From the Los Angeles Review of Books:

Richard Rorty is considered one of the greatest philosophers of the 20th century. He is credited with reviving the philosophical school of American pragmatism and challenging the accepted pieties of analytic philosophy. He championed “quietism,” which he says attempts “to dissolve, rather than solve” sets of problems that should now be considered obsolete. This November 23, 2005, interview is among his last; he died in 2007.

Rorty came to Stanford as a fellow at the Humanities Center in 1996 and then joined the faculty of the Comparative Literature Department in 1998. Beginning in the 1970s, he challenged the notion of philosophy as a discipline that could discern timeless truths about the world. Such attempts were motivated by western philosophy’s misguided reliance on Platonic metaphysics, the notion that there are underlying structures, realities or truths that stand firm against the vagaries of history and social mores. Rorty insisted that we have only a linguistic and causal relationship with the world, so any attempt to find some kind of transcendent, unmediated knowledge about it is futile. He famously urged that intellectuals shift their focus from “the problems of philosophy” to “the problems of men.”

His Entitled Opinions conversation with Harrison moves to the limits of philosophy in describing the nature of reality, and then whether philosophy should tackle human aspirations for greatness or stick to maximizing human happiness. In an occasionally testy exchange with Harrison, Rorty makes a controversial defense of bourgeois liberal democracy, arguing that the rest of the world should be more like America, and America should be more like Norway. The potential cost for cultural diversity? “That’s the price we pay for history,” he says. He takes a number of provocative positions in the conversation. Does he stand alone? As he notes, loneliness is the lot of mankind: “If you don’t have any sense of loneliness you probably won’t be interested in religion or philosophy; if you do, you will.”

Listen to the full interview here.

Douglas Fox in Aeon:

Leonid Moroz has spent two decades trying to wrap his head around a mind-boggling idea: even as scientists start to look for alien life in other planets, there might already be aliens, with surprisingly different biology and brains, right here on Earth. Those aliens have hidden in plain sight for millennia. They have plenty to teach us about the nature of evolution, and what to expect when we finally discover life on other worlds.

Moroz, a neuroscientist, saw the first hint of his discovery back in the summer of 1995, not long after arriving in the United States from his native Russia. He spent that summer at the Friday Harbor marine laboratory in Washington. The lab sat amid an archipelago of forested islands in Puget Sound – a crossroads of opposing tides and currents that carried hundreds of animal species past the rocky shore: swarms of jellyfish, amphipod crustaceans, undulating sea lilies, nudibranch slugs, flatworms, and the larvae of fish, sea stars and countless other animals. These creatures represented not just the far reaches of Puget Sound, but also the farthest branches of the animal tree of life. Moroz spent hours out on the pier behind the lab, collecting animals so he could study their nerves. He had devoted years to studying nervous systems across the animal kingdom, in hopes of understanding the evolutionary origin of brains and intelligence. But he came to Friday Harbor to find one animal in particular.

He trained his eyes to recognise its bulbous, transparent body in the sunlit water: an iridescent glint and fleeting shards of rainbow light, scattered by the rhythmic beating of thousands of hair-like cilia, propelling it through the water. This type of animal, called a ctenophore (pronounced ‘ten-o-for’ or ‘teen-o-for’), was long considered just another kind of jellyfish. But that summer at Friday Harbor, Moroz made a startling discovery: beneath this animal’s humdrum exterior was a monumental case of mistaken identity. From his very first experiments, he could see that these animals were unrelated to jellyfish. In fact, they were profoundly different from any other animal on Earth.

More here.

Suzanne Moore in The Guardian:

Now that he’s dead, the disgusting old sleaze in the smoking jacket is being spoken of as some kind of liberator of women. Kim Kardashian is honoured to have been involved. Righty ho.

I don’t really know which women were liberated by Hefner’s fantasies. I guess if you aspired to be a living Barbie it was as fabulous as it is to be in Donald Trump’s entourage. Had we gone to court, I would like to have heard some of the former playmates and bunnies speak up in court – because over the years they have.

The accounts of the “privileged few” who made it into the inner sanctum of the 29-room Playboy mansion as wives/girlfriends/bunny rabbits are quite something. In Hefner’s petting zoo/harem/brothel, these interchangeable blondes were put on a curfew. They were not allowed to have friends to visit. And certainly not boyfriends. They were given an “allowance”. The big metal gates on the mansion that everyone claimed were to keep people out of this “nirvana” were described by one-time Hefner “girlfriend no 1” Holly Madison in her autobiography thus: “I grew to feel it was meant to lock me in.”

The fantasy that Hefner sold was not a fantasy of freedom for women, but for men.

More here.

Sam Anderson in the New York Times:

When you call John McPhee on the phone, he is instantly John McPhee. McPhee is now 86 years old, and each of those years seems to be filed away inside of him, loaded with information, ready to access. I was calling to arrange a visit to Princeton, N.J., where McPhee lives and teaches writing. He was going to give me driving directions. He asked where I was coming from. I told him the name of my town, about 100 miles away.

“I’ve been there,” McPhee said, with the mild surprise of someone who has just found a $5 bill in a coat pocket. He proceeded to tell me a story of the time he had a picnic at the top of our local mountain, with a small party that included the wife of Alger Hiss, the former United States official who, at the height of McCarthyism, was disgraced by allegations of spying for the Russians. The picnic party rode to the top, McPhee said, on the incline railway, an old-timey conveyance that has been out of operation for nearly 40 years, and which now marks the landscape only as a ruin: abandoned tracks running up a scar on the mountain’s face, giant gears rusting in the old powerhouse at the top. Hikers stop and gawk and wonder what the thing was like.

“It was amazing,” McPhee said. “A railroad created by the Otis Elevator Company. An incline of 60-something percent.”

Then he started giving me directions — 87, 287, Route 1 — until eventually I admitted that I was probably just going to follow the directions on my phone. McPhee kept going for a few seconds, suggesting another road or two, but finally he gave up.

More here.

Fraser Myers in Sp!ked:

Friedrich Nietzsche is an ambiguous figure today. Fragments of this infamous philosopher are all around us. He invented the word ‘superman’; his pronouncements on the nature of good and evil, on self-empowerment and overcoming through struggle, are echoed throughout popular culture, from Harry Potter to Kanye West; and an entire self-help industry, enthusing about the ‘gift of failure’ and churning out books with titles like Feel The Fear And Do It Anyway, is heavily indebted to Nietzsche. Yet when named directly, Nietzsche remains controversial. He is accused by some of being a proto-Nazi, and he is considered by others to be responsible for two world wars. While those claims are overblown, there is little doubt that Nietzsche’s fierce criticism of an emerging mass, dremocratic society put him firmly on the side of anti-democracy. So surely Nietzsche, for all his influence on our intellectual and cultural development, is a thinker best understood in his context, rather than someone whose ideas we would wish to revive today? Perhaps not. In his new book, Get Over Yourself: Nietzsche For Our Times, Patrick West, a columnist for spiked, rejects the idea of contextualising Nietzsche in order to explain away the less palatable aspects of his thought. In fact, West is not really interested in judging Nietzsche. Quite the opposite; he asks Nietzsche to judge us. And it is an incredibly rewarding move, because while Nietzsche’s thought offers few concrete solutions, it does offer a tonic against all manner of contemporary social ills.

Take identity politics and all its attendant narcissism and navel-gazing. Nietzsche attacked this kind of thinking at its root, firmly rejecting any suggestion that national, cultural, racial, religious, gender or sexual identities should be recognised, let alone respected. For Nietzsche, West argues, labels imprison us. ‘Life is concerned with forever becoming, for striving to go beyond oneself’, writes Nietzsche. Indeed, his philosophy of the superman, outlined in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, concerns the individual who goes beyond himself: ‘Man is something that should be overcome’, says the titular Zarathustra. ‘What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal.’

More here.

Jacob Mikanowski at Public Books:

I don’t know how I first came across Trabant (the Hungarian band, not the Icelandic band—and not the fabulously decrepit, partially wooden East German-made car that gave them both their name). Maybe it found me. That’s how it usually feels with the music that’s really important in your life. There are two types of song in the world: the songs that lots of people like, which make you feel like you understand lots of people; and the songs no one else likes, which make it feel like they understand you.

I’ve been listening to Trabant for years now, but I still don’t know much about them. Apparently they never put out a real album. Most of their recordings were spur-of-the-moment, lo-fi improvisations. According to Wikipedia, Trabant’s lyrics are “best described by the words enigmatic, intertextual, grotesque and absurd.” I don’t read or speak Hungarian, so I’ll have to take their word for it. The website also say that “their musical style does not fall into any of the known musical categories.” To me, that doesn’t ring quite true. I think they sound a little bit like Mazzy Star, a little bit like Molly Nilsson, and a little bit like what it would sound like if you forced Blondie to record at the bottom of a well.

more here.

Paul Kerschen at The Quarterly Conversation:

In the nearly twenty years since László Krasznahorkai’s The Melancholy of Resistance first appeared in translation, his reputation in English has grown at the same gradual, inexorable pace that his books favor. Nearly all his novels of lonely visionaries and glimpsed apocalypses have made it by now into English, and later this year New Directions will substantially fill out the short fiction with a large collection titled The World Goes On. In the meantime, we have last year’s smaller volume; Herman/The Last Wolf picks out three pieces from Krasznahorkai’s short work, two early and one late, and joins them up in an inverted tête-bêche binding.

The Herman stories were written together with Krasznahorkai’s first novel Satantango and originally appeared in 1986. As with the novel, they are set in a remote corner of Hungary and show the author feeling his way toward his mature manner. Herman is an elderly gamekeeper, a last remaining adept in “the splendid mysteries of an ancient craft,” called out of retirement by shadowy authorities in order to exterminate predators from a patch of forest. In the first of two stories he performs his task all too well, trapping and disposing of dogs, cats, badgers, and foxes in an enormous carrion pit that comes to haunt his dreams as a “putrescent hairy mass of dead meat.” Before long we have a reversal of sympathies, and Herman begins to seek human quarry (avoiding obvious grotesquerie, he uses non-lethal snares). In his increasingly desperate and painful epiphanies—he feels he has “divided the world into noxious and beneficial, while in reality both categories originated in the same heinous ruthlessness”—the visionary quality of Krasznahorkai’s mature fictions is just detectable.

more here.

Robert Macfarlane at The Guardian:

In August 1913 the children’s writer Eleanor Farjeon visited the poet Edward Thomas and his family at their home near the South Downs. On their first walk together, Thomas’s 11-year-old daughter Bronwen realised that the city-dwelling Farjeon knew few of the names of the wild flowers that flourished in the surrounding landscape. “My ignorance,” Farjeon recalled later, “horrified her.”

Remedial work was promptly set. Bronwen gathered a hundred different flowers and plants, taught Farjeon their names (“agrimony, mouse-eared-hawkweed, bird’s-foot trefoil … ”), and the next day sat her down “to a neatly ruled examination paper, with the numbered specimens laid out in precise order on the table”. Farjeon was given an hour to complete the test: “60 for a Pass, 70 for Honours.” Her memory was sharp and she topped 90: “Bronwen was proud of me.” Those flower names would later blossom in Farjeon’s books for children, which are twined through with natural lore, notably her chalkland fairy fable, Elsie Piddock Skips in Her Sleep (1937) and her Martin Pippin stories.

John Metcalfe in Wired:

If you want an unusual but punchy telling of the world’s explosion of climate-warping gases, look no further than this visualization of CO₂ levels over the past centuries soaring like skyscrapers into space. “₂A Brief History of CO₂ Emissions” portrays the cumulative amount of this common greenhouse gas that humans have produced since the mid-1700s. It also projects to the end of the 21st century to show what might happen if the world disregards the Paris Agreement, an ambitious effort to limit warming that 200 countries signed onto in 2015. (President Donald Trump still wants to renege on it.) At this point, the CO₂-plagued atmosphere could see jumps in average temperature as high as 6 to 9 degrees Fahrenheit, the animation’s narrator warns, displaying a model of Earth looking less like planet than porcupine. “We wanted to show where and when CO₂ was emitted in the last 250 years—and might be emitted in the coming 80 years if no climate action is taken,” emails Boris Mueller, a creator of the viz along with designer Julian Braun and others at Germany’s University of Applied Sciences Potsdam and the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. “By visualizing the global distribution and the local amount of cumulated CO₂, we were able to create a strong image that demonstrates very clearly the dominant CO₂-emitting regions and time spans.”

The visualization begins with a small, white lump growing on London around 1760—the start of the Industrial Revolution. More white dots quickly appear throughout Europe, rising prominently in Paris and Brussels in the mid-1800s, then throughout Asia and the US, where in the early 1900s emissions skyrocket in the New York region, Chicago, and Southern California.

More here.

Concepcion De Leon in The New York Times:

When Ta-Nehisi Coates’s first book, “The Beautiful Struggle,” was published in 2008, it landed with barely a ripple. At the time, Mr. Coates was a struggling writer. He had lost three jobs, and he and his family relied on unemployment checks, his wife’s income and occasional support from his father to stay afloat. By the time the book came out in paperback, his fortune had shifted slightly; he’d become a regular contributor to The Atlantic magazine, writing a blog that attracted a moderate but engaged audience. “I went and did a few events. I did one in Brooklyn and I did one in San Francisco, and maybe 30 people showed up. And I thought, ‘This is what I want. This is it,’” he said in a conversation over a recent lunch. Suffice it to say that Mr. Coates’s second book, “Between the World and Me,” published in 2015, did not suffer the same lack of readership. An early galley was sent to Toni Morrison, who strongly endorsed the book, calling it “required reading” and likening Mr. Coates to James Baldwin. That year, Mr. Coates was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship and the National Book Award in nonfiction. His appearances filled auditoriums and the book was adopted on college syllabuses. It has sold 1.5 million copies internationally and has been translated into 19 languages, catapulting him to prominence.

…When the discussion was opened up to the audience, Mr. Jenkins asked how Mr. Coates advised his son on the subject of political activism. Mr. Coates answered that his own father had been part of the Black Panther Party and had later become disillusioned with mass politics. Mr. Coates’s advice to his son, Samori, was to educate himself before getting involved in protests. “I don’t know that that was the correct answer,” he said, “Protest is a very, very real thing, but for me, it’s much more private.” That perceived detachment has drawn criticism. When “Between the World and Me” was published, Dr. West took issue with Ms. Morrison’s comparison of Mr. Coates to Baldwin and expressed as much in a Facebook post, writing that, unlike Mr. Coates, “Baldwin’s painful self-examination led to collective action and a focus on social movements.” In his view, Mr. Coates’s inattention to the Black Lives Matter movement and political activists in “Between the World and Me” “shows a certain distance” from his subject matter.

Mr. Coates counters that he hopes he writes “things that clarify stuff for people that go to those marches, that clarify things that inspire people who go and think about policy. I necessarily need a little bit of distance.”

More here.

David Kordahl at The New Atlantis:

You see the problem. Carroll posits a “God” whose attributes — and the attributes of whose world — can be enumerated in absentia, more or less like a scientific model: We can imagine the model is correct, then make predictions about outcomes. But this isn’t the way most people approach religion. Just as God’s existence can’t be proven through argument (even if many have tried), one can’t very well discount religious experience by reasoning probabilistically that God is unlikely. Experience is the one thing, in the end, that can’t be denied. Much as we might like to imagine ourselves chilly Bayesian rationalists, I suspect that most of us are led to our fundamental beliefs via methods that are much less austere. We go around sniffing the world, rooting through rubble, turning over dirt. After all our searching, many of us find a world that smells like God. Many others (including me) don’t.

Regardless of your convictions, there is a point here that many would-be Bayesians might overlook. Bayes’s theorem allows well-defined models — mathematically well-defined models — to be tested against observations. Now turn that around, and realize that without a well-defined model, Bayes’s theorem is nearly useless. This has important consequences. It means that Carroll’s faith in his probabilistic approach is overblown, like when he says that even though it is “enormously problematic” to apply Bayesian reasoning to the question of God, “we don’t have any choice.” It also means that for those aspects of your worldview that seep subtly into all your observations, math alone probably won’t change your mind.

more here.

Camille Guthrie at Poetry Magazine:

Robert Browning’s dramatic monologue “My Last Duchess,” first published in Dramatic Lyrics (1842), is also an ekphrastic poem: one that engages with a work of art and in this case dramatizes viewers’ responses to the artwork. In the poem, Browning plays with the genre of ekphrasis to reveal the violence underlying representation. An obsessive Duke shows a visitor, and readers, a painting of his last wife. The Duke tries to distract us with courtesy but even as he controls the story of his wife and her image, his emotion exceeds his control and exposes his crimes. Using conversational couplets and telling punctuation, Browning gives us a study of violence, a test of the rivalry between words and images, and a battle between the male and female gaze.

The poem begins with the Duke of Ferrara, a historical figure from the Italian Renaissance, pulling back a curtain to reveal the painting of his wife to the emissary of a Count:

That’s my last Duchess painted on the wall,
Looking as if she were alive.

Such a casual beginning is full of wicked dramatic irony. Browning’s initial trickery appears in the ambiguity of the first words, seemingly functional and innocuous yet implying some curious notions. With “that’s,” the Duke conflates the painting and his wife into an object of “wonder” to be possessed and shown off; with “last,” he hints that he plans for a series of wives, and it’s soon made clear that he’s in talks with the emissary to marry the Count’s daughter. Even the off-hand conjunctive “as if” at first appears to compliment the talent of the painter, Fra Pandolf, but the painting’s splendid lifelikeness quickly summons the presence of death in the past tense “were.” The Duke conjures shadows in the eerie phrase “there she stands,” as if the Duchess herself or her ghost has appeared in the room, startling unsuspecting viewers and putting us on alert.

more here.