Kenan Malik in Pandaemonium:

Before Facebook, there was the coffee house. In the 17th-century, panic gripped British royal circles that these newly established drinking salons had become forums for political dissent. In 1672, Charles II issued a proclamation ‘to restrain the Spreading of False News’ that was helping ‘to nourish an universal Jealousie and Dissatisfaction in the minds of all His Majesties good subjects’.

Now, 350 years on, legislators across the world are seeking to do the same. Last week, the House of Commons digital culture, media and sport committee flew to Washington DC to grill representatives of big tech companies, including Facebook, Twitter and Google. The title of their session echoed Charles II: ‘How can social media platforms help stop the spread of fake news?’

If there is a long history to fears about fake news, there is a long history to fake news, too. In 1924, four days before a general election, the Daily Mail published the forged Zinoviev letter, a supposed directive from Moscow to British communists to mobilise ‘sympathetic forces’ in the Labour party; Labour lost the election by a landslide.

In the wake of the Broadwater Farm riot of 1985, in which a policeman, PC Keith Blakelock, was hacked to death, the police and the press organised a lurid campaign against the key suspect, Winston Silcott, depicting him as the ‘Beast of Broadwater Farm’. Convicted on the basis of virtually no evidence, he was released three years later after it was shown that the police had forged their interview notes.

More here.

Michael Blanding in the New York Times:

For years scholars have debated what inspired William Shakespeare’s writings. Now, with the help of software typically used by professors to nab cheating students, two writers have discovered an unpublished manuscript they believe the Bard of Avon consulted to write “King Lear,” “Macbeth,” “Richard III,” “Henry V” and seven other plays.

The news has caused Shakespeareans to sit up and take notice.

“If it proves to be what they say it is, it is a once-in-a-generation — or several generations — find,” said Michael Witmore, director of the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington.

The findings were made by Dennis McCarthy and June Schlueter, who describe them in a book to be published next week by the academic press D. S. Brewer and the British Library. The authors are not suggesting that Shakespeare plagiarized but rather that he read and was inspired by a manuscript titled “A Brief Discourse of Rebellion and Rebels,” written in the late 1500s by George North, a minor figure in the court of Queen Elizabeth, who served as an ambassador to Sweden.

“It’s a source that he keeps coming back to,” said Mr. McCarthy, a self-taught Shakespeare scholar, during a recent interview at his home in North Hampton, N.H. “It affects the language, it shapes the scenes and it, to a certain extent, really even influences the philosophy of the plays.”

More here. [Thanks to Laura Claridge.]

Ted Jackson in The Times-Picayune:

One foot in front of the other, the hulking old man trudged up the ramp to the Pontchartrain Expressway. A cold wind stiffened his face, so he bundled tighter and kept walking. His decision was made. A life full of accolades and praise meant nothing to him now. A man who was once the pride of his New Orleans hometown, his St. Augustine alma mater and his 7th Ward family and friends was undone. He was on his way to die.

The man was tired. In his 63 years, he had run with the gods and slept with the devil. Living low and getting high had become as routine as taking a breath. A hideous disease was eating his insides. He was an alcoholic, and he also craved crack cocaine. He was tired of fighting. He was tired of playing the game.

He crossed the last exit ramp and continued walking the pavement toward the top of the bridge. He dodged cars as they took the ramp. No one seemed to notice the ragged man walking to his suicide. If they did notice, they didn’t stop to help.

Only a half-mile more and it would all be over. One hundred and 50 feet below, the powerful currents of the Mississippi River would swallow his soul and his wretched life. He dodged another car. But why did it matter? Getting hit by a car would serve his purposes just as well as jumping.

How did it come to this? This was long after Jackie had turned his life around, or so we both thought.

More here.

Julia Azari in FiveThirtyEight:

We’re now one year into the Trump era, and politics seems more nasty, divided and polarized than ever. A government shutdown is imminent over immigration policy. Congress hasn’t passed a single, major bipartisan bill. President Trump’s approval rating among Democrats has fallen to 5 percent. Some reports suggest that a quarter of Americans have real animosity toward the other party. You’d be forgiven for wondering why we can’t just go back to those halcyon days of bipartisanship. Remember when Ronald Reagan and Tip O’Neill would supposedly come to compromise over drinks?

Here’s the thing: By some measures, the United States is more partisan than ever, but that more peaceful and unified past, that golden age of unity, was … pretty much never.

Let’s think for a moment about what the nature of political division looks like right now in the U.S. Using presidential election results, my FiveThirtyEight colleague David Wasserman found that elections are getting less and less competitive at the county level; a record number of counties in 2016 voted for either Trump or Hillary Clinton in a blowout. This is consistent with findings in political science that even when national presidential races are competitive, many individual states are not. Political scientists have characterized the polarized U.S. as “two one-party nations,” instead of one two-party nation.

The issues we fight over — gender, race, immigration, culture and the role of government — divideAmericans neatly and consistently under party labels. The current moment feels divisive because major policy and political questions are “sorted” between the parties — Republicans are mostly unified around one set of answers, and Democrats are mostly unified around another.

More here.

Noam Shpancer in Quillette:

The scientific case against spanking is one of those rare occasions in which, over a span of 50 years or so, a scientific controversy actually gets resolved, as various programs of increasingly rigorous research converge upon a consensus conclusion.

True, the issue has not been 100% mapped out. Waiting for social science to map any issue out 100% is like waiting for the perfect spouse. You’ll wait forever, pointlessly. Spanking, like any socio-behavioral phenomenon, is bound to have somewhat differing implications depending on multiple variables such as culture, timing, dose, gender, what definition of spanking is used, etc. Local skirmishes about this will continue.

Another hindrance to an air-tight resolution concerns the fact that, due to ethical constraints (you can’t randomly assign parents to spanking and non spanking groups or assign children randomly to parents), true experimentation in this area is all but impossible. In the absence of experimental evidence, causal relations are difficult to establish with certainty. Finding, as we have, that spanking strongly and consistently predicts negative developmental outcome does not in itself settle the question of whether spanking has caused the outcome.

The spanking literature, however, has addressed itself to this problem in several ways.

More here.

Caroline Moorehead in The Guardian:

On 21 June 1908, half a million people gathered in Hyde Park to celebrate “Women’s Sunday”. There were 30 brass bands, bugles and 20 platforms with speakers wearing the purple, white and green colours of the votes for women campaigners. It was, for the most part, a good-humoured event, but it did not persuade the government to extend the franchise to women. Since peaceful protest had clearly failed, Christabel Pankhurst warned the prime minister, Herbert Asquith, “militant methods must once more be resorted to”. What we remember today of the suffragette movement is the image, captured on grainy film, of Emily Davison, the former governess and journalist, throwing herself under the king’s horse at the Epsom Derby on 4 June 1913, and dying four days later of a fractured skull. But as Diane Atkinson makes clear in her collective biography of the movement for women’s suffrage that took place between 1903 and 1914, this was merely the culmination of a decade of relentless confrontation, some of it extremely violent, drawing in not only the middle classes but factory workers, shop girls, teachers and housewives up and down the country, many of them prepared to go to prison again and again for acts that grew increasingly dangerous.

By 1903, seven countries, among them New Zealand and Australia, had accorded some degree of voting rights to women. In Britain, before 1832 some women had a parliamentary vote as property owners, but they were excluded in 1832 by the Reform Act, which extended the franchise to “male persons” over 21, including small landowners, tenant farmers and shopkeepers. The word “male” sparked unease: since the monarch was a woman, had the moment not come to let all women vote? A number of reformers joined forces, gathered signatures and petitioned parliament, but the “shrieking sisters” were briskly brushed aside.

More here.

More here. (Note: Throughout February, at least one post will be dedicated to honor Black History Month)

Massimo Pigliucci in Footnotes to Plato:

An anonymous poster has recently published a short essay over at the Oxford University Press philosophy blog, entitled “5 great unsolved philosophical questions.” How could I possibly resist answering them, I ask you? Presumptuous, you might say. Well, no, that would be the case if I claimed that my answers are original, or clearly the right ones. I make no such claim, I am simply offering my informed opinion about them, in my dual role of a philosopher and scientist. Of course, I’m also totally right.

Before proceeding, I need to remind readers of my take on the nature of philosophical questions, and therefore of philosophy itself. Here it is, in a nutshell. (For a much longer, and far more substantiated, though of course not necessarily convincing to everyone, answer, see here.)

Philosophy began, in the Western tradition, with the pre-Socratics, and at that time, and for many centuries afterwards, its business was all-encompassing. Pretty much every meaningful question to be asked was philosophical, or had a philosophical component. Then gradually, mathematics was spun off as one of many offsprings from Mother Philosophy, followed from the 17th century on by a succession of what today we call sciences: first physics, then chemistry, biology, and eventually psychology. That did not mean any shrinking of philosophy itself, however. The discipline retained its core (metaphysics, ethics, aesthetics, logic, epistemology, and so forth) and added just as many “philosophies of” as new disciplines originated from it (e.g., philosophy of science, of language, of mind, and so forth).

In modern times, I think the business of philosophy is no longer trying to attain empirical truths about the world (we’ve got science for that), but rather to critically explore concepts and notions informed, whenever possible, by science.

More here.

Jennifer Ouellette in Physics World:

Nicholas Ouellette likes midges. Yes, these tiny flies are infuriating and can bite, but Ouellette, who’s a physicist by training, is intrigued by how and why these insects form giant swarms, sometimes thousands strong. We know the swarms are composed entirely of male midges, which have long antennae and beat their wings at nearly twice the frequency of the females. Attracted by the high-pitched sounds, the females fly towards the swarm in the hope of reproducing, which makes swarming an elaborate midge-mating ritual.

The sensitivity of midges to sound was allegedly discovered by a Finnish ecologist in the 1960s while out walking in the woods. As he sang local folk songs, the ecologist noticed swarms of these flies being irresistibly drawn into his path, seemingly by the sound of his voice. Ouellette knew, however, that he’d need something more scientific than singing folk songs if he was to study swarming using sound. He therefore got one of the postdocs in his lab at Stanford University – Rui Ni (now at Pennsylvania State University) – to track midges with a microphone and record the beating of their wings.

When Ni and Ouellette blasted the buzzing of swarming midges back at them through a loudspeaker, they noticed some unusual things. If they alternated the level of sound played back through the speaker – loud, soft, loud, soft – the region of highest midge density shifted with the change in volume. And when they played just the sound of a female through the speaker (you can easily spot the females as they lack antennae), the entire male swarm flew over and sat on it.

More here.

Stephen T. Asma in TruthOut:

"How will you make sure the dirt stays inside the sandwich?" I asked my brother Dave. He was trying to figure out how to send a dirt sandwich to Nancy Grace, the shrieking CNN legal analyst and gossip show host. In 2005, Grace told viewers she was so convinced Jerry Hobbs killed his daughter that she would gladly eat a dirt sandwich if police failed to turn up the physical evidence. My brother Dave and a handful of public defenders finally proved that Jerry was innocent and paved the way for his release in August 2010.

On Mother's Day, May 2005, as the sun began to set in a rural part of Zion, Illinois, Jerry Hobbs grew anxious that his eight-year-old daughter Laura was not back home yet. Laura and her friend, nine-year-old Krystal Tobias, were last seen sharing a single bike around the wooded suburban community north of Chicago. But by nightfall, it became clear that both girls were missing. A frantic search ensued. Jerry and others searched throughout the night and, at daybreak, it was Jerry himself who found his daughter and her friend stabbed to death in the nearby woods of Beulah Park. Several hours later, the distraught father found himself sequestered in a legal "blacksite" – unlocatable to family, friends and legal representation – and under intense interrogation by police.

Within forty-eight hours, Jerry Hobbs, now "Monster Hobbs," was arrested for the murder of Laura and Krystal. This is the inside story of Hobbs' exoneration five years later and his drive back to Texas with my brother Dave.

More here.