Aaron M. Bornstein in Nautilus:

We don’t know what our customers look like,” said Craig Berman, vice president of global communications at Amazon, to Bloomberg News in June 2015. Berman was responding to allegations that the company’s same-day delivery service discriminated against people of color. In the most literal sense, Berman’s defense was truthful: Amazon selects same-day delivery areas on the basis of cost and benefit factors, such as household income and delivery accessibility. But those factors are aggregated by ZIP code, meaning that they carry other influences that have shaped—and continue to shape—our cultural geography. Looking at the same-day service map, the correspondence to skin color is hard to miss.

Such maps call to mind men like Robert Moses, the master planner who, over decades, shaped much of the infrastructure of modern New York City and its surrounding suburbs. Infamously, he didn’t want poor people, in particular poor people of color, to use the new public parks and beaches he was building on Long Island. Though he had worked to pass a law forbidding public buses on highways, Moses knew the law could someday be repealed. So he built something far more lasting: scores of overpasses that were too low to let public buses pass, literally concretizing discrimination. The effect of these and dozens of similar decisions was profound and persistent. Decades later, bus laws have in fact been overturned, but the towns that line the highways remain as segregated as ever. “Legislation can always be changed,” Moses said. “It’s very hard to tear down a bridge once it’s up.”

Today, a new set of superhighways, built from data shaped by the old structures, refresh these divisions. While the architects of the new infrastructure may not have the same insidious intent, they can’t claim ignorance of their impact, either.

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Andrew Taggart in Aeon:

Imagine that work had taken over the world. It would be the centre around which the rest of life turned. Then all else would come to be subservient to work. Then slowly, almost imperceptibly, anything else – the games once played, the songs hitherto sung, the loves fulfilled, the festivals celebrated – would come to resemble, and ultimately become, work. And then there would come a time, itself largely unobserved, when the many worlds that had once existed before work took over the world would vanish completely from the cultural record, having fallen into oblivion.

And how, in this world of total work, would people think and sound and act? Everywhere they looked, they would see the pre-employed, employed, post-employed, underemployed and unemployed, and there would be no one uncounted in this census. Everywhere they would laud and love work, wishing each other the very best for a productive day, opening their eyes to tasks and closing them only to sleep. Everywhere an ethos of hard work would be championed as the means by which success is to be achieved, laziness being deemed the gravest sin. Everywhere among content-providers, knowledge-brokers, collaboration architects and heads of new divisions would be heard ceaseless chatter about workflows and deltas, about plans and benchmarks, about scaling up, monetisation and growth.

In this world, eating, excreting, resting, having sex, exercising, meditating and commuting – closely monitored and ever-optimised – would all be conducive to good health, which would, in turn, be put in the service of being more and more productive.

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Jean M. Twenge at The Atlantic:

The more I pored over yearly surveys of teen attitudes and behaviors, and the more I talked with young people like Athena, the clearer it became that theirs is a generation shaped by the smartphone and by the concomitant rise of social media. I call them iGen. Born between 1995 and 2012, members of this generation are growing up with smartphones, have an Instagram account before they start high school, and do not remember a time before the internet. The Millennials grew up with the web as well, but it wasn’t ever-present in their lives, at hand at all times, day and night. iGen’s oldest members were early adolescents when the iPhone was introduced, in 2007, and high-school students when the iPad entered the scene, in 2010. A 2017 survey of more than 5,000 American teens found that three out of four owned an iPhone.

The advent of the smartphone and its cousin the tablet was followed quickly by hand-wringing about the deleterious effects of “screen time.” But the impact of these devices has not been fully appreciated, and goes far beyond the usual concerns about curtailed attention spans. The arrival of the smartphone has radically changed every aspect of teenagers’ lives, from the nature of their social interactions to their mental health. These changes have affected young people in every corner of the nation and in every type of household. The trends appear among teens poor and rich; of every ethnic background; in cities, suburbs, and small towns. Where there are cell towers, there are teens living their lives on their smartphone.

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Adam Gopnik at The New Yorker:

Romain Gary was a great big liar. The French novelist, war hero, and diplomat made up stories the way other people make up beds: daily and conscientiously and without much premeditation. He lied all the time, and about many things. He lied about his background: born Roman Kacew in Lithuania, in 1914, right at the beginning of the European catastrophe, as a poor Jew among poor Jews. He lied about his mother, his father, his education, his literary history, his loves. His fine and patient and entirely admiring biographer, David Bellos, not only called his study of Gary “A Tall Story” but throughout uses words like “bullshit” and “eyewash” to characterize the tales his subject told.

But Gary was a big liar. This desperately poor Eastern European Jew reinvented himself as a French patriot and literary figure, titles he earned by fighting for France and by writing very good novels in French, one of which won the Goncourt Prize, France’s highest literary award. And then, when he was famous under one made-up name and persona, he invented another name and persona, and wrote well enough in this very different voice to win a second Goncourt Prize.

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Philip Hensher at Literary Review:

Thom Gunn started out as a member of the Movement, that 1950s collection of like-minded British poets, but he looks now like a consistent outsider. When he left England and went to America, he detached himself from one poetic community without, it seems, quite attaching himself to another – the judgement of his biographers is that he never reached the status in American poetry circles that he should have. This is just about the point where we might expect an august Collected Poems with juvenilia, footnotes, drafts and unpublished poems; instead, we have an attractive but rather slight Selected Poems, updating a 1979 edition. Is he a minor poet? Or are there other explanations?

Often, Gunn’s mode is exquisitely formal. He had real knowledge and understanding of English lyric poetry, producing an edition of Ben Jonson’s poetry – anyone who goes beyond Jonson’s most famous plays into the lyrics and, especially, the court masques will quickly appreciate his virtuosity. Gunn’s first volume, Fighting Terms, used this formality in approved ways for rather dignified subjects: the Trojan War, the landscapes of the Romantic poets. Between his first and second books, Gunn moved to America to be with the man he spent the rest of his life with.

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Scott Rennie and Michael Platt in Nature:

Social interactions are often complicated by conflicts of interest. Humans and other animals adopt diverse strategies to resolve such disputes. Stronger individuals can often secure their interests at the expense of weaker individuals, but this strategy can be costly if it requires aggression. Strategies that are more cooperative and egalitarian can also develop among kin¹ or individuals who reciprocate in repeated interactions². Theoretical and experimental studies suggest that cooperation depends on cognitive control processes that override the impulse to acquire tangible rewards³. This theory now finds support from Choe et al.⁴, writing in Nature Communications. The authors demonstrate that pairs of mice can learn to coordinate their behaviour to achieve an egalitarian distribution of rewards — but only when rewards are delivered directly to the brain, rather than through food.

Choe et al. set out to investigate whether mice have the capacity to override their natural tendencies towards dominance-based conflict resolution. To do this, they developed a clever coordination task. They trained mice to enter a central start zone in a three-chambered box, and then to follow a visual cue to either the left or right chamber of the box to receive a reward. Next, they paired trained animals to take the trial together. When both mice occupied the start zone, a trial was initiated (Fig. 1a). The first mouse to enter the correct chamber received a reward of either food pellets or wireless brain stimulation (WBS) of the medial forebrain bundle — a region that, when stimulated, can override all other rewards, including food, water and sex⁷ (Fig. 1b). In the WBS trials, the reward was terminated if the second mouse entered the chamber (Fig. 1c), although this was not possible in the food trial. As expected, when mice were rewarded with food pellets, dominant ones coerced their subordinate partners into the start zone to enable the trial to begin, and then monopolized the rewards. By contrast, Choe and colleagues found that most animals that were rewarded with WBS developed and maintained a simple alternate-side-allocation rule: each mouse in a pair monopolized only one reward chamber and avoided the other (Fig. 1d). As a result, one mouse gained rewards in trials when the left-hand chamber was the reward chamber, and the other gained rewards when the right-hand chamber was the reward chamber. By following this rule, mice increased both the total amount of reward received and the equality with which that reward was divided.

More here.

Bill Bryson in Delancey Place:

Herbert Hoover went from a spectacular career in mining to international acclaim and celebrity in a war relief effort to derision and blame for the Great Depression.

…"Herbert Clark Hoover was born in 1874 thirty miles west of the Missis­sippi (he would be the first president from west of that symbolically weighty boundary) in the hamlet of West Branch, Iowa, in a tiny white cottage, which still stands. His parents, devout Quakers, died tragically early — his father of rheumatic fever when little Bert was just six, his mother of typhoid fever three years later — and he was sent to live with an uncle and aunt in Oregon. …"Though he never finished high school — his uncle, disregarding his brightness, sent him to work as an office boy in Salem, Oregon, instead­ — Hoover nurtured a fierce ambition to better himself. In 1891, at age sev­enteen, he passed the entrance examinations for the brand-new Leland Stanford Junior University (or just Stanford as we now know it), which then was a free school. As a member of Stanford's first-ever class, he studied geology and also met there his future wife, Lou Henry, who by chance was also from Iowa. (They would marry in 1899.) Upon graduat­ing, Hoover took the only job he could find, in a gold mine in Nevada City, California, loading and pushing an ore cart ten hours a day seven days a week for 20 cents an hour — a meager salary even then. That this was the permanent lot for his fellow miners seems never to have troubled him. Hoover was a great believer in — and a living embodiment of — the notion of personal responsibility.

Bill Moyers at his own website:

Our times at last have found their voice, and it belongs to a Pakistani American: Ayad Akhtar, born in New York, raised in Wisconsin, an alum of Brown and Columbia, actor, novelist, screenwriter and playwright, with an ever-soliciting eye for the wickedness and wonders of the world. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, his plays revel in the combustions of an America on edge, bursting with excess — too much of everything, from wealth and impoverishment to religion, rage and radicalism, from sad hearts and hollow souls and shifting identities to the glorious celebration of money. Perhaps that should be the inglorious celebration of money: E Pluribus Unum transformed into Every Man a Midas. His latest play, Junk, is running through Jan. 7 at the Vivian Beaumont Theatre at Lincoln Center: Lucky you if you can get there over the holidays. One critic calls Junk “an epic, strutting, restless, sexually charged, slam-bang-wham piece of work… A Shakespearan history play of spiraling national consequence.” That’s too modest; Junk is not only history but prophecy. A Biblical-like account of who’s running America — and how. Last week, before I announced that I would be signing off in retirement again, I asked Ayad to join me for this conversation, the last in a series. We had a great time together; it was worth the wait.

Bill Moyers: When your play Junk came to an end, I sat there in my seat, marveling that what I had just seen on the stage was fiction which from my own experience as a journalist I knew to be true.

Ayad Akhtar: Well, Picasso says that art is the lie that tells the truth. So if this absorption in the fictional doings of people is oriented toward the truth in some way — the truth of society or a character or a situation — then you get to the end hopefully having had that experience. I’m very gratified to hear that you did.

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Bridget Heal at History Today:

Five hundred years ago, in an obscure town in a remote part of Germany, an Augustinian friar set in train a series of events that led to the permanent splintering of western Christendom. The story of Martin Luther posting his Ninety-Five Theses against Indulgences to the door of the castle chapel in Wittenberg is a defining moment in German history. But what were the origins of Luther’s movement for religious reform? How should we understand the individuals and the events that propelled his protest from Wittenberg onto the European stage? And how can we explain the Reformation’s significance in the context of contemporary concerns?

The eldest of nine siblings, Martin Luther was born in Eisleben in the county of Mansfeld on November 10th, 1483. His origins were relatively lowly: ‘I am a peasant’s son; my great-grandfather, my grandfather, my father were true peasants’, he commented later in life. This was an exaggeration. Although his family was of peasant origin, his father, Hans Luder, had become a senior figure in the local mining industry and wanted his eldest son to study law. Luther attended school in Magdeburg and Eisenach and in 1501 he enrolled at the university in Erfurt, where he gained a master’s degree in 1505.

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Anne Elizabeth Moore at The Baffler:

SOME HOLLYWOOD TYPES are offering a bus tour of the city I live in and I leap at the opportunity. My presence, however, seems to raise questions about whether a writer for the national press can possibly live in Detroit. This does not bode well for the excursion, which is teeming with entertainment reporters from New York and LA, who speculate on what can be seen out the windows based on two sources of information: the ruin porn that’s dominated media since a famed 2009 Time cover story proclaimed the city a “tragedy,” and Kathryn Bigelow’s latest film, which distills five famously violent days from the city’s 316-year history into a story about one very—very—bad night.

Fifty years and two days prior, Detroit police had raided an unlicensed club—a “blind pig”—one hot summer night, making mass arrests. Bystanders grew agitated, then outraged. The display of force had hit a nerve. The officers were members of the city’s 95 percent white police force and the arrestees primarily black. The agitation in the streets spread, despite police pressure, and Michigan Governor George Romney called in the National Guard—only increasing hostilities.

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Patricia Lockwood at the LRB:

The first thoughts about Joan Didion are not reasonable. The present literature about her is a hagiography that does not entirely trust itself; there is a vacancy at the centre of it that I call the ‘but surely’. But surely if these essays were published now, the hagiography says to itself at three in the morning, they would meet with a different reception? But surely if she wrote today, her ideas about feminism would be more in line with ours? But surely, for all her pointillism, she is failing to draw the conclusions we would most like to see? The hagiography turns the pillow over, looking for a cool spot. How much can we really rely on someone who loved The Doors? Why do all her last lines give the impression that she’s speaking from beyond the veil? What, in the end, is she actually saying? But surely she has told us that herself, and all along. What she is saying, standing in the corner of every piece, holding her yellow legal pad and watching, is: ‘I was there.’

Jon Day in The Guardian:

^‘The fate of our times,” wrote the sociologist Max Weber in 1917, “is characterised by rationalisation and intellectualisation and, above all, by the disenchantment of the world.” Though its urgency was new, Weber’s anxiety – that the rise of monotheism, followed by the gradual secularisation of culture and the march of science, were robbing the world of wonder – was an old one. In “Lamia”, published in 1820, John Keats expressed a fear that Newtonian optics would “unweave” the rainbow. In 1949, the critic Lionel Trilling warned of the “reductive spectre” of psychoanalysis which, he thought, “haunts our culture”. Nowadays, Trilling’s spectre has been replaced by what the writer and retired medical physician Raymond Tallis has identified as contemporary culture’s propensity toward “neuromania”: the belief that neuroscientific explanations for consciousness can fully account for all human experience and endeavour.

Catherine Saint Louis in The New York Times:

It’s the classic image of the holidays: Parents, siblings and their children gather around the family table to feast and catch up on one another’s lives. But it doesn’t always work that way. After years of discontent, some adults choose to stop talking to their parents or returning home for family gatherings, and parents may disapprove of a child so intensely that he or she is no longer welcome home. In the past five years, a clearer picture of estrangement has been emerging as more researchers have turned their attention to this kind of family rupture. Their findings challenge the deeply held notion that family relationships can’t be dissolved and suggest that estrangement is not all that uncommon. Broadly speaking, estrangement is defined as one or more relatives intentionally choosing to end contact because of an ongoing negative relationship. (Relatives who go long stretches without a phone call because of external circumstances like a military deployment or incarceration don’t fit the bill.)

“To the extent you are actively trying to distance yourself and maintain that distance, that makes you estranged,” said Kristina Scharp, an assistant professor of communication studies at Utah State University in Logan. Last month, Lucy Blake, a lecturer at Edge Hill University in England, published a systematic review of 51 articles about estrangement in the Journal of Family Theory & Review. This body of literature, Dr. Blake wrote, gives family scholars an opportunity to “understand family relationships as they are, rather than how they could or should be.” Estrangement is widely misunderstood, but as more and more people share their experiences publicly, some misconceptions are being overturned. Assuming that every relationship between a parent and child will last a lifetime is as simplistic as assuming every couple will never split up.

Myth: Estrangement Happens Suddenly

It’s usually a long, drawn-out process rather than a single blowout. A parent and child’s relationship erodes over time, not overnight. Kylie Agllias, a social worker in Australia who wrote a 2016 book called “Family Estrangement,” has found that estrangement “occurs across years and decades. All the hurt and betrayals, all the things that accumulate, undermine a person’s sense of trust.” For a study published in June, Dr. Scharp spoke to 52 adult children and found they distanced themselves from their parents in various ways over time. Some adult children, for example, moved away. Others no longer made an effort to fulfill expectations of the daughter-son role, such as a 48-year-old woman who, after 33 years with no contact with her father, declined to visit him in the hospital or to attend his funeral.

More here.