uninitiated (possibly American) readers to a variety of different voices – feminist, dalit, Marxist, etc.

Relying on other voices is essential to avoid falling into the trap that has affected so many other social critics – the trap of not knowing what the hell they're talking about. Women are tired of men doing their thinking for them. Dalits are tired of Brahmins speaking on their behalf. And Marxists, well, they're mostly tired of other Marxists.

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by Yohan J. John

A few months ago I attended a rather peculiar seminar at MIT's Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences. A neuroscientist colleague of mine named Robert Ajemian had invited an unusual speaker: a man named Jim Karol, who was billed as having the world’s best memory. According to his website, his abilities include "knowing over 80,000 zip codes, thousands of digits of Pi, the Scrabble dictionary, sports almanacs, MEDICAL journals, and thousands of other facts." He has memorized the day of the week for every date stretching back to 1AD. And his abilities are not simply matter of superhuman willingness to spend hours memorizing lists. He can add new items to his memory rapidly, on the fly. After a quick look at a deck of cards, he can recall perfectly the order in which they were shuffled. I witnessed him do this last 'trick', as well as a few others, so I can testify that his abilities are truly extraordinary [1].

Such Stupendous Feats of Skill might seem more suited to a carnival or a variety show than to a university seminar room. The sheer strangeness of the event definitely aroused curiosity — the auditorium couldn't contain everyone, so several of us had to watch on a TV screen in the overflow area. But along with the interest there was also a palpable sense of bemusement, bordering on derision. I could hear the murmurings: why would anyone need to memorize trivia in the era of cheap terabytes? And what could sober scientists learn from circus tricks, however astounding?

The truth is that Ajemian’s goal in inviting Karol was more about raising awareness than presenting data or theory. More specifically, he wants more brain scientists to think about how odd human memory seems if we compare it with computer memory. Decades of experience with electronics has led many people to think of memory as a matter of placing digital files in memory slots. It then seems natural to wonder about storage and deletion, capacity in bytes, and whether we can download information into the brain 'directly', as in the Matrix movies.

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by Ashutosh Jogalekar

The flames crackled high and mighty, scalping the leaves from the oak trees, embracing bark and beetles in their maw of carbonized glimmer. The remains of what had been lingered at the bottom, burnt to the sticky nothingness of coagulated black blood. The walls of the stores and restaurants shone brightly, reflecting back the etherized memory of letters and words flung at them. Seen from the branches of the trees, filtered through incandescent fire, the people below were mere dots, ants borne of earthly damnation. A paroxysm of a new beginning silently echoed through the cold air. Palo Alto stood tall and brightly lit tonight.

Bell’s Books, a mainstay of the town for a hundred years, projected its ghostly, flickering shell across the square, its walls stripped of everything that ever dwelt on them, now pale shadows of a dimming past. A few months back they had come to the store, crew cuts and stiff ties, smiles of feigned concerns cutting across the room like benevolent razors. As a seller of used and antiquarian books Bell’s posed a particular problem, riddled through and through as it was with undesirables. The owner, an old woman who looked like she had been there since the beginning of time, was told quietly and with no small degree of sympathy how they did not want to do this but how they needed to cart out most of her inventory, especially because of its historical nature.

“We’re sorry, ma’am, but ever since they passed the addendum our directives have grown more urgent. And please don’t take this personally since yours is not the only collection to be cataloged: over the last few weeks we have repeated this exercise at most of the area’s stores and libraries. To be fair, they are offering healthy compensation for your efforts, and you should be hearing back from the grievances office very soon.”

With that, three Ryder trucks filled with most of the books from Bell’s had disappeared into the waning evening, the old woman standing in the door, the wisps of sadness on her face looking like they wanted to waft into the air and latch on to the gleaming skin of the vehicles. What happened to her since then, where she went and what she did was anybody’s guess. But the space where Bell’s stood had already been sold to an exciting new health food store.

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by Paul Braterman

Yes, Bishop Wilberforce really did ask TH Huxley, “Darwin’s bulldog”, whether he would prefer an ape for his grandfather, and a woman for his grandmother, or a man for his grandfather, and an ape for his grandmother. And Huxley really did say that he would prefer this to descent from a man conspicuous for his talents and eloquence, but who misused his gifts to ridicule science and obscure the light of truth. This and more at the very first public debate regarding Darwin’s work on evolution, only months after the publication of On the Origin of Species.

L: The Oxford Museum of Natural History, where the event took place. Click on this and other images to enlarge

The debate took place at the May 1860 meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. The actual exchange is whitewashed out of the account of the meeting in the gentlemanly Athenaeum, leading some historians to wonder whether it really occurred, but a recently rediscovered contemporary account places the matter beyond doubt. What I find even more interesting, however, is the way in which argument and counter-argument between Wilberforce and Huxley, and between other supporters and opponents of the concept of evolution, prefigure arguments still being used today.

R: 150th anniversary commemorative plaque, outside the Museum

The Athenaeum account is freely available here. The fuller account, in the Oxford Chronicle, has recently been published (abstract open, full text behind paywall) by Richard England in Notes and Records, the Royal Society journal of the history of science. There are good accounts in Wikipedia and elsewhere of the historical setting. For completeness, and because of the pay wall, I include the Oxford Chronicle account of the discussion as an Appendix.

The meeting attracted enormous interest, despite the rather uninviting title of the leading lecture, by Professor Draper of New York; "On the Intellectual Development of Europe, considered with reference to the views of Mr. Darwin and others, that the progression of organisms is determined by law." Draper drew far-fetched analogies between the development of societies, of individual organisms, and of species, which need not detain us, and concluded that his own work on physiology supported, among other things, the transmutation of species, which was (and is) the central issue separating creationists from those who accept evolution.¹

Then things got a lot more interesting. I shall describe what happened by quoting (with some slight compression) the relevant sections of the Oxford Chronicle account, and inserting commentary.

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by Max Sirak

I don’t spend much time on Twitter. I check it twice a day, maybe, for a combined total of 7 minutes. But recently, when swiping up to scroll down, I saw the tweets between Elon Musk and Governor Ricardo Rossello of Puerto Rico and smiled.

“Yes,” I thought. “This makes so much sense.”

When I was 20 I spent a summer backpacking in Europe. A couple friends joined me, or I them; they did most of the planning. It was the early 2000s. Cell phones weren’t ubiquitous. Pre-paid calling cards kept us in touch. The digital revolution was nascent. Our Eurail passes, like our currency, were paper.

It was an eight week trip. We visited 13 different countries. And it was while winding on the rails all about Europe, from station to station, where I fell in love with reading and writing. Up until then, both bored me. (Not that this is what my essay’s about, but it seemed a relevant aside, you know, considering…)

Anyway, about 2/3 of the way through our trip we disembarked in Rotterdam. A friend from college, Whit, was studying there for a semester and, since we happened to be in that part of the world, we decided to drop in for a visit. I’m glad we did.

Not only was it nice to see a friendly, familiar face but city itself blew my mind. Sure, I was high (I mean, we were college kids from the US in the Netherlands…), but still. It wasn’t just the drugs that had me wide-eyed.

It was the architecture. I’d never seen anything like it.

Read more »

Philip Ball in Aeon:

Why can we count to 152? OK, most of us don’t need to stop there, but that’s my point. Counting to 152, and far beyond, comes to us so naturally that it’s hard not to regard our ability to navigate indefinitely up the number line as something innate, hard-wired into us.

Scientists have long claimed that our ability with numbers is indeed biologically evolved – that we can count because counting was a useful thing for our brains to be able to do. The hunter-gatherer who could tell which herd or flock of prey was the biggest, or which tree held the most fruit, had a survival advantage over the one who couldn’t. What’s more, other animals show a rudimentary capacity to distinguish differing small quantities of things: two bananas from three, say. Surely it stands to reason, then, that numeracy is adaptive.

But is it really? Being able to tell two things from three is useful, but being able to distinguish 152 from 153 must have been rather less urgent for our ancestors. More than about 100 sheep was too many for one shepherd to manage anyway in the ancient world, never mind millions or billions.

The cognitive scientist Rafael Núñez of the University of California at San Diego doesn’t buy the conventional wisdom that ‘number’ is a deep, evolved capacity. He thinks that it is a product of culture, like writing and architecture.

More here.

Ethan Siegel in Forbes:

If you ask an astrophysicist what's the greatest puzzle in the Universe today, two of the most common answers you'll get are dark matter and dark energy. The stuff that makes up everything we know of here on Earth, atoms, which is in turn made up of other fundamental particles, adds up to only around 5% of the cosmic energy budget. Either 95% of the energy in the Universe is in these two forms, dark matter and dark energy, that have never been directly detected, or something is wrong with our current picture of the Universe. These alternatives have been explored at length, with many options leading to slightly different physical consequences. With the first observation of merging neutron stars, and signals in both gravitational waves and light from across the electromagnetic spectrum arriving, a huge slew of these options have just been ruled out. When put to the test, dark matter and dark energy both survive.

There are a few major puzzles in astrophysics and cosmology that dark matter and dark energy were designed to solve. For dark matter, they largely relate to how galaxies form, rotate, and cluster together; for dark energy, they're about the expansion rate of the Universe and how it evolves over time. If you make an appropriate modification to your theory of gravity, you can alter some of those observables without introducing dark matter and/or dark energy. The hope of those working on these alternatives is that the right modification will be found — one that also makes new predictions distinct from those of dark matter/dark energy — and they can be put to the test.

More here.

Kevin Berger in Nautilus:

It doesn’t seem enough to call Stephen Paddock, who killed 58 innocent people in Las Vegas this month, a monster. The term has lost its power to evoke the unimaginable. The beasts that terrorized the mental lives of our ancestors have been tamed by religion and culture, notes Stephen T. Asma this week in a Nautilus essay, “Why Are So Many Monsters Hybrids?”. So what do we call Paddock?

Asma, a professor of philosophy at Columbia College Chicago, and author, most recently, of On Monsters and The Evolution of Imagination, says the term “monster” is not ready to be retired. The moniker suits Paddock, he says. “Monster is a term we reserve for people who cannot be negotiated with. It’s almost impossible, if not impossible, to understand their behavior, their motives, their mind. Our regular theory of mind doesn’t work on these people.”

In a ranging interview with Nautilus about mythic and real monsters, Asma talked about the evolutionary origin of werewolves and the psychological fears that give rise to tyrannous leaders. Asma lived in Cambodia for a while and learned about the monstrous rule of Pol Pot. He offered his view of what appeals to Americans about Donald Trump. We delved into the roles that desire and repulsion play in our conceptions of monsters, and why he disagrees with neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett about the source of emotions.

More here.

Andrew O'Hehir in Salon:

With the coming of the Enlightenment, the cobwebs of superstition and pseudo-reality were supposed to be swept out of human society by the real reality of Science and Reason and Democracy and other grand abstractions. Why did that happen only incompletely, or temporarily? That might be the central question of modern history — and perhaps of philosophy, psychology, political science and a whole bunch of literature as well. But even without a graduate degree, we can conclude that there was considerable hubris at work, and that the balance between competing narratives of meaning was more complicated than it looked in Rousseau or Jefferson’s time. One answer might be that human beings thrive on stories. We need myth. If you’re anything like me, when you get home from work you’ll flip on Hulu or Netflix to soak up some middlebrow moral parable aimed predominantly at people of your class and background. Another answer lies in Nietzsche’s central insight, which was more or less that all systems of thought are always power relations in disguise. That doesn’t mean that no such systems are better than others, or that there’s no such thing as objective reality. There are facts out there about how Kennedy was killed in 1963, and about how Trump was elected in 2016 — but we are never likely to know them for sure, or to agree about them.

Repeatedly hitting people over the head with a rolled-up newspaper, as if they were disobedient doggies, while telling them that Donald Trump is a liar and a fraud is pretty much the apex state of liberal self-parody. They know that. That’s why they like him. Trump is a prominent symbol of the degradation or destruction of reality, but he didn’t cause it. He would not conceivably be president today — an eventuality that will keep on seeming fictional, as long as it lasts — if all of us, not just Republicans or the proverbial white working class, hadn’t traveled pretty far down the road into the realm of the not-real. Reality just wasn’t working out that well. God is dead, or at least he moved really far away with no phone and no internet, and a lot of reassuring old-time notions of reality loaded in his van. The alternative for many Americans is dead-end service jobs, prescription painkillers and blatantly false promises that someday soon technology and entrepreneurship will make everything better.

More here.

Adam Szetela in AlterNet:

Not many people can say they have done yoga with Amy Goodman. But then again, not many people have been to the Omega Institute in Rhinebeck, New York. Founded in 1977, the institute has been a spiritual haven and progressive force in a world cut through with hate, anger and ignorance. Last week, the institute held a multi-day retreat focused on the union of contemplative wisdom and political activism. In between yoga poses, performative art, meditation sessions, and communal dining, leaders of the progressive left gave talks on how to proceed in difficult times. Here is what they had to say. “America was a business before it was a country.” Clad in his trademark black suit, white shirt and silk tie, Cornel West helped to kick off Friday evening with a fiery sermon that condemned neoliberalism and the rising tide of neofascism in America. His words were soaked in metaphors, alliteration and the hip-hop style that Harvard president Larry Summers once called "an embarrassment." In between his rebuke of Wall Street and its political puppets, West made the important point that what America is experiencing is not just economic and political tyranny, but an “eclipse of integrity, honesty, decency, and generosity. It is the escalation of gangster-like sensibilities.”For West and the other speakers who joined him at Omega, America is in the long, dark night of a spiritual blackout. If people are to light a candle in these dark times, the first step is to be self-critical.

Self-criticism is something that CNN’s Van Jones knows well. On election night 2016, Jones was catapulted into the national spotlight after he stated on live television that Donald Trump’s victory was in part a result of "whitelash." Since then, Jones has traveled the country to connect with Trump voters. In his talk at Omega, he admitted that these experiences have made him rethink his initial post-election remarks and the way he fights for a progressive agenda. As he explained, “I met straight, white, cisgendered, heterosexual Trump voters who are some of the best people in this country. I’ve done that, I’ve seen it, and I can’t unsee it.” The message Jones sent to those listening is that they need to stop the bashing and the name-calling, and instead, step outside their assumptions about other people. If we are to effectively connect with the people we disagree with, then empathy and the ability to listen deeply will be our greatest allies. This approach to political struggle, as West prophetically stated, requires us to practice self-awareness and self-critique, and to see how much of our politics is governed by anger and self-righteousness, rather than compassion and the will to understand other people’s perspectives.

More here.

Angela Stubbs interviews John Freeman in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

JOHN FREEMAN IS a word slayer, known for his keen editorial eye. But he is just as keen to illuminate the stories of people in all lands. In the past several weeks, Freeman has released his debut book of poems, Maps, an anthology of essays titled Tales Of Two Americas: Stories of Inequality in a Divided Nation, and the fourth issue of Freeman’s, his literary journal. All his literary endeavors are meditations on memory and love, which feel like guideposts on a search for authentic self-knowledge. In his poems, Freeman manages to offer an antidote to suffering, chaos, and pain by illuminating the loneliest, darkest places in each of us. His work is its own form of cognitive behavioral therapy for the reader. Instead of probing at the root cause of pain, his poems ask us to acknowledge and appreciate the journey, rethinking our attitude toward it. I emailed with John over the past month to discuss politics, poetry, and why imagination is at the heart of all our experiences.

ANGELA STUBBS: How did the writing of Maps help you unravel the internal maps you’d made over the years? How difficult was it to revisit some of these memories in order to write these poems?

JOHN FREEMAN: Writing poetry has always been a largely instinctual thing for me, something I do only when I feel like it, often very quickly at night or in transit. Scribble, scribble. My internal editor needs a lot of distraction to shut off. For the last 20 years, as a journalist and editor, I have been a human deadline, bouncing from one assignment or production date to the next. Poetry was a way to unplug and return to a deeper mode of thinking, and not direct my mind at a task but into a space. I’ve always felt the unconscious mind maps things far more interestingly than our rational, waking mind, so making this book was for me an attempt to try to be guided by that principle, to see what lived in there — for me — in the possibility of a poem. I’m so glad it wasn’t just filled up by muscle cars and Tom Petty tunes.

More here.