Ed Yong in The Huffington Post:

Heather Murphy in The New York Times:

by Jalees Rehman

A friend who was invited to serve as a visiting professor at a German university recently contacted me and asked whether staying in Germany would be safe for him and his family. His concern was prompted by the September 2017 election of the federal German parliament in which the far-right AfD (Alternative für Deutschland, translated as "Alternative for Germany") party received approximately 13% of the popular vote. AfD had campaigned on an anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim platform, and has been referred to by various media outlets as a nationalist, racist, far-right populist, right wing extremist or even Neo-Nazi party. For the first time in history since World War 2, a far-right or nationalist party would be sitting in the federal German parliament by crossing the 5% minimum threshold designed to keep out fringe political movements. Even though all other political parties had categorically ruled out forming a government coalition with the AfD, thus relegating it to an opposition role in parliament with only a limited role in policy-making, my friend was concerned that its success could be indicative of rising neo-Nazism and hatred towards immigrants or Muslims. As a Muslim and visibly South Asian, he and his family could be prime targets for right-wing hatred.

I was flabbergasted by his concern. What surprised me most was that someone living in the US would be worried about safety and racial prejudice in Germany. Violent crime rates in major German cities are much lower than those of their US counterparts. While it is true that AfD garnered 13% of the popular vote in Germany, the US president who also ran on a similar populist, nationalist and anti-immigrant platform (with promises of building walls and enacting Muslim bans) received 46% of the popular vote! Many of the views of the AfD – for example the claims that traditional Islam is not compatible with Western European culture and the constitution, that immigrants and refugees represent a major threat to the economy and safety or that multiculturalism and progressive-liberal views have betrayed the ideals of the country's heritage – are increasingly becoming mainstream views of the ruling Republican party in the US. White supremacists, supporters of confederate ideology and neo-Nazis now feel emboldened to hold rallies in the US, knowing that they might only receive lukewarm or relativistic criticism from the US government whereas such acts would be unequivocally condemned by the German government. Racial or religious prejudices held by members of the government and the ruling party can lead to severe institutional reprisals against individuals. When these views are held by a minority party, there is much less danger of immediate institutionalized discrimination and persecution by the government or law enforcement.

So why is it that the 13% vote for AfD is causing such concern, both in Germany and outside of Germany?

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by Jonathan Kujawa

This summer Kevin Knudson and Evelyn Lamb started a podcast called "My Favorite Theorem". In it, they interview a mathematician and get them to geek out about their favorite mathematical result. Like "The Best Thing I Ever Ate" on the Food Network, but with less butter and more math.

This month here at 3QD I thought I'd share my favorite theorem. There are lots of amazing math results I get to work with every day in my teaching and research, but there is one which warms my heart above all others: the Intermediate Value Theorem (IVT) from calculus. As we'll see, it's easy to grasp, has remarkable and surprising implications even in the real world, and foreshadows some really cool results from elsewhere in math.

The IVT tells us about continuous functions. A function, you'll recall, is a rule which takes in one (or more) input numbers and spits out one (or more) output numbers. A first example is f(x)=x²+1. It takes in a single number and squares it and then adds 1. The result is the output. If you plug in 2 you get out 5, and if you plug in 4 you get out 17. If you plot all the pairs of inputs and outputs as x's and y's, you get the graph of your function.

Functions are ubiquitous. Every time you have a cause and an effect, there is a function in the background. The input could be the pressure exerted on a car's gas pedal, the output the velocity of the car. The input could be the income a person earned, the output the tax they owe. The input could be the surface temperature of the Gulf of Mexico along the path of a hurricane, the output the severity of the hurricane. The input could be the ambient temperature, the output the growth rate of a colony of bacteria. The list goes on and on.

A continuous function is a function in which the outputs are close together whenever the inputs are sufficiently close together. Said differently, there are no sudden jumps, breaks, or dramatic changes in outputs as you change from one input to another. Many, many, many functions in real life are continuous. If you press down slightly on a gas pedal, the car doesn't jump into warp speed, it slowly accelerates. If you slowly travel across the Gulf, the surface temperature also slowly changes. Same with the population of a bacteria if you slowly vary the temperature.

Of course, not everything varies in a continuous way. Taxes are usually done in whole dollars (at least in the US) and there are various tax brackets and other rules which come into play. You could earn a penny more and suddenly owe an entire dollar more in tax. The prices of stocks on Wall Street are even more dramatically non-continuous. If bad news about a company is announced, a stock can drop by a huge amount from one moment to the next. Even in the natural world you can have non-continuous phenomena at the extremes. A sudden phase change in a material as it is slowly warmed, or crossing the event horizon of a black hole.

But almost every function you see in everyday life is continuous. Even though it is so simple as to be ridiculous, the IVT tells us remarkable things about continuous functions.

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by Daniel Ranard

Last week's Nobel prize in physics was awarded for the observation of gravitational waves, the famous ripples in spacetime. You can read about these waves first predicted by Einstein, but I want to talk about a more basic idea: that of spacetime itself. Why do physicists insist on "spacetime"—why can't we content ourselves with just space and time?

Many thinkers before Einstein pondered the connection between time and space. Medieval timeline makers must have understood the analogy between points and lengths of space, on the one hand, and instants and durations of time, on the other. It's an analogy rendered physical by the timeline itself. Still earlier, sundials mapped temporal durations to spatial intervals. In Edgar Allen Poe's book-length "Eureka: A Prose Poem," he concludes that "Space and Duration are one." But contrary to Poe, modern physicists do not contend space and time have an identical character. Indeed, the differences would appear obvious: for instance, we always move forward in time, while in space we may remain still.

Though spatial and temporal directions may differ, Einstein and his contemporaries realized they must be considered together, part of a geometrical whole. In one limited sense, space and time had already been considered together for centuries. A graphical timeline emphasizes time as a dimension; if you add a dimension of space to your timeline, you create the spacetime arena. More quantitatively, if you make a graph of an object's position over time, then the background of the graph – the two-dimensional plane, with axes of both space and time – suggests a notion of spacetime. Such graphs predate even Descartes, who's most often credited with the invention of Cartesian coordinates; Oresme and others drew similar figures long before.

Modern illustrations of spacetime take the same form: the Cartesian plane, with axes of time and space. But the modern marriage of space and time entails far more than just a nailing together of the axes. Though many thinkers drew time and space together, it was the insights of Einstein in 1905 that bound them inextricably. In fact, it was Einstein's old teacher, the mathematician Hermann Minkowski, who most clearly cast Einstein's results in the language of spacetime.

Minkowski began his 1908 lecture Space and Time by declaring that "Henceforth, space for itself, and time for itself shall completely reduce to a mere shadow, and only some sort of union of the two shall preserve independence." What could that mean? We often label the three axes of space as x,y,z, measuring width, height, and depth, while t labels time. The four dimensions of x, y, z, and t together constitute spacetime. Why put them together? That is, why does their union constitute a four-dimensional arena whose components demand joint consideration?

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by Claire Chambers

On 19 October I am presenting at a York Explore Library event entitled Refugees, Asylum and Women's Human Trafficking in Fiction. While preparing for the talk I was reminded that in November 2013, three women aged between 30 and 69 were rescued from a house in Lambeth in south London where they had lived as modern-day slaves since 1983. The youngest woman had been born into slavery. All of them were brainwashed by, and under the control of, the girl's father Aravindan Balakrishnan, an Indian from Singapore, who had founded the Workers Institute of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought in Brixton during the 1970s. This left-wing organization quickly became a quasi-religious cult. Its leader and figurehead Balakrishnan forbade his women members to leave the premises on their own, submitting several of them to grave physical and sexual abuse.

As I understand it, in their forthcoming book Child Migration, law experts Kathryn Cronin and Jemma Dally will challenge the current global legislation around refugees. The 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees led to authorities in countries across the world working to deny refugees entry, because once displaced people come under their jurisdiction they become their responsibility. Essentially, this means that the entry system is closed to anyone who is poor. If a refugee can afford convincing forged papers, she can get on a plane. If not, she can only turn to the criminal network of smugglers and agents. The Convention has spawned an irregular type of travel almost completely dominated by a criminal network: an alternative economy of forgers, lorry drivers, agents, an elaborate infrastructure and various specialisms. As authorities get wind of one trafficking route, it alters its course, in a game of cat and mouse. Also commonplace is the enormous amount of debt bondage that exists within this system.

Cronin and Dally show that more children than ever before are refugees. These minors find themselves detained at various points along their journey, and are compelled to engage in exploitative labour relations as their families back home run out of the money intended to help them move inexorably towards Europe. Yet lawyers merely interrogate the child migrant's age and the reasons for his asylum claim — a test which he is set up to fail. Rarely is the child asked about his background and his leave-taking from his family, which is an enormously significant and gut-wrenching moment. Few child migrants have any knowledge of their destination or the army of officials they will meet there, instead being told vaguely that they're going somewhere safe.

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Thomas Chatterton Williams in the New York Times:

In the study of German history, there is the notion of sonderweg, literally the “special path,” down which the German people are fated to wander. In different eras, and depending on who employed it, the term could imply different things. It began as a positive myth during the imperial period that some German scholars told themselves about their political system and culture. During and after World War II it turned distinctly negative, a way for outsiders to make sense of the singularity of Germany’s crimes.

Yet whether viewed from within or without, left or right, the Germans could be seen through such a lens to possess some collective essence — a specialness — capable of explaining everything. In this way, one could speak of a trajectory “from Luther to Hitler” and interpret history not as some chaotic jumble but as a crisp, linear process.

There is something both terrifying and oddly soothing about such a formulation. For better or worse, it leaves many very important matters beyond the scope of choice or action. It imagines Germans as having been either glorious or terrible puppets, the powerful agents of forces nonetheless beyond their control.

A similar unifying theory has been taking hold in America. Its roots lie in the national triple sin of slavery, land theft and genocide. In this view, the conditions at the core of the country’s founding don’t just reverberate through the ages — they determine the present. No matter what we might hope, that original sin — white supremacy — explains everything, an all-American sonderweg.

No one today has done more to push this theory in the mainstream than the 42-year-old author Ta-Nehisi Coates.

More here.

Note: For Ga.

John R. Bradley in The Spectator:

When Russia entered the Syrian civil war in September 2015 the then US secretary of defense, Ash Carter, predicted catastrophe for the Kremlin. Vladimir Putin was ‘pouring gasoline on the fire’ of the conflict, he said, and his strategy of fighting Isis while backing the Assad regime was ‘doomed to failure’. Two years on, Putin has emerged triumphant and Bashar al-Assad’s future is secure. They will soon declare victory over Isis inside the country. The dismal failure turned out to be our cynical effort to install a Sunni regime in Damascus by adopting the Afghanistan playbook from the 1980s. We would train, fund and arm jihadis, foreign and domestic, in partnership with the Gulf Arab despots. This way we would rob Russia of its only warm-water naval base, Tartus, on Syria’s Mediterranean coast. In the process we would create a buffer between Iran and its Lebanon-based proxy, Hezbollah, to divide the anti-Israel Shia axis. And we would further marginalise Iran by extending the influence of our Sunni Gulf allies from Lebanon deeper into the Levant. Half a million Syrians were slaughtered as a consequence of this hare-brained scheme, which geo-politically has resulted in the exact opposite of the intended outcome.

Putin, though, had grasped the reality at the outset. Unlike Afghans, ordinary Syrians were used to living in a liberal, diverse culture that, while politically repressive, championed peaceful religious co-existence. Most of them were nervous about seeing their country transformed into a Wahhabi theocracy. Assad, for all his faults, was the buffer between them and internecine carnage. They stuck with the devil they knew, and there was no popular revolution against Assad — nothing compared to the Tahrir uprising that ousted the hated Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak. The millions-strong demonstrations in Damascus were pro-regime. Among the two-thirds of the Syrian population now living in government–controlled parts of the country, Assad is more popular than ever, and Putin is a hero.

Small wonder Putin recently mocked Washington for ‘not knowing the difference between Austria and Australia’.

More here.

Thanu Padmanabhan in Nautilus:

There are two tantalizing mysteries about our universe, one dealing with its final fate and the other with its beginning, that have intrigued cosmologists for decades. The community has always believed these to be independent problems—but what if they are not?

The first problem has to do with the existence of something called “dark energy,” which is today accelerating the expansion of the universe and will determine its final fate. Theorists tell us that the effects of dark energy can be explained by introducing a term into Einstein’s equations of gravity called the cosmological constant. But, for this explanation to work, the cosmological constant must have a very specific—and tiny—value. In natural units, the cosmological constant is given by 1 divided by a number made of 1 followed by 123 zeros! Explaining this value is considered one of the greatest challenges faced by theoretical physics today.

The second problem relates to another crucial number that shapes our universe, and is related to the formation of structures like galaxies and groups of galaxies. We know that the early universe, while being very smooth, also contained tiny fluctuations in density that acted as seeds for all the cosmic structures we see today. These fluctuations must have a specific magnitude and shape to be consistent with present-day observations. Understanding how these tiny fluctuations were created during the earliest stages in the evolution of the universe, and explaining their magnitude and shape, is an equally fascinating mystery in cosmology.

In the conventional approaches to cosmology, these two numbers—the numerical value of the cosmological constant and the magnitude of initial perturbations—are considered unrelated.

More here.

Adam Kosan at The Quarterly Conversation:

Baker tells us that he followed peregrines for ten years, and that his book is the record of one season’s pursuit, lasting October to April. In fact his book is a compression of ten years of experience and observation into a focused period of mystical journeying toward the outward edge of things. It’s a quest poem in prose, but lacking the human-centered incidents typical of quest poems and fiction, and with an unusual reticence. Not only does the narrator say nothing about his life or his past, he also abstains from the contemplative involvement of, say, the narrator in Walden. He is shorn of biography, austere like Wallace Stevens’s snow man: moving through isolation, stopping for long periods to observe what occurs apart from him, aware of the breath that leaves the heat of his body for the cold of the land. The action, so to speak, emerges around the falcon and Baker’s dogged pursuit of it. When he provides rare self-portraits of himself as pursuer, he appears like one of the slinking creaturely specters of Beckett’s fiction: “I crept towards them along a dry ditch, inching forward like the tide. I crawled across stubble and dry plough.” He aims to achieve alarm-dissipating invisibility: “Hood the glare of the eyes, hide the white tremor of the hands, shade the stark reflecting face, assume the stillness of a tree.”

If this is a grail poem, though, why does Baker chase the falcon? It’s not to capture or tame it, and certainly not to kill it. He wishes to join it, but even in moments of greatest identification, when his language shifts from metaphor and longing into consummation, it isn’t long before the dream of union breaks up: “I shut my eyes and tried to crystallise my will into the light-drenched prism of the hawk’s mind.

more here.

Michael Dirda at the Washington Post:

Today, Giorgio Vasari (1511-1574) is usually remembered only as the author of “The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects,” one of the foundational works of art history and a book nearly as entertaining as its models, Plutarch’s “Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans” and Suetonius’s “Lives of the Caesars.” In its fullest edition, Vasari presents gossipy biographical portraits of seemingly all of Renaissance Italy’s major (and minor) artists, including Cimabue, Leonardo, Botticelli, Raphael, Titian and Michelangelo.

As Ingrid Rowland and Noah Charney remind us in “The Collector of Lives,” scholars still turn to Vasari as a primary source, albeit with caution: He is hardly what one would call impartial or disinterested. Vasari badmouths his enemies (such as Cellini), while his novella-length account of Michelangelo approaches hagiography. Moreover, rather than verify his facts, he tends to “print the legend.” Did the young Giotto really draw a perfect O when asked to supply an example of his work? Did Piero di Cosimo really live almost entirely on hard-boiled eggs? Maybe, maybe not. Some stories are too good to check. Rowland lives in Rome and is the author of a fine biography of the philosopher Giordano Bruno and of a guide to Pompeii ; Charney, who resides in Slovenia, founded the Association for Research Into Crimes Against Art.

more here.

Amanda Marcotte in Salon:

I don't buy Harvey Weinstein's apology. I realize this isn't really a novel opinion, as social media is burning up with people mocking the statement he released to the New York Times after Times reporters Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey published an exposé chronicling decades of allegations of sexual harassment against the renowned studio executive. Still, it's an opinion worth explicating because the excuses that Weinstein trots out in his statement are the kinds of excuses that sexual harassers and abusers all too often get away with, even in the 21st century. Weinstein is trying to gaslight us all. An insincere apology is no apology at all, and people should not accept it. "I came of age in the 60’s and 70’s, when all the rules about behavior and workplaces were different. That was the culture then," Weinstein wrote. "I have since learned it’s not an excuse, in the office — or out of it. To anyone." First, if it's not an excuse, then why offer it up as one? Second, the claim that he didn't know any better is particularly hard to believe in light of the eight legal settlements — that we know about — uncovered by the Times. After you have repeatedly paid out hundreds of thousands of dollars to women who say you have behaved inappropriately, that might have been a clue that something was wrong. But mostly, the whole "I didn't know better" claim, common to sexual harassers, needs to be understood as the nonsense that it is. Sexual harassers know better. They know it's wrong. They know their behavior upsets women.

That's why they do it.

A lot of sexual harassers want to pass off their behavior as merely awkward or unwelcome advances, knowing that draws sympathy. Who among us hasn't flirted with someone who didn't flirt back? Who hasn't worried about asking someone out for fear of rejection? That's how the harassers want you to imagine them: hapless Romeos, guilty not of being cruel but of having no game. Well, don't believe it. As most women who've been targeted by creeps — which is most women, by the way — can tell you, what is usually obvious is how much of the creep's pleasure depends on knowing he's making you uncomfortable. The stories relayed by women to the Times reporters suggest that's the case here. Many of the women describe Weinstein making excuses to get them alone in a hotel room. Making sure there are no witnesses to the behavior doesn't suggest a well-meaning guy who doesn't know better, but someone who knows exactly what he's doing and how he plans to get away with it.

More here.

John Mullan in The Guardian:

A few years ago in a panel discussion at a literary festival I was asked to name a recent British novel that readers and critics would still be talking about in a hundred years’ time. On the spur of the difficult moment I plumped for Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go. Only as I tried to explain my choice did I realise why I had given this answer. It was not just a novel I enjoyed and admired, it was also a novel that enacted something elementary and elemental: a human’s need to imagine his or her origins. The Swedish Academy has made some dubious – and last year attention-seeking – decisions in recent years, but this year its 18 voters have got it right. While the choice has come as a surprise to some – Ishiguro at 62 is relatively youthful; he was not on the list of bookies’ favourites being touted in the press – in literary fact it is not. The Nobel prize for literature, according to the official wording, is for “the most outstanding work in an ideal direction”. Translated from the original Swedish, it is an awkward phrase, but does suggest something important: that the prize should reward universality rather than topicality, literature about the way we always live, not just the way we live now. Ishiguro’s novels step aside from contemporary mores and pressing social issues. Audaciously, sometimes bewilderingly, they abstract us from our times.

How brilliant it is that Never Let Me Go opens with a page that says only “England, late 1990s”. Narrated by a young woman who is a clone, created, like her fellow clones, to provide organs for those requiring transplant surgery, it takes place in a version of Britain both cosily provincial and utterly strange. The countryside, the liberal boarding school, the English seaside town have never made for such a disturbing backdrop. Similarly, the novel that made him famous, The Remains of the Day, took a character familiar from a hundred English books and films – the butler in a country house – and gave him a narrative of painstaking evasiveness. For all the teasing period detail, it was a novel about human self-denial and self-deception at any time and in any place.

More here.

Raphael Mostel in Architectural Record:

Steven Holl frequently seeks ideas in the Architectonics of Music, and as a composer I consulted on the Lewis Arts Complex.

Visiting the finished building now, I see the ideas of Morton Feldman’s music everywhere in Steven’s magnificent realization—and not just in the rugs of the Music Building that reproduce the graphic notation of Feldman’s early works. Steven’s architecture embodies the spirit of Feldman’s expansive and mystical late works.

Although written in conventional notation and with great precision, Feldman’s late compositions direct attention away from the tick-tock that keeps most music earthbound. They likewise eschew amorphousness. Likewise Steven’s designs disdain both quotidian regularity and deliberate disorientation.

Feldman achieves a ‘tapestry of sound’ not only in the multi-layered terms of harmony, but also in the more profound sense as a totally integrating force of expanding self-referential relationships, weaving and knotting ever widening loops, through sequences with repetitions and near-repetitions. Each note always in relation to many others, and the group relation always clearly related to a larger perspective, and an even larger perspective in turn. By this musical alchemy every individual note gains an almost physical presence and sense of integrity as a participant in emergent patterns and then patterns-in-patterns, even with altered positioning in these patterns.

More here.

Morgan Meis in The Easel:

To grasp the excitement (positive and negative) produced by Jasper Johns’s flag and target paintings of the mid- to late 1950s, you have to consider the situation of American painting at the time. That means thinking about Abstract Expressionism. In the mid-1950s, Barnett Newman was still making his zips. Willem de Kooning was churning out shake-and-bake canvases filled with his signature dancing shapes and colours. Jackson Pollock, alas, was dead by 1956, but his all-over-the-canvas drip paintings had become standard-bearers for what ‘serious painting’ should look like. The Ab Exers more or less held sway.

They held sway partly because they were producing visually stunning work, and partly because they were able to express, in both words and paint, a powerful sense of artistic urgency. Abstract Expressionists were given to asking big questions like: what does painting do? Is painting about itself? Should painting reproduce what we see in the world, or does it, rather, ‘express’ something in the mind or soul of the painter? Does painting reach beyond the visual into the fundamental building blocks of reality, be those mental, physical, or spiritual?

Painting in America in 1955 was, in short, a heady affair. To be a painter was to have accepted a kind of ideological calling. In 1943, Mark Rothko, Adolph Gottlieb and Barnett Newman wrote a short manifesto in the form of a letter to the art editor of the New York Times in which they claimed: ‘to us art is an adventure into an unknown world, which can be explored only by those willing to take the risks.’ They also wrote: ‘It is our function as artists to make the spectator see the world our way not his way.’¹ Rothko, Gottlieb and Newman wanted serious painting to fly in the face of everyday perception. Standing in front of one of Newman’s imposing zips, one is inclined to feel that the painting hovers at the very edge of what the mind can grasp.

More here.