Jonathan Eig in Slate:

Elizabeth Gibney in Nature:

In 1989, surgery for detached retinas left Gilbert Lonzarich blind for a month. Rather than feel shaken or depressed, the condensed-matter physicist at the University of Cambridge, UK, seized the opportunity, inviting his graduate students to his house to share with them how exciting it was to adapt to life without sight. Lonzarich's embrace of the experience perfectly captures his approach to life, says Andrew Mackenzie, then one of those students and now a director at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Physics of Solids in Dresden, Germany. “Gil is one of the most positive people I've ever met. He finds interest in everything,” he says.

For more than 40 years, that optimism and curiosity has led Lonzarich to probe materials in ways never thought possible. In pioneering experiments in the 1990s, his team showed that pushing magnetic compounds to extreme pressures and close to absolute zero can make some of them conduct electricity without resistance¹. This flew in the face of convention, which declared that magnetism and superconductivity could never mix. “It was as if nowadays you were talking about finding aliens or something,” says Malte Grosche, a colleague at Cambridge. That work showed physicists a new way to hunt for superconductors, which lie at the heart of technologies such as magnetic resonance imagers and particle accelerators. In recent years, it has offered a potential explanation for why some materials remain superconductors at temperatures much higher than absolute zero, which could pave the way to developing efficient, cheap devices that superconduct at room temperature. But the experiments have had an impact well beyond superconductivity. Lonzarich's method of subjecting materials to extreme conditions has become a general recipe for discovering new states of matter. Around the world, physicists now use this approach to probe a range of materials in which the collective interactions of electrons can give rise to unusual behaviour. Some of these phenomena could potentially revolutionize computing.

More here.

Joseph Dethomas in 38 North:

“The lamps are going out all over Europe. We shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.”

— Sir Edward Grey, British Foreign Secretary, August 3, 1914

US President Donald Trump’s speech to the United Nations General Assembly on September 19 may well come to be viewed as “historic,” but not in a good way. This article will leave for others the impact of Donald Trump’s and Kim Jong Un’s reality TV show rhetoric. But the substance of Trump’s speech—including threats to both North Korea and the Iran deal—may have closed any remaining doors to a diplomatic resolution to this crisis surrounding North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs. Moreover, Trump’s speech and the North Korean reaction seem to have set us on a path that could very well end in a major war in Asia. The escalating threats and the closing off of diplomatic options by both sides makes it now more likely than ever that President Trump will have to make good on his threat to “utterly destroy” a nation of 25 million people. The strategic consequences of carrying out this threat, even if successful, will be felt for the remainder of this century, largely to the detriment of the United States and the Western World.

Major wars are not created with a single action. They flow from a series of decisions that drive participants towards a sense that no other action but war can extricate them from their predicament. For example, many historians now credit Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany’s July 2, 1914 telegram to the Austrian government, which gave his ally a so-called blank check to do whatever it wished in the crisis with Serbia, as the fatal step that set the machinery inexorably in motion for the catastrophe of World War I. Trump shares one common and dangerous trait with the Kaiser: both were amateur militarists given to public bluster and adopting an ultra-nationalist bully-boy style of diplomacy, in part to cover up vast weaknesses in their own characters and their lack of understanding of their countries’ true strengths. But neither of these individuals intended to unleash catastrophe. Certainly, the Kaiser would never have sent his blank check if he had known it would result in the fall of his own dynasty, the disappearance of centuries-old empires, the death of millions, and the emergence of Nazism in his country. No doubt, Trump sees himself as a heroic figure standing up to a mad tyrant using rhetoric, economic pressure and, if necessary, military force to break him. He does not see because he does not understand the vast risks he is running for his own citizens, or millions of residents of East Asia.

More here. [Thanks to Dan Dennett.]

Brett Frischmann and Evan Selinger in The Guardian:

Most of the headlines about technology in the workplace relate to robots rendering people unemployed. But what if this threat is distracting us from another of the distorting effects of automation? To what extent are we being turned into workers that resemble robots?

Take taxi drivers. The prevailing wisdom is they will be replaced by Uber drivers, who in turn will ultimately be replaced by self-driving cars. Those lauding Transport for London’s refusal to renew Uber’s licence might like to consider how, long before that company “disrupted” the industry, turn-by-turn GPS route management and dispatch control systems were de-skilling taxi drivers: instead of building up navigational knowledge, they increasingly rely on satnavs.

Fears about humans becoming like machines go back longer than you might think. The sort of algorithmic management we see in the modern gig economy – in which drivers and riders for digital platforms such as Uber and Deliveroo are dispatched and managed not by human beings, but by sophisticated computer systems – has its roots in a management theory developed by Frederick Taylor in the early 20th century. As a young man, Taylor worked as a shop foreman for a steel-making corporation in Philadelphia, where he diagnosed inefficiencies he saw as being products of poorly structured incentives, unmotivated and sometimes shirking workers, and a huge knowledge gap that rendered management ineffective. Managers, he proclaimed, knew too little about the workforce, their tasks, capabilities and motivations.

More here.

Stephen Squibb in n + 1:

Before the cops bought Dylann Roof a burger after he killed nine people in a South Carolina bible study and before Michael Slager shot Walter Scott in the back after a traffic stop and then planted evidence on his body; before Daniel Pantaleo choked Eric Garner to death on camera and Jeronimo Yanez killed Philando Castile for legally owning a gun; before Sandra Bland was found hanging in police custody and Heather Heyer was run over by the fascist James Harris Fields, Jr., and the police told the media he was “just scared”; before Jeremy Joseph Christian told two young women of color on a train in Portland, Oregon to go back to Saudi Arabia and then stabbed to death two of the three men who rose to defend them—“I’m a patriot! This is what liberalism gets you!” he shouted in court—before James Harris Jackson came to New York from Baltimore for the purpose of killing black men and stabbed 66-year-old Timothy Caughman to death while he was collecting cans; before John Russell Houser killed two women in a movie theater for watching a feminist film and before Robert Lewis Dear, Jr. was captured alive after killing three people—one of them a cop—in a Colorado Springs Planned Parenthood; before the police killed Freddie Gray in the back of a van and 12-year-old Tamir Rice in a park in Cleveland; after so many thousands of others but before all of these, officer Darren Wilson shot Michael Brown when he was standing in the middle of the street with his hands up in Ferguson, Missouri.

Wilson thought he was just killing an animal, an angry beast with the temerity to do something other than what he said exactly when and how he said it. The courts and his fellow officers agreed with him, and he was rewarded with early retirement. But Wilson wasn’t killing a creature like a dog or a pig whose complex emotional lives we routinely torture and destroy without consequence. He was killing a citizen of the United States of America, and these creatures are stubborn. They do not listen when you tell them that for 400 years reactionary violence has been part of the culture of this nation. They do not believe it when you point out that the Constitution has always been a hypocritical, contradictory, selectively-enforced document, only taken seriously by the weak-minded. They cannot be convinced that a garish rectangle set about with stars and stripes is just another piece of cloth. And so the protests began. In the streets, in the classrooms, and on the football field, when Colin Kaepernick began kneeling during the national anthem to draw attention to the blatant, doggedly consistent violation of American citizens’ rights to life, liberty, and due process.

What did they expect would happen? That’s the part that has turned me against more beloved members of my family than I would have thought possible. It’s not that they approve of the killing, here or elsewhere, it’s that they apparently share the widespread expectation that after the killing there would be no consequences whatsoever of any kind.

More here.

Lyndall Gordon at The New Statesman:

How Pleasant to Know Mr Lear!” is a comical self-portrait by Edward Lear, the Victorian poet of nonsense. This Mr Lear “has written such volumes of stuff!” His nose is “remarkably big”, his body “perfectly spherical” and his face, ineffectively hidden by an immense, bushy beard, “more or less hideous”.

Born in 1812, Lear lived much of his life abroad and eventually built himself a house above the sea in San Remo, north-western Italy. By 1879, when he wrote this poem, he had become a “crazy old Englishman”, who once could sing but now was “one of the dumms”. Lear relays this comedown with mild tolerance. A self-portrait by his imitator T S Eliot is harsher. In “How Unpleasant to Meet Mr Eliot!”, the author’s mouth is prim and his grimness and precision are forbidding. Both poets appear to toss off jingles, yet invite us to pick up a signal: beckoning through thickets of words towards what they secrete.

Jenny Uglow’s Mr Lear explores an “oblique” mode of confession behind the nonsensical mask. To read it is like walking behind a detective’s searchlight trained on the lines. The strength of this biography lies in this illumination of the life through the work, including Lear’s drawings and paintings. The approach expands on the explorations of Vivien Noakes in Edward Lear: The Life of a Wanderer, first published in 1968 and lasting through three editions. Both draw us into the purview of a guarded Victorian. Lear slips two unfunny lines into his pleasant self-portrait: “He weeps by the side of the ocean,/He weeps on the top of the hill.”

more here.

Siddhartha Deb at The Baffler:

Yet the book serves an unintentional purpose as a barometer for the times. Why is American liberalism unable to provide a better defense of its values than this? Always eager to pursue violations of human rights abroad, although only in those countries not directly in thrall to American power and capital, conditions at home could surely provoke liberals into a fresh appraisal of the significance of individual rights and a free press. But this is where liberalism’s long, benighted history comes to the fore, the flip side to its professed commitment to free speech, free elections, and free market. Lilla’s complaints about minorities and the disenfranchised, the supreme disdain revealed in his reference to the Democratic Party’s website, which includes links to seventeen groups, as reminiscent of “the website of the Lebanese government” brings to the surface American liberalism’s long history of red baiting and race baiting, its anti-communism and its anti anti-imperialism, its hostility toward Palestine and now to the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement.

It is fear that is the driving force of such liberalism and that pulses throughout this book. In good times, such as the flat terrain end of history promised not that long ago, this characteristic doesn’t surface. Instead, one gets arrogance and hubris, think tanks and op-eds, the certainty of everything in its right place. But now that the clamor of the world, its uneasy disturbances, are beginning to be felt even in the hallowed confines of Brooklyn and the ivory tower classroom, one sees the teeth behind the smile, the fist under the glove, and the common cause between the prissy men with advanced degrees and the demented ranters on Fox News.

more here.

David Thomson at the LRB:

The Vietnam War, a film made by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, comes in ten parts, with beginnings, middles and end credits; and lasts 18 hours altogether, which some may feel is a lot to ask of busy, anxious wrecks who have their own troubles to patrol. Not that 18 hours on your couch, attending to war, is really so much if you need courage and history in your life. The film took ten years to make, at a cost of $30 million. That’s a lot of money by documentary standards, but it was done in the Burns tradition: there was a seeding deal with PBS, but the greater part of the money was raised by Burns himself, a visionary documenter of America’s past and a model businessman too. Even as he was launching the Vietnam series, he was working on another show, about country music.

The Vietnam War starts at the end of the Second World War, with the Japanese finished in Indochina, the uneasy resumption of French control, and their attempts to ignore the pressures of nationalism and the push for independence. And you follow it through to the end of the era called ‘Vietnam’, knowing that that time did not end in 1975, but will last as long as the walking wounded trudge on, and for as long as there is anyone left who understands the remark, made in the film, that ‘Vietnam drove a stake in the heart of this country’ – and knows that the country spoken of here is not Vietnam, despite its three million lost lives.

more here.

Ian McGuire in The Guardian:

We live in a world made up of competing and contradictory stories: stories about origins and identity, the good and the bad, the future and the past. Although we can never be sure that any one of these stories represents the absolute or permanent truth, some are more believable and appealing than others. While some encourage hope and tolerance, others foster only anxiety, anger or despair. But what makes one kind of story, one version of reality, more successful than another? Why do some live and flourish, while others are ignored or disappear? In the era of Twitter storms and fake news these questions are more important and pressing than ever, and they lie at the core of Marcel Theroux’s ambitious, if idiosyncratic, new novel. As he tells us himself, in one of the novel’s several moments of disarming directness: “The thesis of this book is that we are trapped in stories but that we may be able to imagine our way to better ones. There are other stories than the ones we have collectively chosen. There are second chances and redemption.” Theroux explores these big philosophical and historical questions through the life story of his protagonist Nicolas Notovitch. Notovitch, who is based on an actual historical figure, is born into a Jewish family in Crimea in the late 19th century, but at 17 abandons them and his Jewish heritage and begins a process of life-long reinvention, becoming first a journalist, then a propagandist, a spy, a revisionist biblical scholar, and finally the owner of a Parisian department store. He represents a modern cosmopolitanism that is open-minded and free-wheeling but also, on more than one occasion, morally vague. For Notovich the price of his escape from tradition is a kind of perpetual uncertainty; he is a man who is never entirely sure of himself, and whose story is, as a result, never exactly fixed.

…In the end, The Secret Books, having surveyed the miserable history of 20th-century prejudice and violence, puts its battered faith in the enchanting powers of art. If history forgets or represses certain stories, Theroux implies, then it may be the task of the artist to redeem and revive them. The novel itself becomes a solution to the problems it explores, a means, limited but real, of righting wrongs, and of making stories better known. After all, who would have remembered Nicolas Notovitch and his strange and complex history if The Secret Books had never been written?

Natalie Angier in The New York Times:

Tom Vaughan, a photographer then living in Colorado’s Mancos Valley, kept a hummingbird feeder outside his house. One morning, he stepped through the portico door and noticed a black-chinned hummingbird dangling from the side of the red plastic feeder like a stray Christmas ornament. At first, Mr. Vaughan thought he knew what was going on. “I’d previously seen a hummingbird in a state of torpor,” he said, “when it was hanging straight down by its feet, regenerating its batteries, before dropping down and flying off.” On closer inspection, Mr. Vaughan saw that the hummingbird was hanging not by its feet but by its head. And forget about jumping its batteries: the bird was in the grip of a three-inch-long green praying mantis. The mantis was clinging with its back legs to the rim of the feeder, holding its feathered catch in its powerful, seemingly reverent front legs, and methodically chewing through the hummingbird’s skull to get at the nutritious brain tissue within. “It was staring at me as it fed,” Mr. Vaughan said. “Of course, I took a picture of it.” Startled by the clicking shutter, the mantis dropped its partially decapitated meal, crawled under the feeder — and began menacing two hummingbirds on the other side. “Talk about cognitive dissonance,” Mr. Vaughan said. “I always thought of mantises as wonderful things to have in your garden to get rid of bugs, but it turns out they sometimes go for larger prey, too.” "It gave me new respect for mantises,” he added.

Mr. Vaughan’s sentiment is echoed by a cadre of researchers who place mantises in a class of their own among the swarming Class Insecta, and who are discovering a range of skills and predilections that make mantises act like aspiring vertebrates. Praying mantises are the only insects able to swivel their heads and stare at you. Those piercing eyes are much like yours, equipped with 3-D vision and a fovea — a centralized concentration of light receptors — the better to focus and track. A mantis can jump as unerringly as a cat, controlling its trajectory through an intricate series of twists and turns distributed across its legs and body, all to ensure a flawless landing on a ridiculously iffy target nearly every time. The mantis appetite likewise turns out to leap and bound, and with scant regard for food-chain decorum. By the standard alimentary sequence, insects feed on plants or one another, and then birds hunt down insects. But just as there are carnivorous plants like the Venus flytrap, mantises prey on hummingbirds and other small-to-middling birds more often than most people realize.

More here.

Justin E. H. Smith:

Many animals, not just humans, generate objects that resemble their generators. In most cases these objects are not held to be works of art, however, since they are not made for the sake of resemblance to their makers. They are not made at all, in fact, but rather molted.

At its most masterful, nature gives us ecdysis, the variety of molting common to many invertebrates. Unlike lizards shedding their skin, birds their feathers, or mammals their fur, insects and arthropods are outfitted with rigid outer casings, and so their molting involves something closer to a crawling out than a casting off.

Consider the scorpion as it sinks into apolysis, when the epidermal cells gradually separate from the hard old exoskeleton. A new cuticle begins to form, and the
creature within agitates, thrusting back and forth until the old integumentary shell cracks. It squeezes out, reborn. Let us imagine that it then turns and regards—perhaps with admiration, perhaps with disgust—the scorpion shaped, self-shaped monument it has, by nature’s necessity, cast off. The new creature appears neotenous, inexperienced, soft-shelled, while the outer casing it leaves behind takes on the appearance of a gutted and abandoned tank, dry and gray and dead, while still plainly retaining the figure of the life it once vehicled.

Can we easily distinguish between what the scorpion does when it molts and what we human beings do when we, say, sculpt the human form in stone? The most common means of distinguishing between the two sorts of production is that the human sculptings are representations of human forms, whereas molted exoskeletons or shells are not representations but rather the things themselves, or at least vestiges of the things.

More here.

Natalie Wolchover in Quanta:

Even as machines known as “deep neural networks” have learned to converse, drive cars, beat video games and Go champions, dream, paint pictures and help make scientific discoveries, they have also confounded their human creators, who never expected so-called “deep-learning” algorithms to work so well. No underlying principle has guided the design of these learning systems, other than vague inspiration drawn from the architecture of the brain (and no one really understands how that operates either).

Like a brain, a deep neural network has layers of neurons — artificial ones that are figments of computer memory. When a neuron fires, it sends signals to connected neurons in the layer above. During deep learning, connections in the network are strengthened or weakened as needed to make the system better at sending signals from input data — the pixels of a photo of a dog, for instance — up through the layers to neurons associated with the right high-level concepts, such as “dog.” After a deep neural network has “learned” from thousands of sample dog photos, it can identify dogs in new photos as accurately as people can. The magic leap from special cases to general concepts during learning gives deep neural networks their power, just as it underlies human reasoning, creativity and the other faculties collectively termed “intelligence.” Experts wonder what it is about deep learning that enables generalization — and to what extent brains apprehend reality in the same way.

Last month, a YouTube video of a conference talk in Berlin, shared widely among artificial-intelligence researchers, offered a possible answer. In the talk, Naftali Tishby, a computer scientist and neuroscientist from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, presented evidence in support of a new theory explaining how deep learning works.

More here.

David Kipen in the Los Angeles Times:

Lots happened in L.A. last night. Lives ended. Lives began. Couples fought, couples made up. A recently transplanted Manhattan-ite said, “All my friends are here!” I probably fell asleep with a book on my chest.

Eighty years from now, what record of these events will survive? Partly that depends on who keeps a diary, who writes to friends or family, who posts, who publishes a memoir and who doesn’t. For instance, 80 years ago this week, Ernest Hemingway, the author of “The Sun Also Rises” and “A Farewell to Arms,” grudgingly visited Los Angeles. He had once recommended the only way for a writer to deal with Hollywood: “You throw them your book, they throw you the money, then you jump into your car and drive like hell back the way you came.”

Why, then, did Hemingway make an exception in July 1937? It all had to do with a film that he and Dutch documentarian Joris Ivens had made about the Spanish Civil War called “Tierra de España,” or “The Spanish Earth.” He and a group calling itself “Contemporary Historians, Inc.,” including playwright Lillian Hellman; author of the U.S.A. trilogy (with its Hollywood-themed finale, “The Big Money”) John Dos Passos; poet Archibald MacLeish; and Dorothy Parker (who satisfied all three job descriptions and more), funded the picture out of their own pockets. The idea was to make a movie to raise money for the Loyalist cause. Every $1,000, they promised, would buy a new ambulance.

Fresh off a White House screening for the Roosevelts, Hemingway stayed only a few days in L.A. He made them count, fundraising for the cause everywhere he went.

More here.

Ivana Perić in H-Alter:

To commemorate Said and recall the magnitude of his works, we are in conversation with Judith Butler, Laleh Khalili, Avi Shlaim and Illan Pappé.

Judith Butler, philosopher and gender theorist, professor at Department of Comparative Literature and the Program of Critical Theory, University of California: Said understood the work of imagination:

"Said was able to imagine a world in which the legacy of colonialism could come to an end and a relation of equality in difference could take its place on the lands of Palestine. He understood the work of the imagination to be central to politics, for without an 'unrealistic' vision of the future, no movement could be made in the direction of peace based on a just and lasting solution.

He lived in the midst of conflict, and used the powers of art and literature, of the archive, testimony, and public appeal, to ask the world to imagine a future in which equality, justice, and freedom finally triumph over subordination, dispossession, and violence. Sometimes I think he was perhaps too good for this world, but that incommensurability between what he could imagine and what actually exists accounts in part for the power of his writing and his presence in the world."

More here.