Debbie Chachra in Nature:

Late in the afternoon of 6 December 1989, a man walked into the École Polytechnique in Montreal, Canada, carrying a hunting rifle, a knife, ammunition and a grudge against women in non-traditional roles — in this case, engineering. He went from class to class, targeting female students. Fourteen women died. It remains the worst mass murder in modern Canadian history. At the time, I was an 18-year-old studying engineering at the University of Toronto. The shooting was a harsh lesson that some men don’t think women belong in science and technology. As I persisted in the field and became a faculty member, I heard this message again and again, albeit expressed less violently.

The latest instance comes in a ten-page memo written by James Damore, a Google employee who has now been fired by the company. He argues that women are biologically less suited for technical roles than men are, and that Google’s diversity efforts are therefore misguided. The flaws in his arguments (mainly cherrypicking and over-extrapolation) have been much discussed, but his biggest lapse was in not questioning his own assumptions and motivations. I have lost patience with arguments from people who think they are saying ‘what everyone is too afraid to say’ without recognizing that they are simply repeating what women like me have heard throughout our lives. When my colleagues and I do outreach to support women in engineering, we start with two arguments. The first cites social justice: women deserve the same opportunity to work and succeed as men do. The second is utilitarian: diverse teams of engineers do better engineering. After all, harnessing science and technology for the benefit of everyone demands an array of perspectives. These alone are solid reasons to reshape educational and professional environments in engineering to make them more welcoming. But there is a third argument that I make for people with scientific and technical backgrounds: if you value rationality and objectivity, you need to engage with gender bias. That’s because bias is part of us: we live in a world steeped in conventional gender roles. To borrow a metaphor from computing, biases have root privileges in our brains.

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Stephen Metcalf in The Guardian:

Last summer, researchers at the International Monetary Fund settled a long and bitter debate over “neoliberalism”: they admitted it exists. Three senior economists at the IMF, an organisation not known for its incaution, published a paper questioning the benefits of neoliberalism. In so doing, they helped put to rest the idea that the word is nothing more than a political slur, or a term without any analytic power. The paper gently called out a “neoliberal agenda” for pushing deregulation on economies around the world, for forcing open national markets to trade and capital, and for demanding that governments shrink themselves via austerity or privatisation. The authors cited statistical evidence for the spread of neoliberal policies since 1980, and their correlation with anaemic growth, boom-and-bust cycles and inequality.

Neoliberalism is an old term, dating back to the 1930s, but it has been revived as a way of describing our current politics – or more precisely, the range of thought allowed by our politics. In the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, it was a way of assigning responsibility for the debacle, not to a political party per se, but to an establishment that had conceded its authority to the market. For the Democrats in the US and Labour in the UK, this concession was depicted as a grotesque betrayal of principle. Bill Clinton and Tony Blair, it was said, had abandoned the left’s traditional commitments, especially to workers, in favour of a global financial elite and the self-serving policies that enriched them; and in doing so, had enabled a sickening rise in inequality.

Over the past few years, as debates have turned uglier, the word has become a rhetorical weapon, a way for anyone left of centre to incriminate those even an inch to their right.

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Jacob Heilbrunn in The National Interest:

In August, 1776, a large crowd gathered in front of a grand neoclassical mausoleum. It was designed by Scotland’s greatest architect, Robert Adam, and stood on Calton Hill in Edinburgh. One observer sardonically noted that it almost seemed as though the attendees had either “expected the hearse to have been consumed in livid flames, or encircled with a ray of glory.” To prevent the tomb from being desecrated by the devout, guards were stationed around the mausoleum for several days after the burial ceremony. A few years later, Adam Smith told a companion that the tomb was too ostentatious: “I don’t like that monument. It is the greatest piece of vanity I ever saw in my friend Hume.”

But this was an isolated reproach. No one went to greater lengths to defend David Hume’s posthumous reputation than Smith. Always more prudent than Hume—who was known as “the Great Infidel” and deemed unfit for tutoring the young—Smith, a venerated professor of moral philosophy at the University of Glasgow, was guarded in conversation about his religious skepticism. But after Hume’s death, Smith shed his habitual caution and composed a highly controversial supplement to Hume’s brief memoir My Own Life. It was called a Letter to Strahan. In it, Smith described Hume’s final months, emphasizing his affability and serenity in the face of illness and impending death. He observed,

Though Mr. Hume always talked of his approaching dissolution with great cheerfulness, he never affected to make any parade of his magnanimity. He never mentioned the subject but when the conversation naturally led to it, and never dwelt longer upon it than the course of the conversation happened to require.

Boswell, who visited Hume on his deathbed and wrote a famous account of it, was astounded by Hume’s phlegmatic acceptance of his demise. Dr. Johnson was not. After Boswell described his interview with Hume, Johnson, who was always beset by a profound fear of death and regarded Hume’s irreligiosity with abhorrence, commented that he had “a vanity in being thought easy.”

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Kat Rosenfield in Vulture:

The Black Witch centers on a girl named Elloren who has been raised in a stratified society where other races (including selkies, fae, wolfmen, etc.) are considered inferior at best and enemies at worst. But when she goes off to college, she begins to question her beliefs, an ideological transformation she’s still working on when she joins with the rebellion in the last of the novel’s 600 pages. (It’s the first of a series; one hopes that Elloren will be more woke in book two.)

It was this premise that led Sinyard to slam The Black Witch as “racist, ableist, homophobic, and … written with no marginalized people in mind,” in a review that consisted largely of pull quotes featuring the book’s racist characters saying or doing racist things. Here’s a representative excerpt, an offending sentence juxtaposed with Sinyard’s commentary:“pg. 163. The Kelts are not a pure race like us. They’re more accepting of intermarriage, and because of this, they’re hopelessly mixed.”

Yes, you just read that with your own two eyes. This is one of the times my jaw dropped in horror and I had to walk away from this book.

In a tweet that would be retweeted nearly 500 times, Sinyard asked peopleto spread the word about The Black Witch by sharing her review — a clarion call for YA Twitter, which regularly identifies and denounces books for being problematic (an all-purpose umbrella term for describing texts that engage improperly with race, gender, sexual orientation, disability, and other marginalizations). Led by a group of influential authors who pull no punches when it comes to calling out their colleagues’ work, and amplified by tens of thousands of teen and young-adult followers for whom online activism is second nature, the campaigns to keep offensive books off shelves are a regular feature in a community that’s as passionate about social justice as it is about reading. And while not every callout escalates into a full-scale dragging, in the case of The Black Witch — a book by a newcomer with a minimal presence online — the backlash was immediate and intense.

Based almost solely on Sinyard’s opinion, the novel became the object of sustained, aggressive opposition in the weeks leading up its release. Its publisher, Harlequin Teen, was bombarded with angry emails demanding they pull the book.

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Siddhartha Deb in The Baffler:

"MY TRUE OCCUPATION . . . is reading and, occasionally, writing,” the Urdu writer Naiyer Masud once stated with characteristic self effacement. Among his interests, he listed calligraphy, painting, music, and book binding, adding that he was also capable of “minor repair jobs around the house which have to do with plumbing, masonry, electrical work and carpentry.” A translator into Urdu of contemporary Iranian short stories as well as of Kafka’s work (collected under the title, Kafka ke Afsane), Masud lived in the North Indian city of Lucknow in a house called “Adabistan” or the Place of Literature. When it came to his own fiction, however, he confessed that he worked on it rather slowly, producing no more than twenty-two short stories in twenty-five years. In 2015, when Oxford University Press in India published an English translation of his Collected Stories, the number had expanded only slightly, to thirty-five stories.

Masud, who died last month at the age of eighty-one, performed his labors for the most part in obscurity. He wrote in Urdu, a South Asian language with a distinctive literary tradition that attracted writers with both Hindu and Muslim origins. Yet the partition that took place seventy years ago, on August 15, 1947, dividing the subcontinent into the separate nations of India and Pakistan, leading to the death of a million or more, the rapes and abductions of tens of thousands, and the displacement of between twelve million to twenty million people, also dealt out death by a thousand cuts to syncretic culture. Urdu, associated in post-colonial India exclusively with Muslims and Pakistan, became increasingly marginalized.

In the West, in spite of being translated into English with devotion and skill, largely by Muhammad Umar Memon, Masud’s work has appeared in scattershot fashion. With the bulk of his four collections divided into two volumes from two publishers, Essence of Camphor (The New Press) and Snake Catcher (Interlink Books), Masud’s fiction has not received the kind of coherent identity that comes to an author in translation when published by a single publishing house—an advantage enjoyed by, for example, Roberto Bolaño or Elena Ferrante.

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Tim Squirrell in Quartz:

The alt-right isn’t one group. They don’t have one coherent identity. Rather, they’re a loose collection of people from disparate backgrounds who would never normally interact: bored teenagers, gamers, men’s rights activists, conspiracy theorists and, yes, white nationalists and neo-Nazis. But thanks to the internet, they’re beginning to form a cohesive group identity. And I have the data to prove it.

The_Donald is a Reddit community with over 450,000 subscribers. It’s the breeding ground for the alt-right, and the fermenting vat in which this identity is being formed. According to data analysis by FiveThirtyEight, it’s US president Donald Trump’s “most rabid online following,” and Reddit itself now claims it is the fourth most visited sitein the US, behind only Facebook, Google, and YouTube.

As part of the Alt-Right Open Intelligence Initiative at the University of Amsterdam, I’ve been working to understand the language of the alt-right and what it can tell us about its members. Working with the UK Home Office’s Extremism Analysis Unit, I used Google’s BigQuery tool, which lets you trawl through massive datasets in seconds, to interrogate a collection of every Reddit comment ever made—all 3 billion of them.

Focusing on The_Donald, I used a script that lets you see which words are most likely to occur in the same comment. Combining this with a tool that allows you to look at the overlap in commenters between different parts of Reddit, I found that the alt-right isn’t just one voice: It’s made up by distinct constituencies that share different opinions and ways to express them, identifiable by the language they use and the other communities they post in.

In other words, there’s a taxonomy of trolls. So who are they, and what language do they use?

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Tamsin Saxton in Aeon:

There are also individual differences in partner choice. Your ideal partner is vanishingly unlikely to be my ideal partner, even if we are matched for gender, age and sexual orientation. To an extent, beauty is indeed in the eye of the beholder. But even these differences between people’s preferences are somewhat predictable: a person’s family influences the partner he or she chooses. Several studies have found that, on average, there’s some physical similarity between one’s parent and one’s partner. That is, your girlfriend might well look a little bit like your mother. This physical similarity is apparent whether you ask strangers to compare facial photos of partners and parents, or whether you assess things such as parent and partner height, hair or eye colour, ethnicity, or even body hair.

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Syed Jaffar Ahmed in Dawn:

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness … We were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way…

THESE lines were written by Charles Dickens in the background of the French Revolution. These hold true in a very different historical setting in which Pakistan was created and started its journey. It was a journey which began amidst conflicting rays of hope and despair, and belief and incredulity. Pakistan emerged on the map of the world as the solution of the communal question that had declined to be addressed within a wider united Indian framework that had made partition inevitable. The founding fathers had cultivated a very promising image of Pakistan, a country that would be a social welfare and modern democratic state, radiating all the virtues a common Muslim believes to be found in what was believed to be an Islamic state. The reality of Pakistan, however, unfortunately proved to be the nemesis of what had been cultivated.A lot of Pakistan’s saga has to do with its leadership.

…Our freedom is known for its being the work of just one individual, the Quaid-i-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah. Leonard Mosley called the creation of Pakistan a “one-man achievement”. More comprehensive was Stanley Wolpert’s depiction of Jinnah’s role in the creation of Pakistan: “… few individuals significantly alter the course of history. Fewer still modify the map of the world. Hardly anyone can be credited with creating a nation-state. Jinnah did all three.” However, while Jinnah’s unusual role makes him a unique figure, it also represents a weakness of our freedom movement which did not create a wider section of big leaders. Those who accompanied Jinnah were mostly not even his pale shadows.

…Pakistan’s drift towards authoritarianism from its very inception was detected gradually by historians and there has been a great deal of political literature on it since. But it’s a fact of history that the first who noted it were also the first who had to bear the ramifications of authoritarianism. These were our working classes, our intelligentsia, writers and poets. Who can forget the writings of Manto and Qasmi and the poetry of Faiz and Noon Meem Rashid articulating the trials of their times. Shouldn’t they too be counted among the founding fathers of our country?

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William Broad in The New York Times:

In 1932, William Beebe wedged his lanky body into a cramped submersible and became the first scientist to descend into the sea’s inky darkness. A tiny window let him gaze out. Later, he described an unfamiliar world of dancing lights, pale glows and beguiling shimmers. “It seemed to explode,” he said of one luminous creature. Nothing, he added in his book, “Half Mile Down,” had prepared him for the spectacular displays. The colors included pale greens, blues, reds and especially blue-greens, which by nature can travel far in seawater.

Over the decades, biologists learned that the creatures of the deep sea use light much as animals on land use sound — to lure, intimidate, stun, mislead and find mates. The living lights emanated from tiny fish with needlelike fangs, and gelatinous brutes with thousands of feeding tentacles. The sheer variety suggested that bioluminescence was fairly common, but no scientist came up with a measurement of the phenomenon. Now, 85 years after Dr. Beebe’s pioneering dive, scientists have succeeded in gauging the actual extent of bioluminescence in the deep ocean. During 240 research dives in the Pacific, they recorded every occurrence and kind of glowing sea creature — more than 500 types living down as deep as two miles. Then, the researchers merged the results into a comprehensive survey. The result? Most of the creatures — a stunning 76 percent — made their own light, vastly outnumbering the ranks of the unlit, such as dolphins. “People think bioluminescence is some kind of exotic characteristic,” said Séverine Martini, a marine biologist and lead author of the study, published this year in Scientific Reports. “Even oceanographers don’t realize that it’s common.”

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Zoë Heller in the New York Review of Books:

Perhaps the greatest service that the director Patty Jenkins does her protagonist in Wonder Woman, the Warner Brothers blockbuster released this June, is to give her a new set of clothes. The female superhero has been charged with various ideological impurities over the years—jingoism, a too-cozy relationship with America’s military-industrial complex, an excessively heteronormative lifestyle—but by far the most frequent complaints have been about her man-pleasing, bondage-inflected get-up. Those go-go boots! Those bracelets of submission! That quivering embonpoint! It’s hard to be taken seriously as a feminist icon when the only thing you’ve got to wear to work is a star-spangled corset.

The costume worn by Wonder Woman’s star, the Israeli actress and former beauty queen Gal Gadot, is altogether more stern. The kinky boots have been replaced by a pair of gladiatorial thigh-highs; the body suit, constructed out of some cunning alloy of spandex and bronze, is, if not quite armor, at least armor-themed. The outfit isn’t much less revealing, and only marginally more practical, than the old one. (It’s still strapless and her legs must still get rather chilly when she’s stalking villains in cold climates.) But it does at least communicate some martial ferocity and menace. Thus attired, Wonder Woman might plausibly intimidate even her haters at the UN.

Sadly, whatever fresh potency she has acquired from the wardrobe department is offset by the film’s anxious insistence on demonstrating the femininity that lies beneath her breastplate.

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Steven Nelson in the Washington Examiner:

The left-wing "Antifa" movement is rising in prominence after clashing with white supremacists in Charlottesville, Va., but one progressive scholar says the anti-fascists feed the fire they seek to extinguish.

"As for Antifa, it's a minuscule fringe of the Left, just as its predecessors were," Noam Chomsky told the Washington Examiner. "It's a major gift to the Right, including the militant Right, who are exuberant."

Many activists affiliated with the loosely organized Antifa movement consider themselves anarchists or socialists. They often wear black and take measures to conceal their identity.

Chomsky said, "what they do is often wrong in principle – like blocking talks – and [the movement] is generally self-destructive."

"When confrontation shifts to the arena of violence, it's the toughest and most brutal who win – and we know who that is," said Chomsky, a professor emeritus of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "That's quite apart from the opportunity costs – the loss of the opportunity for education, organizing, and serious and constructive activism."

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Amit Chaudhuri in The Guardian:

The idea that a “book of the year” can be assessed annually by a bunch of people – judges who have to read almost a book a day – is absurd, as is the idea that this is any way of honouring a writer. A writer will be judged over time, by their oeuvre, and by readers and other writers who have continued to find new meaning in their writing. The Booker prize is disingenuous not only for excluding certain forms of fiction (short stories and novellas are out of the reckoning), but for not actually considering all the novels published that year, as it asks publishers to nominate a certain number of novels only. What it creates is not so much a form of attention but a midnight ball. The first marketing instrument is the longlist (this year’s was announced last month): 13 novels arrayed like Cinderellas waiting to catch the prince’s eye. (Those not on the longlist find they’ve suddenly turned into maidservants.)

When the shortlist is announced, the enchantment lifts from those among the 13 not on it: they become figments of the imagination. Then the announcement of the winner renders invisible, as if by a wave of the wand, the other shortlisted writers. The princess and the prince are united as if the outcome was always inevitable: at least such is, largely, the obedient response of the press. And the magic dust of the free market gives to the episode the fairytale-like inevitability Karl Popper said history-writing possesses: once history happens in a certain way, it’s unimaginable that any other outcome was possible.

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Hilary Lamb interviews Mariana Mazzucato in Times Higher Education:

What are the greatest misconceptions surrounding innovation policy?

That innovation happens when the state gets out of the way. As I showed in The Entrepreneurial State, exactly the opposite is true. Many game-changing breakthroughs – the internet, biotechnology, nanotechnology and today’s emerging green technology – are the result of risk-taking, bold, entrepreneurial action by public sector institutions. But storytellers rule the world, and the idea of the lone, garage tinkerer triumphing against the odds is a great story. Steve Jobs coming up with the iPhone is a great story. But it’s only half true. Almost all the technological developments that made the iPhone possible were the result of state investments right along the innovation chain.

You argue that government is a market shaper: what do you mean by this?

Orthodox economics imagines a very limited role for the state in the economy – to fix market failures in areas where there is a clearly defined “public good”. But this model doesn’t do a very good job of describing how many public agencies have acted in the past, or of providing a policy framework for governments to apply the right lessons from Silicon Valley. From Darpa [the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency] and SBIR [the Small Business Innovation Research programme] in the US to [the venture capital fund] Yozma in Israel, and Sitra [the Finnish Innovation Fund] and Tekes [the Finnish Funding Agency for Innovation] in Finland, public agencies have actively shaped and created new markets. And arguably China is doing the same now with investments in new green technologies…instead of seeing policy as “intervening” in the market, we should see it as co-creating it. This also means that we need to be more vigilant about what is being created, and here civil society has a key role.

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Randy Dotinga in Christian Science Monitor:

On a February day in 1939, New York City cops gathered around Madison Square Garden to protect the 20,000 fascists inside and the surrounding protesters who numbered as many as 100,000. There wouldn't be a larger police presence in the city until 9/11. According to historian Arnie Bernstein, "the cops said they had enough men on hand to stop a revolution." The Nazi sympathizers in the arena, there to see the fascist German-American Bund organization, wouldn't have minded setting off a revolt. After all, in their minds, the man of the day – this was the Bund's “George Washington Birthday Celebration" – had helped spark a revolution as the "First American Fascist.” Outside, just as in Charlottesville, outraged protesters decried the hatred. "They were like what we saw in Charlottesville, a cross section of Americans," Bernstein says. "Young, old, black, white, Jew, gentile, people from political groups of all stripes, including Trotskyites and other fringe figures as well as more mainstream groups. It was a massive scene, and a few Bundists took punches as they left. Most tried to hide their identity as Bund members." The Bund and its toxic American fascism are largely forgotten now. But they were significant players in the America their time, says Bernstein, author of 2013's Swastika Nation: Fritz Kuhn and the Rise and Fall of the German-American Bund. In a Monitor interview, Bernstein talks about the roots of the American fascist movement, the parallels to today, and why Americans should not despair.

Q: What started this movement?

The German-American Bund was born out of various factions and groups that came into being during the 1920s post-war era, when Germans immigrants and descendants of previous immigrant generations in the US were faced with enormous prejudices. These groups looked back to the Fatherland, the rise of Hitler and National Socialism for inspiration. They adopted uniforms resembling those of SS and brownshirts, created family retreats where they could espouse their ideals in private with like-minded individuals, printed their own newspaper, and held parades among with other activities. The Bund was led by Fritz Kuhn, who labeled himself “the Bundesführer." Kuhn was a German immigrant himself and a Hitler loyalist.

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