Peter Brannen in The Guardian:

Many of us share some dim apprehension that the world is flying out of control, that the centre cannot hold. Raging wildfires, once-in-1,000-years storms and lethal heatwaves have become fixtures of the evening news – and all this after the planet has warmed by less than 1C above preindustrial temperatures. But here’s where it gets really scary.

If humanity burns through all its fossil fuel reserves, there is the potential to warm the planet by as much as 18C and raise sea levels by hundreds of feet. This is a warming spike of an even greater magnitude than that so far measured for the end-Permian mass extinction. If the worst-case scenarios come to pass, today’s modestly menacing ocean-climate system will seem quaint. Even warming to one-fourth of that amount would create a planet that would have nothing to do with the one on which humans evolved or on which civilisation has been built. The last time it was 4C warmer there was no ice at either pole and sea level was 80 metres higher than it is today.

I met University of New Hampshire paleoclimatologist Matthew Huber at a diner near his campus in Durham, New Hampshire. Huber has spent a sizable portion of his research career studying the hothouse of the early mammals and he thinks that in the coming centuries we might be heading back to the Eocene climate of 50 million years ago, when there were Alaskan palm trees and alligators splashed in the Arctic Circle.

“The modern world will be much more of a killing field,” he said. “Habitat fragmentation today will make it much more difficult to migrate. But if we limit it below 10C of warming, at least you don’t have widespread heat death.”

In 2010, Huber and his co-author, Steven Sherwood, published one of the most ominous science papers in recent memory, An Adaptability Limit to Climate Change Due to Heat Stress.

“Lizards will be fine, birds will be fine,” Huber said, noting that life has thrived in hotter climates than even the most catastrophic projections for anthropogenic global warming. This is one reason to suspect that the collapse of civilisation might come long before we reach a proper biological mass extinction.

More here.

Nagraj Adve in The Wire:

Experts have voiced their surprise that Hurricane Irma has surfaced so soon after Hurricane Harvey. In fact, Irma is being accompanied by Hurricanes Jose to its east and Katia to its west. Jose, itself close to Category 5, will be the second to hit the Caribbean islands in just a couple of days. It’s made some raise what is increasingly becoming an obvious question: to what extent does global warming have a role to play? To which I would add one voiced less frequently: why should those least responsible for global warming have to constantly face its effects? And what does it bode for the future?

Ocean water temperatures need to cross 26.5º C to depths of 50 metres for tropical cyclones to form. (It’s a necessary condition but not a sufficient one. Other favourable conditions are needed, for instance the absence of winds at a higher level that can interfere with hurricane formation.) Over 60% of the extraordinary amount of heat energy trapped by greenhouse gases since 1971 – about 170,000 billion billion joules – has gone into the upper oceans, according to the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report. It’s a number so bewilderingly large that an easier way of conceptualising it is this: averaged out each year, it equals 40-times the entire annual energy consumption of the US. The consequently warmer upper ocean waters ensure that, when other conditions are right, there’s a greater chance of hurricanes forming and sustaining themselves for a longer duration. Or getting more intense. Or them forming one after the other, as has happened with Irma and Jose.

Another way global warming is implicated has to do with storm surges now pummelling Cuba, followed by the US over the weekend. Swirling hurricane winds pull in massive volumes of sea water. Out in the open sea, those waters are forced downwards into the ocean depths. But once the hurricane approaches land, the shallower seabed means the excess water pulled in by the hurricane has nowhere to go, so it just piles up and overwhelms the shore.

More here.

Michael Grunwald in Politico:

The first Americans to spend much time in South Florida were the U.S. Army men who chased the Seminole Indians around the peninsula in the 1830s. And they hated it. Today, their letters read like Yelp reviews of an arsenic café, denouncing the region as a “hideous,” “loathsome,” “diabolical,” “God-abandoned” mosquito refuge.

“Florida is certainly the poorest country that ever two people quarreled for,” one Army surgeon wrote. “It was the most dreary and pandemonium-like region I ever visited, nothing but barren wastes.” An officer summarized it as “swampy, low, excessively hot, sickly and repulsive in all its features.” The future president Zachary Taylor, who commanded U.S. troops there for two years, groused that he wouldn’t trade a square foot of Michigan or Ohio for a square mile of Florida. The consensus among the soldiers was that the U.S. should just leave the area to the Indians and the mosquitoes; as one general put it, “I could not wish them all a worse place.” Or as one lieutenant complained: “Millions of money has been expended to gain this most barren, swampy, and good-for-nothing peninsula.”

Today, Florida’s southern thumb has been transformed into a subtropical paradise for millions of residents and tourists, a sprawling megalopolis dangling into the Gulf Stream that could sustain hundreds of billions of dollars in damage if Hurricane Irma makes a direct hit. So it’s easy to forget that South Florida was once America’s last frontier, generally dismissed as an uninhabitable and undesirable wasteland, almost completely unsettled well after the West was won. “How far, far out of the world it seems,” Iza Hardy wrote in an 1887 book called Oranges and Alligators: Sketches of South Florida. And Hardy ventured only as far south as Orlando, which is actually central Florida, nearly 250 miles north of Miami. Back then, only about 300 hardy pioneers lived in modern-day South Florida. Miami wasn’t even incorporated as a city until 1896. And even then an early visitor declared that if he owned Miami and hell, he would rent out Miami and live in hell.

More here.

Julia Felsenthal in Vogue:

Enter the New York City art gallery Sikkema Jenkins & Co. sometime between today and October 14, and you will encounter a world just as chaotic and dark and discombobulating as the one in which we live. That Chelsea space is where the Brooklyn artist Kara Walker—she of the massive and massively celebrated 2014 Domino Sugar factory installation—has mounted her latest work.

Walker’s subject matter is, and always has been, racism and misogyny and the way that America’s original sin of slavery continues to rot our country from the inside out. Her work, long before we elected a black president, long before we elected a white president single-mindedly intent on erasing the legacy of our black president, has served as an active, pointed rebuke to notions of a post-racial United States. First there were her silhouetted cutouts that packaged the nightmarish violence of everyday antebellum life in a jaunty, reductive, old-timey visual vernacular. That work, cunning and disturbing, won Walker a MacArthur “Genius” grant at the tender age of 27. Her installation several years ago at Brooklyn’s Domino Sugar factory, A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby, took things one step further. Her gigantic, glowing-white, Aunt Jemima-esque sugar sphinx, surrounded by shoe-polish brown sugar worker boys, relocated the slave trade to its natural terminus: a plant in the most metropolitan of northern cities, where supply met demand, where the fruits of slave labor were processed for the sweet-toothed (though not particularly sweet-hearted) American people.

More here.

Matthew Schmalz in Salon:

Seeing the devastation of Hurricane Harvey, conservative Christian pastor John McTernan argued recently that “God is systematically destroying America” out of anger over “the homosexual agenda.” There were others who disagreed over the reasons for God’s anger, but not necessarily with the assumption that God can be wrathful. Ann Coulter, a conservative political commentator, for example, said jokingly that Houston’s election of a lesbian mayor was a more “credible” cause of the hurricane than global warming. And, from the other side of the political spectrum, a Tampa University professor tweeted that God had punished Texans for voting Republican. He subsequently expressed regret, but was fired. It is true that many religious traditions, including Judaism and Christianity, have seen natural disasters as divine punishment. But, as a scholar of religion, I would argue that things aren’t that simple.

…The question of God’s anger is intimately connected to the problem of human suffering. After all, how can a loving God cause indiscriminate human misery? We first need to look at how suffering is portrayed in the texts. For example, it is also in the Book of Isaiah that we find the story of the “Man of Sorrows” – a man who takes on the sufferings of others and is an image of piety. While the Bible does speak of humans suffering because of their sins, some of the most moving passages speak about how innocent people suffer as well. The Book of Job relates the story of a “blameless and upright man,” Job, whom Satan causes to experience all sorts of calamities. The suffering becomes so intense that Job wishes he had never been born. God then speaks from the heavens and explains to Job that God’s ways surpass human understanding. The Hebrew Bible recognizes that people suffer often through no fault of their own. Most famously, Psalm 42 is an extended lament about suffering that nonetheless concludes by praising God. The Hebrew Bible’s views on suffering cannot be encapsulated by a single message. Sometimes suffering is caused by God, sometimes by Satan and sometimes by other human beings. But sometimes the purpose behind suffering remains hidden.

More here.

John Bew in New Statesman:

In the last two decades of the 19th century, a new word began to appear in the writings of biologists and zoologists across Europe, inspired by the work of Charles Darwin. “Degeneration” referred to a subset of the evolutionary story by which a species or subspecies began to lose ground in the evolutionary game. In his 1880 work Degeneration: A Chapter in Darwinism, the zoologist E Ray Lankester described the phenomenon as “a loss of organisation making the descendant far simpler or lower in structure than its ancestor”. For social scientists and political commentators, the implications for societies and nations of such findings were arresting. In Britain, discussions about degeneration quickly became entangled with fears of national decline. The world’s greatest empire was losing ground in the race with its rivals but was also suffering the effects of chronic complaints in its collective health: the consequence of more than a century of explosive industrialisation and chaotic urbanisation. In 1888, the Lancet, the foremost journal of British medicine, announced that degeneration was “undoubtedly at work among town-bred populations”, due to “unwholesome occupations, improper [diet] and juvenile vice”. While the process could be reversible, it was no longer possible “to ignore the existence of widespread evils and serious dangers to the public health”.

The story of the British state’s approach to poverty and welfare is not one of simple progress towards more benevolence and enlightened policy, but it does have some crowning glories. The watershed moment remains the publication in 1942 of William Beveridge’s white paper Social Insurance and Allied Services, which declared war on the five “giant evils”: “want, disease, ignorance, squalor and idleness”. Surprisingly for a government publication, it sold half a million copies, and abbreviated versions were dropped behind enemy lines as a declaration of intent – a domestic version of the Atlantic Charter – indicating the type of nation that Britain aspired to be at the end of the war.

More here.

Jordana Cepelewicz interviews Nigel Goldenfeld in Quanta:

Physics has an underlying conceptual framework, while biology does not. Are you trying to get at a universal theory of biology?

God, no. There’s no unified theory of biology. Evolution is the nearest thing you’re going to get to that. Biology is a product of evolution; there aren’t exceptions to the fact that life and its diversity came from evolution. You really have to understand evolution as a process to understand biology.

So how can collective effects in physics inform our understanding of evolution?

When you think about evolution, you typically tend to think about population genetics, the frequency of genes in a population. But if you look to the Last Universal Common Ancestor — the organism ancestral to all others, which we can trace through phylogenetics [the study of evolutionary relationships] — that’s not the beginning of life. There was definitely simpler life before that — life that didn’t even have genes, when there were no species. So we know that evolution is a much broader phenomenon than just population genetics.

The Last Universal Common Ancestor is dated to be about 3.8 billion years ago. The earth is 4.6 billion years old. Life went from zero to essentially the complexity of the modern cell in less than a billion years. In fact, probably a lot less: Since then, relatively little has happened in terms of the evolution of cellular architecture. So evolution was slow for the last 3.5 billion years, but very fast initially. Why did life evolve so fast?

[The late biophysicist] Carl Woese and I felt that it was because it evolved in a different way. The way life evolves in the present era is through vertical descent: You give your genes to your children, they give their genes to your grandchildren, and so on. Horizontal gene transfer gives genes to an organism that’s not related to you. It happens today in bacteria and other organisms, with genes that aren’t really so essential to the structure of the cell. Genes that give you resistance to antibiotics, for example — that’s why bacteria evolve defenses against drugs so quickly. But in the earlier phase of life, even the core machinery of the cell was transmitted horizontally. Life early on would have been a collective state, more of a community held together by gene exchange than simply the sum of a collection of individuals.

More here.

Stefan Wagstyl in the FT:

Gelsenkirchen stands at one extreme of the German economic scale, far removed from the rich metropolises of Hamburg, Frankfurt and Munich, and the hundreds of successful small industrial towns that form the country’s economic backbone.

As in many other poorer towns, the problems are not immediately obvious: with the help of central government funds, Gelsenkirchen has developed a modern pedestrianised shopping centre, a renowned concert hall and a world-class football stadium for Schalke 04, a leading Bundesliga side.

The residents walking about on a recent sunny day would not have looked out of place in a smart resort, in their designer T-shirts, jeans and trainers. As Annette Berg, the head of social services in the city, says: “Can you see poverty in Gelsenkirchen? No. Because [social security in Germany] isn’t so low that people look poor on the streets. They make sure their children dress well. But, without jobs, they cannot afford to do anything nice.”

Plenty of Doris’ neighbours in Gelsenkirchen are in the same rickety boat. Ravaged by the decline of coal, which once made it rich, the town ranks among Germany’s poorest. The unemployment rate last year was 14.7 per cent, the highest for any large town or city, and far above the 5.5 per cent national average. Household incomes are among the lowest, as are health standards, even among young children.

Such sentiments are now starting to drive political debate in Germany. Marcel Fratzscher, head of the DIW economic think-tank who has advised the SPD, says: “The economy is doing well. The big concern is about people who are being left behind.”

Ms Merkel’s conservative supporters have long disagreed: they have seen a need to assist particular disadvantaged groups, such as impoverished pensioners or the long-term unemployed, but no overall inequality problem.

More here.

Episodes from the TV show Ethics Matters are online. "Dr. Dan Halliday talks with the philosophers, and helps place their ideas in a real world context. All episodes are 12 minutes long."

EPISODE 1 – CONSEQUENCES

Interviewees Peter Singer and Caroline West explore consequentialism and ask would you, could you, kill to save others?

EPISODE 2 – MY RIGHTS

Interviewees John Tasioulas, Christian Barry and Peter Singer unpack the rights of an individual and explore intended and unintended consequences.

EPISODE 3 – OUR SOCIETY

Interviewees Liz Anderson and John Thrasher examine how society should be organised and wrestle with conflicting libertarian and egalitarian points of view.

EPISODE 4 – FREE EXPRESSION

Interviewees Robert Simpson and Caroline West explore the nature of free speech and the role of censorship.

EPISODE 5 – SHAPING OUR BODIES

Interviewees Julian Savulescu and Serene Khader discuss the effect of social assumptions on how we view our bodies, and the science we use to change them. [and more]

More here. Here, you can find a discussion on Ethical Consumption with Christian Barry.

Melissa Beck at Open Letters Monthly:

The classicist Anne Carson, in her book Nox which contains an English translation of a poem composed by the Roman poet Catullus, describes her experience with Latin translation: “But over the years of working at it, I came to think of translation as a room, not exactly an unknown room, where one gropes for the light switch.” For centuries, scholars have been groping around in that dark room, searching for that evasive switch whereby they might shine a new light on Vergil’s epic. John Dryden, Richard Lattimore, Stanley Lombardo, Robert Fitzgerald and Robert Fagles are just a few of the brave classicists who have attempted to render The Aeneid into fluid English that captures the poetry and brilliance of the original Latin. David Ferry, whose translation of The Aeneid will be published by the University of Chicago Press in September of 2017, is the latest scholar to add his name to this illustrious list of translators.

The language of the Ancient Romans is succinct and tight, oftentimes lacking grammatical structures that add to the complexity of a Germanic language like English. Latin contains no articles, has only six verb tenses, and has a much smaller vocabulary than most modern languages . Whereas word order is of the utmost importance in comprehending a sentence in English, Latin is inflected so that nouns, pronouns and adjectives are assigned different endings to indicate their case and use (subject, direct object, etc.) in a sentence. So how does a translator deal with these linguistic differences while at the same time taking into account the meter and figures of speech that are also contained within the lines of Vergil’s Aeneid?

more here.

David L. Ulin at the LA Times:

Nathan Englander is a fabulist: That’s the first thing to keep in mind. Even when he’s trafficking in the naturalistic — in his story “The Wig” from “For the Relief of Unbearable Urges” or in the magnificent collection “What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank” — he aspires to the lesson of the parable.

“Wouldn’t I hide you?” he writes in the latter, channeling Raymond Carver and the Holocaust. “Even if it was life and death — if it would spare you, and they’d kill me alone for doing it? Wouldn’t I?” That such questions are being asked in the pantry of a suburban house in Florida is the point entirely; we never know where our fables will come from or what form the allegory might take.

A similar sensibility marks “Dinner at the Center of the Earth,” Englander’s second novel (his first, “The Ministry of Special Cases,” came out in 2007): a kaleidoscopic fairy tale of Israeli-Palestinian reconciliation … or its inverse. Shifting fluidly among characters and settings, the book divides its action between 2002 and 2014.

The central character, if we can call him that, is Prisoner Z, a young American Jew-turned-Israeli operative who betrays his mission (or does he?) for a larger cause. That we do not understand, until late in the novel, what this means suggests the complex dance that Z must undergo.

more here.

Michael Dirda at The Washington Post:

In “Frames of Reference,” one of the chapters in John McPhee’s “Draft No. 4: On the Writing Process,” this longtime staff writer for the New Yorker visits his granddaughter’s 12th-grade English class. He brings with him a list of approximately 60 items mentioned in an article he has just written. “I would like to try that list on you,” McPhee tells the young people. “Raise your hand if you recognize these names and places: Woody Allen.”

All 19 students are aware of Woody Allen, so he starts going down his list. Only five hands go up for Norman Rockwell, Truman Capote and Joan Baez. Laurence Olivier gets one. In 2014 none of these high school seniors can identify Samuel Johnson. Or Sophia Loren. Or Bob Woodward.

McPhee doesn’t intend this to be shocking. He certainly knows the voting results if you were to ask other students about John McPhee.

No, what he means to emphasize is the brief shelf life of cultural references. Prose that overindulges in the hip can quickly grow incomprehensible or dated. Today’s “woke” and Adele are yesterday’s “keen” and Dinah Shore. So little abides and the present inexorably overwrites the past.

more here.

Amy Kind in Aeon:

Philosophers have a love-hate relationship with the imagination. René Descartes, for one, disparaged it as ‘more of a hindrance than a help’ in answering the most profound questions about the nature of existence. Trying to imagine one’s way towards metaphysical truth, he wrote in Meditations on First Philosophy (1641), is as foolish as falling asleep in the hope of obtaining a clearer picture of the world through dreams. Yet Descartes also relied heavily on imagination in scientific and mathematical essays such as The World (1633), in which he tried to conjure up the details of the basic building blocks for structures such as humans, animals and machines. According to the philosopher Dennis Sepper at the University of Dallas, Descartes relied upon a kind of ‘biplanar’ imagination, pioneered by Plato, in which one level of reality could embody and display relations that existed on a different level, and vice versa. The Scottish philosopher David Hume was equally conflicted about the imagination – especially when compared with perception and memory. ‘When we remember any past event, the idea of it flows in upon the mind in a forcible manner,’ he wrote in A Treatise of Human Nature (1738-40). But imagined images and sensations, he continued, are ‘faint and languid, and cannot without difficulty be preserved by the mind steady and uniform for any considerable time’. However, Hume also claimed that humans are most free when they’re engaging in imagination. Perception can show us only the actual, he said, but imagination can go beyond that, to the realm of the maybe, the what-if and if-only. Indeed, ‘nothing we imagine is absolutely impossible,’ Hume said.

What’s behind this apparent tension at the heart of the imagination? Hume put his finger on it when he talked about how our facility for fantasy helps us to move beyond and change our present reality. One need only think of how Leonardo da Vinci’s fantastical flying machines paved the way for the Wright brothers, or how H G Wells’s novel The War of the Worlds (1898) inspired the first liquid-fuelled space rocket, to see the truth of this insight. But imagination is also restricted by the extent of our previous perceptions and experiences, Hume said. ‘Let us chase our imagination to the heavens, or to the utmost limits of the Universe; we never really advance a step beyond ourselves,’ he wrote.

More here.