Alice George in Smithsonian:

For many Americans of a certain age, the film that provides the singular most refreshing dose of 1970s nostalgia is director John Badham’s Saturday Night Fever. In its most memorable scene, John Travolta, as the smooth-talking Tony Manero, swaggers down the street to the sounds of the Bee Gees’ incomparable hit “Stayin’ Alive;” and the audience travels back to when the four-year-old Twin Towers in the Manhattan skyline evoked only American success with no hint of tragedy. Powered by music, machismo and masterful footwork, the gritty low-budget film lured crowds to theatres, record stores and discos after it premiered 40 years ago this month. At a cost of just $6 million, this new incarnation of the traditional movie musical grossed more than $100 million domestically and $300 million worldwide. In fact, the film earned $31 million in its first 31 days. It was the third highest seller that year, surpassed only by George Lucas’s Star Wars and Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind. And the soundtrack, which sold 30 million copies, topped the album charts for six months and set a record as the biggest-selling album ever. (Michael Jackson’s Thriller subsequently broke that record.)

Saturday Night Fever’s long life in the American consciousness springs “primarily from a brilliant soundtrack that connected vast audiences with infectious, anthemic and imminently danceable hooks,” says the Smithsonian’s John Troutman, curator of American music at the National Museum of American History. “The inner tension that Travolta captured in Tony Manero’s underdog, working-class character—his stunted, bleak and occasionally dark emotional development weighing against his earnest aspirations and locally celebrated triumphs on the dance floor—came across to audiences throughout the country as not only relatable, but intensely believable,” says Troutman.

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Stephen Yenser in Poetry Daily:

As the engaged reader discovers gradually and with increasing pleasure, Robert Pinsky’s new volume of poems, richly titled At the Foundling Hospital, delicately but persistently works in two ways at once. At the same time that it is a series of different kinds of what we casually call “lyric” poems, it is a constellation of musings on a number of subtly related motifs. Among these motifs are foundlings, slaves, ancestors, musical instruments, shells, threads and other filaments and filiations, names – all surprisingly reticulated terms, a little, ultimately uncontainable lexical tribe – and (almost inevitably) language itself, especially in its etymological dimension.

Pinsky is a master of his trade, one of the few living American poets who deserves that appellation. His individual compositions are prosodically firm and limber, whether in loose blank verse, longer six-to-seven-foot lines in distichs, tercets of four to five feet, or slant-rhymed couplets. He can craft a narrative, taut (“Radioman”) or vagarious (“The City”), invent a song (“The Orphan Quadrille,” “Genesis”), deftly translate a traditional sonnet (“Góngora: Life Is Brief,” after the Spanish poet’s “Menos solicitó veloz saeta”), make a mercurial dramatic monologue (“Mixed Chorus”), eulogize a kind of musician (“Horn”), relate local history (“The Foundling Tokens”), and noodle on locutions (“Improvisation on Yiddish”). His signature mode is meditation that incorporates thoughtful, often aphoristic, and sometimes humorous observation on matters of general interest, crisp description, and vivid anecdote – and conjures Horace in its perspicuity and geniality.

The result of the motifs binding this variety together is insistently a text, a term that stems from the Indo-European etymon teks-, which signified a fabrication, a thing made of fabric, specifically of wattle, comprising tree branches interlaced with boughs, tendrils, twigs, and the like (to be covered with clay and used as a shelter or domicile), fashioned in the first place by an ax.

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Michael Brooks in the Times Literary Supplement:

Despite devising both the defining equation and the defining thought experiment of quantum physics, Erwin Schrödinger was never comfortable with what he helped to create. His “Schrödinger’s Cat” paradox, published in 1935, was an attempt to expose the flaws in the physics that flowed from his eponymous equation. And yet, that cat – both dead and alive – has become an icon of quantum physics rather than a warning against its shortcomings.

Schrödinger was born in Vienna in 1887. He was an exemplary schoolboy, displaying a startling ability in all his classes. He taught himself English and French in his spare time, and nurtured a love of classical literature. By the time he enrolled at the University of Vienna in 1906 he was focused on physics, but still took the time to learn a great deal of biology, which informed his later work – contributions that were cited as inspirational by the discoverers of DNA.

The work for which he is remembered requires some context. As with all science, an individual’s contributions to physics rarely occur in a vacuum, and a host of other figures set the stage for Schrödinger’s entrance. His seminal work began with his attempts to resolve a central mystery of the nascent quantum theory. Max Planck had discovered that the precise nature of the radiation emitted by hot objects could only be explained if the energy of the radiation came in discrete lumps that came to be known as quanta. Planck found this somewhat distasteful, as there was (and still is) no explanation for why this should be so. Einstein subsequently proved this energy quantization to be real with his discovery of the photoelectric effect, for which he won the 1921 Nobel Prize for Physics.

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Geoffrey Pullum in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

It was a spring evening in 1993 at Stanford; Fred Dretske (1932–2013) was introducing the man who would deliver that year’s Immanuel Kant Lectures, a distinguished philosopher of the cognitive and linguistic sciences from Rutgers: Jerry Fodor. Dretske spoke with warm approval about the intensity of Fodor’s philosophical views. He doesn’t just disagree with doctrines like empiricism, pragmatism, relativism, and holism, Dretske smilingly explained; he hates them.

To welcoming applause, Fodor stepped up to the podium, scowling. As he spread his papers on the lectern he muttered into the microphone: “I’d hate them a lot more if they were true.”

It was a classic deadpan ad lib, humorous yet thought-provoking, and indicative of the passion that animated all of Fodor’s philosophical writing. I remembered it clearly from two dozen years ago when his death was announced last week (he died on November 29). It was sad news. The philosophical world was a richer, more bracing, and more unpredictable place with Jerry Fodor in it.

“I hate relativism,” he once said, speaking of the then resurgent view that your truth may not be the same as my truth. “I hate relativism more than I hate anything else, excepting, maybe, fiberglass powerboats.” That’s Jerry. No other philosopher writes like that. I am so sorry that he’s gone.

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Lydia Shoup at Ploughshares:

It’s been 100 years since the Russian Revolution of 1917 toppled Tsarist rule, leading to the socialist system that would come to be known as the Soviet Union. Boris Pasternak is best known for writing Doctor Zhivago, a novel which documents these years of national upheaval through the eyes of a poet and physician. Like his eponymous character, Pasternak was famous in his native Russia for his verses.

The end of the novel sees the fictional Zhivago’s poems laid out for readers. Thematically, they cover love, death, and religion. The most moving are the ones that relate to Zhivago specifically, often written in first person. These poems communicate the disorienting effects of the revolution and its aftermath on the daily lives of Russian citizens through the experience of Zhivago and his beloved Lara.

On paper, these poems are neat, brief, four-line stanzas with simple titles like “White Night,” “Autumn,” “A Winter Night,” “Separation,” and “Dawn.” Many of them serve a practical purpose—to chart narrative events in the novel such as Lara’s leaving Zhivago and the town of Varykino and the doctor’s subsequent hours spent alone there, writing and longing for her return.

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Julian Bell at the NYRB:

The sweet-tempered and hugely popular productions of Hockney’s later twenties and thirties, epitomized by that 1971 London interior with the cat and the carpet, tilt back toward descriptive decorum. In the later galleries of the retrospective, the mood continues to oscillate. Between the ages of sixty-eight and seventy-six Hockney devoted much of his energy to rural scenes from his native Yorkshire. On the one hand, the venture led to pounding melodramas such as the sixteen-foot-wide May Blossom on the Roman Road (2009), with its gigantiform shrubs and super-vibrant hues, a Carl Orff orchestration of a placid English backwater. On the other, a 2013 sequence of drawings of lanes through a woodland are virtuoso solos of steady, quiet lyricism—charcoal’s whole gamut of streaking, stippling, and stumping attuned to the interplay of ground, foliage, and sunlight.

There is an inspiring buoyancy to Hockney’s act. Here is an artist who reckons he can get marks to perform however he pleases. His force of attention seldom slackens, and there will always be more to do. Picturing is his element, stretching in all directions. Each picture, in his own words, is “an account of looking at something,” but each has “a limit to what it can see” and thus tantalizes with the prospect of further viewpoints. Hockney might here be talking about the works of which this retrospective is composed, but he might equally be talking about the units of which they themselves are composed, the variegated patches of attentiveness.

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Hernan Diaz at The Paris Review:

Born in Kent in 1858, H. W. Fowler was one of our greatest lexicographical geniuses. He led an ascetic life: he was a runner and a swimmer (lakes, rivers, ocean); he lived with his brother in relative seclusion on the island of Guernsey; and he held—and proved—that anyone should be able to subsist on a hundred pounds a year. He devoted his life to literature: he won the fifth prize in the immensely popular competition with which the Encyclopedia Britannica celebrated its tenth edition; he rediscovered and translated Lucian; he took on, almost single-handedly, the herculean project of boiling down the entire Oxford Dictionary to the Concise Oxford English Dictionary, which is, to this day, one of the most widely used reference books in the language. He was a politely outspoken atheist who lost his teaching position for being unwilling to prepare his students for confirmation. During World War I, he refused to collaborate on the recruiting campaign to send young men into harm’s way while he remained safe. Instead, he lied about his age (forty-four), got enlisted, and was sent to the front. After a rather hermitic life, he got happily married when he was in his seventies and died three years after his wife, in 1933. In the words of Ernest Gowers, “The simplicity of his habits has a counterpart in the simplicity of diction he preaches.”

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Maggie Gray in More Intelligent Life:

Michelle Grayson in Nature:

The transition from fossil fuels is well under way. Each year sees an increase in the amount of electricity generated from renewable sources, including solar, wind and biomass. Changing where we get our energy from has numerous impacts on society, affecting job opportunities, infrastructure and the quality of our air and water resources. But this is not humanity’s first energy transition — society has experienced profound change time and again as new energy sources have risen to dominance.

The driving forces behind our present energy transition are diverse. Although many view low-carbon energy as a way to mitigate climate change, individuals and communities will often move for reasons of business and self-determination. Some people — such as those with no connection to the electrical grid — see little option but renewables. And there are economic benefits: it is likely that we have been grossly underestimating the real cost of fossil fuels. Will the latest energy transition be a success? It might depend on whether green electricity can make itself indispensable to the growing knowledge economy. Inequalities in energy use between the wealthiest and poorest members of society must also be addressed, and difficult decisions on power-plant placement taken. The current energy transition should not be viewed through just one lens. It is not merely an issue of technology, or resource availability. It is about history, democracy, economics and society.

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Sven Birkerts in Literary Hub:

I learned a good deal about poets and poetry from Joseph Brodsky, whose classes I audited in the 1970s in Ann Arbor and whose opinion on most anything I took as holy writ in those days. Joseph was a great one for naming and ranking poets, and much of our conversation consisted of him delivering his various verdicts. “Miroslav Holub is terrific, ya?” Or “Yevtushenko, he’s just shit.” So-and-so was in fact a good poet, “too bad he had to get a Bly-job.” I was all ears, and tuned in closely whenever a new name appeared on his list. “Derek Walcott,” he said one day, “Caribbean poet—look him out [sic].” And I, ever dutiful, did just that, picking up Sea Grapes and Another Life. I remember liking both, and I also remember pushing myself to like them still more so I could be adequate to Brodsky’s esteem. I certainly felt Walcott’s power and freshness, and got that this was poetry with a unique rhythmic surge. But at that point I hadn’t fully connected with it. Some time later, after I moved to Cambridge, I thought I might try to get closer by writing about the man. I decided to set Walcott’s work and worldview against that of his fellow Caribbean writer V.S. Naipaul. The two had been friends in their youth but had since taken radically divergent paths, Naipaul dismissing his roots, Walcott putting his at the core of his poems and plays. I had heard there was friction.

When I finished, I showed the essay to Brodsky, who seemed to like it well enough. He made some noise about showing it to Walcott—the two had by this point become fast friends—but if he did, I never heard anything about it.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.