Therese Huston in the NYT:

Scott Schomburg in The Paris Review:

Workers wheel Ralph Ellison’s coffin to a vault at the Trinity Church Cemetery on 153rd and Riverside Drive in Manhattan: “There’s no room in the ground to be buried.” His mourners follow the pallbearers out of a small, unadorned chapel. Classical music plays faintly from a cassette player. The vaults, about fifteen feet high, look like “oversized pink marble post office boxes in the sunlight.” The George Washington Bridge is visible in the distance, darkly present in the afternoon haze, like a bridge to a world beyond our own. I’m reading an account of Ralph Ellison’s funeral, nine pages typed, hiding in a folder among the 127 boxes of Joseph Mitchell’s extant papers, at the New York Public Library. There is no byline, and it isn’t Mitchell’s prose. I stumble on it during my third day in the archives, sitting under lamplight at a corner desk in the Brooke Russell Astor Reading Room. Mitchell and Ellison’s friendship has never been documented, as far as I know, but here in the preserved debris of Mitchell’s life, Ellison fills an entire folder. Four, in fact. I keep reading: “The ceremony is perfunctory, and except for watching Joe Mitchell comfort Mrs. Ellison, his arms encircling her small body, his sorrowful face bent toward hers, you almost forget someone has died.”

Last March, during the second of six trips to the library, I spent a week reading Mitchell’s papers, attending to the details he also felt drawn to when assembling his portraits, the “scraps and crumbs and odds and ends and bits and pieces.” Mitchell’s stories reveal a writer who had little use for the spectacle at the center of things; he looked in the city’s shadows and at its dark edges for companions who reflected his own attitude toward life and death. So I began by following his threads, wondering if the truth of his life would be found beyond or beneath or adjacent to the legend that has grown up around him, in some as yet unexplored place or with the people surrounding his life—not only in the bound volumes of his work, but in his notes and collected objects, discarded things sacred only to him. My father joined me in the archives to help take photos, and I came back to Durham, North Carolina, with more than nine thousand images, including a photo for every page of Mitchell’s diary notes, all twenty boxes of them.

More here.

From Phys.Org:

"Because graphene is so thin, diffusion across it will be extremely fast," Kidambi says. "A molecule doesn't have to do this tedious job of going through all these tortuous pores in a thick membrane before exiting the other side. Moving graphene into this regime of biological separation is very exciting." Dialysis, in the most general sense, is the process by which molecules filter out of one solution, by diffusing through a membrane, into a more dilute solution. Outside of hemodialysis, which removes waste from blood, scientists use dialysis to purify drugs, remove residue from chemical solutions, and isolate molecules for medical diagnosis, typically by allowing the materials to pass through a porous membrane.

Today's commercial dialysis membranes separate molecules slowly, in part due to their makeup: They are relatively thick, and the pores that tunnel through such dense membranes do so in winding paths, making it difficult for target molecules to quickly pass through. Now MIT engineers have fabricated a functional dialysis membrane from a sheet of graphene—a single layer of carbon atoms, linked end to end in hexagonal configuration like that of chicken wire. The graphene membrane, about the size of a fingernail, is less than 1 nanometer thick. (The thinnest existing memranes are about 20 nanometers thick.) The team's membrane is able to filter out nanometer-sized molecules from aqueous solutions up to 10 times faster than state-of-the-art membranes, with the graphene itself being up to 100 times faster. While graphene has largely been explored for applications in electronics, Piran Kidambi, a postdoc in MIT's Department of Mechanical Engineering, says the team's findings demonstrate that graphene may improve membrane technology, particularly for lab-scale separation processes and potentially for hemodialysis.

Gabriel Winant in Dissent:

When I teach history classes, I often give students assignments that ask them to—as we say in the profession—“historicize” themselves. At a superficial level, it’s easy to absorb this fundamental insight of historical scholarship: that an individual’s ideology doesn’t come from inside them, but is an effect of time and place. But it’s much easier to understand how this was true of some stranger in the distant past than to accept it about yourself—that you’re a product of the social processes of your time, and your ideas are not crystals of pure rationality, but the residue of these processes.

Much of the indictment of mainstream journalists and politicians on the center-left boils down to this problem. The leaders of the Democratic Party and their loyalists seem to hear themselves as the sole voice of reason in an insane moment. They don’t grasp that they’re speaking a particular and provincial language—the institutional formalism and propriety of the professional middle class of the late twentieth century—and even less why that language enjoys less resonance now than in its 1990s heyday. The latest defeat—that of Jon Ossoff in the Georgia special election—illustrates this dynamic starkly: Democrats are sniffing for suburban votes where they can’t get a majority, while ignoring the people who might actually want to vote for them. The party appears committed to offering substantively vacuous defenses of formalism to an electorate whose dire needs have destroyed lingering faith in our residual institutional norms. Ossoff, who ran on a promise not to send impulsive tweets and studiously avoided actual policy discussions, embodies the problem: reasonability offered as the rationale for the Democrat, but no actual reasons. Conceding the election, the losing candidate delivered his speech in an imitation-Obama style. The principle of neoliberal governance—democratic politics as mere theater, markets as the real governors—became literal here: the Democrats banked their hopes on someone pretending to be a politician on the TV.

More here. [Thanks to Corey Robin.]

Kevin Hartnett in Quanta:

On a warm morning in early spring, June Huh walked across the campus of Princeton University. His destination was McDonnell Hall, where he was scheduled to teach, and he wasn’t quite sure how to get there. Huh is a member of the rarefied Institute for Advanced Study, which lies adjacent to Princeton’s campus. As a member of IAS, Huh has no obligation to teach, but he’d volunteered to give an advanced undergraduate math course on a topic called commutative algebra. When I asked him why, he replied, “When you teach, you do something useful. When you do research, most days you don’t.”

We arrived at Huh’s classroom a few minutes before class was scheduled to begin. Inside, nine students sat in loose rows. One slept with his head down on the table. Huh took a position in a front corner of the room and removed several pages of crumpled notes from his backpack. Then, with no fanfare, he picked up where he’d left off the previous week. Over the next 80 minutes he walked students through a proof of a theorem by the German mathematician David Hilbert that stands as one of the most important breakthroughs in 20th-century mathematics.

Commutative algebra is taught at the undergraduate level at only a few universities, but it is offered routinely at Princeton, which each year enrolls a handful of the most promising young math minds in the world. Even by that standard, Huh says the students in his class that morning were unusually talented. One of them, sitting that morning in the front row, is the only person ever to have won five consecutive gold medals at the International Mathematical Olympiad.

More here.

Zain Alam in The Miami Rail:

I am a Muslim. Minutes after I was born at the Flushing Hospital in Queens, New York City, my father whispered the shahadah into my ears: La ilaha il-Allah—There is no God but God. I was introduced to Islam with the world, and the rhythm of La ilaha il-Allah took the place of my mother’s heartbeat. All other experiences were subsequent to the rhythms of Islamic verse. In my childhood home of Kennesaw, Georgia and in cities across South Asia, I’ve heard the shahadah repeated daily in the azaan, which calls believers to prayer. No one disputes the beauty of the sound—the strong and sonorous voice of the muezzin casting a spell on its surroundings. At home, recorded azaans are played back by apps that have re-placed miniature mosque-shaped alarm clocks that double as home decorations. But their intention is the same: to invite us to prayer regularly, five times a day.

I am a musician. My songs take on new lives apart from me the moment they are shared. The long process of songwriting is how I try to do justice to what begins as a melody in a dream. My task as a composer is simply to submit to the dream, guiding it to structure and feeling it into form, through a private intuition that is informed by deep traditions. I may not know why singing songs—even when I’m alone—brings me such pleasure, but sharing them with others comes from a desire to make something that can find a life far beyond my own.

More here.

Patrick Stokes in The Conversation:

Every year, I try to do at least two things with my students at least once. First, I make a point of addressing them as “philosophers” – a bit cheesy, but hopefully it encourages active learning.

Secondly, I say something like this: “I’m sure you’ve heard the expression ‘everyone is entitled to their opinion.’ Perhaps you’ve even said it yourself, maybe to head off an argument or bring one to a close. Well, as soon as you walk into this room, it’s no longer true. You are not entitled to your opinion. You are only entitled to what you can argue for.”

A bit harsh? Perhaps, but philosophy teachers owe it to our students to teach them how to construct and defend an argument – and to recognize when a belief has become indefensible.

The problem with “I’m entitled to my opinion” is that, all too often, it’s used to shelter beliefs that should have been abandoned. It becomes shorthand for “I can say or think whatever I like” – and by extension, continuing to argue is somehow disrespectful. And this attitude feeds, I suggest, into the false equivalence between experts and non-experts that is an increasingly pernicious feature of our public discourse.

Firstly, what’s an opinion?

Plato distinguished between opinion or common belief (doxa) and certain knowledge, and that’s still a workable distinction today: unlike “1+1=2” or “there are no square circles,” an opinion has a degree of subjectivity and uncertainty to it. But “opinion” ranges from tastes or preferences, through views about questions that concern most people such as prudence or politics, to views grounded in technical expertise, such as legal or scientific opinions.

You can’t really argue about the first kind of opinion. I’d be silly to insist that you’re wrong to think strawberry ice cream is better than chocolate. The problem is that sometimes we implicitly seem to take opinions of the second and even the third sort to be unarguable in the way questions of taste are. Perhaps that’s one reason (no doubt there are others) why enthusiastic amateurs think they’re entitled to disagree with climate scientists and immunologists and have their views “respected.”

More here.

Arun Jayadev at the OUP Blog:

The evolution of the distribution of income among individuals within countries and across the world has been the subject of considerable academic and popular commentary in the recent past. Works such as Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century or Joseph Stiglitz’s The Price of Inequality have become unlikely bestsellers, garnering a startling degree of both academic and popular interest.

The last few decades have seen a sharp increase in global integration with its attendant benefits and anxieties. Concerns about the distributional effects of cross-border flows of trade and finance have grown and are central issues in political debates worldwide. At the same time, massive global inequities, dysfunctional polities, and the most egregious outcrops of these-civil breakdowns and mass migration have become the staple of mass media.

Also in the last couple of decades, for the first time in human history, we have the raw materials to measure the living standards of individuals across the world in comparable terms. The careful collection of survey information from almost every country in the world, led by national statistical offices and multilateral organizations, and the simultaneous collation and harmonization of price data by the International Comparison Project has made it possible, in principle, to truly understand and compare the fortunes of individuals in any country or region in the world with others from elsewhere.

Figure 1 (using data drawn from the Global Consumption and Income Project) provides a simple snapshot of the distribution of income. The height of the ‘skyscrapers’ represent average incomes in purchasing power (PPP) terms in 2005 for each population decile for over 150 countries in the year 2014. That is the height of each building represents the average income in 2014 in dollars for 10% of the population of a country, correcting for the fact that prices differ across countries. The height of each bar in the chart varies along two axes: the first, the horizontal axis is a ranking of countries from the poorest (the Democratic Republic of Congo) on the left of the figure to the richest (Luxembourg) on the right; the second, from the front to the back of the figure, shows the distribution of income from poorest to richest within each country. Note that the skyscrapers for some countries such as India and China are wider. This indicates their relatively large size of population.

Figure 1: average income of each decile of the population, $2005 PPP terms in 2014. Image by CORE, used with permission

As is evident, most of the ‘mass’ of income is on the right-hand side and at the back, indicating that most of world income is held by the rich in the rich countries. A relatively rich US individual sitting on his income skyscraper looks down on a world that is very far below him in terms of living standards.

More here.

John Mullan in New Statesman:

Why keep a diary? An absorbing and sometimes droll new exhibition in London surveys the history of diary-keeping, particularly over the past century, and gives sometimes contradictory answers to this question. It is a collaboration between the Centre for Life-Writing Research at King’s College and the Great Diary Project, the latter dedicated to rescuing and archiving a growing collection of diaries. The emphasis is on “ordinary” diarists, and on the ways in which keeping a diary has been changing over recent decades. In earlier centuries, the point of ­keeping a diary was to give a minute account of yourself to God. Diary-keeping was closely related to the growth of Protestantism. No wonder that those Protestant protagonists of 18th-century novels, Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, take so readily to diaries. Self-recording signalled religious self-inspection. The purpose remained powerful even as religious devotion waned. When he recommended logging 13 virtues a day, Benjamin Franklin was attempting an ­Enlightenment version of this. When he recorded his whoring as well as his intellectual conversations, James Boswell was not only boasting, but also puzzling over his own sinful nature.

Diary-keeping was therefore a discipline. Samuel Johnson recorded his need for a diary in order “to methodise my life, to resist sloth”. But then he never did it. This exhibition shows the uninitiated how diary apps can now make that struggle with sloth much easier. Sign yourself up, and the software will weave information about your whereabouts, the weather and contemporary events into your record. Just a few words from you can make an entry look rich. Modern diary-writers can bring to the form some of the self-seriousness that was quite proper in an earlier, religious age. A magnificently solemn quotation from Susan Sontag adorns one of the walls. “I know I’m alone, that I’m the only reader of what I write here,” she announces – to ­herself. “. . . I feel stronger for it, stronger each time I write something down.” Among the handful of celebrity diarists whose work is on show, the actor Kenneth Williams has something of the fierce purpose of self-investigation. A few pages of his copious journals display, in his appropriately fastidious script, his social unease, his frequent ennui and his fascination with his every physical ailment.

More here.

Philip Ball in Nature:

Lauren Cassani Davis in The Atlantic:

The former Yale English professor William Deresiewicz stirred up quite a storm earlier this month with his New Republic essay “Don’t Send Your Kid to the Ivy League”—a damning critique of the nation’s most revered and wealthy educational institutions, and the flawed meritocracy they represent. He takes these arguments even further in his upcoming book, Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life. Part cultural commentary, part philosophical treatise on the meaning of education itself, the book reads like a self-help manual for ambitious yet internally adrift adolescents struggling to figure out how to navigate the college system, and ultimately their own lives. Deresiewicz, who is also the author of A Jane Austen Education: How Six Novels Taught Me About Love, Friendship and the Things That Really Matter, spoke to me on the phone from his home in Portland, Oregon.

Lauren Cassani Davis: How does the phrase “excellent sheep” describe the typical student at an elite college today?

William Deresiewicz: The most interesting thing about that phrase is that I didn’t write it myself. It came out of the mouth of a student of mine, and just seemed perfect. They’re “excellent” because they have fulfilled all the requirements for getting into an elite college, but it’s very narrow excellence. These are kids who will perform to the specifications you define, and they will do that without particularly thinking about why they’re doing it. They just know that they will jump the next hoop.

Davis: Do you see a connection between this “hoop-jumping” mindset and other trends, like mental-health issues, on college campuses?

Deresiewicz: The mental-health issues, absolutely. People have written books about this—adolescent therapists like Madeline Levine, who wrote The Price of Privilege. These students are made to understand that they have to be perfect, that they have to do everything perfectly, but they haven’t turned to themselves to ask why they’re doing it. It’s almost like a cruel experiment with animals that we’re performing—every time the red light goes on, you have to push the bar. Of course they’re stressed.

This is also why they’re sheep, because they have never been given an opportunity to develop their ability to find their own direction. They’re always doing the next thing they’re being told to do.

More here.

Daniel Goleman at Edge.org:

These days I’m reflecting a lot on what a compassionate system would be. People generally know too little about systems, let alone about science. That’s one reason the current government may get away with enormous cuts to science.

I was talking to the dean of science at Columbia, who also runs a program at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia, which is in our backyard. He said research there—it’s a world leader in climate science—may get cut by 80 to 85 percent, which is astounding. It’s a huge crisis. Someone else I was talking to who runs a neuroscience lab says he's expecting a 20 percent cut. Twenty percent itself is crippling.

Why is it that a government can get away with this? Why isn’t there uproar beyond a narrow circle of scientists? Why is it that so few people understand science, per se? Part of it has to do with a general lack of awareness of the systems in which we’re enmeshed. The systems of energy and of technology, the systems of economics and of culture; the systems that would make more clear why science itself is so essential to the betterment of our own lives and of society, and what a researcher in a lab has to do with any of us.

There’s a huge disconnect.

More here.

Jason Smith in Evonomics:

Friedrich Hayek did have some insight into prices having something to do with information, but he got the details wrong and vastly understated the complexity of the system. He saw market prices aggregating information from events: a blueberry crop failure, a population boom, or speculation on crop yields. Price changes purportedly communicated knowledge about the state of the world.

However, Hayek was writing in a time before information theory. (Hayek’s The Use of Knowledge in Society was written in 1945, a just few years before Claude Shannon’s A Mathematical Theory of Communication in 1948.) Hayek thought a large amount of knowledge about biological or ecological systems, population, and social systems could be communicated by a single number: a price. Can you imagine the number of variables you’d need to describe crop failures, population booms, and market bubbles? Thousands? Millions? How many variables of information do you get from the price of blueberries? One. Hayek dreams of compressing a complex multidimensional space of possibilities that includes the state of the world and the states of mind of thousands or millions of agents into a single dimension (i.e. price), inevitably losing a great deal of information in the process.

Information theory was originally developed by Claude Shannon at Bell Labs to understand communication. His big insight was that you could understand communication over telephone wires mathematically if you focused not on what was being communicated in specific messages but rather on the complex multidimensional distributions of possible messages. A key requirement for a communication system to work in the presence of noise would be that it could faithfully transmit not just a given message, but rather any message drawn from the distribution. If you randomly generated thousands of messages from the distribution of possible messages, the distribution of generated messages would be an approximation to the actual distribution of messages. If you sent these messages over your noisy communication channel that met the requirement for faithful transmission, it would reproduce an informationally equivalent distribution of messages on the other end.

We’ll use Shannon’s insight about matching distributions on either side of a communication channel to match distributions of supply and demand on either side of market transactions.

More here.

Peter Temin in INET Economics:

Mass incarceration in the United States has mushroomed to the point where we look more like the authoritarian regimes of Eastern Europe and the Middle East than the democracies of Western Europe. Yet it vanished from political discussions in campaigns in the 2016 election. In a new INET Working Paper, I describe in detail how the US arrived at this point. Drawing on a new model that synthesizes recent research, I demonstrate how the recent stability in the number of American prisoners indicates that we have settled into a new equilibrium of mass incarceration. I explain why it will hard to dislodge ourselves from this damaging and shameful status quo.

Mass incarceration started from Nixon’s War on Drugs, in a process described vividly by John Ehrlichman, Nixon’s domestic-policy adviser, in 1994:

The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.

This was the origin of mass incarceration in the United States, which has been directed at African Americans from Nixon’s time to today, when one third of black men go to prison (Bonczar, 2003; Baum, 2016; Alexander, 2010).

Federal laws were expanded in state laws that ranged from three-strike laws to harsh penalties for possession of small amounts of marijuana. The laws also shifted the judicial process from judges to prosecutors, from the courtroom to offices where prosecutors pressure accused people to plea-bargain. The threat of harsh minimum sentences gives prosecutors the option of reducing the charge to a lesser one if the accused is reluctant to languish in jail awaiting trial—if he or she is unable to make bail—and then face the possibility of long years in prison. And the shift of power was eased by the pattern of financing. Prosecutors are paid by localities, while the costs of prisons are borne by states. The trip to the penitentiary does not cost prosecutor at all. “Instead of juries and trial judges deciding whether this or that defendant merits punishing, prosecutors decide who deserves a trip to the nearest penitentiary (Stuntz, 2011, 286; Pfaff, 2017, 127).”

More here.

Adam Kirsch at The Nation:

In Boyhood, Coetzee recalls that his own childhood relationship to Jesus was a combination of disbelief and an odd kind of intimacy. “Though he himself is an atheist and has always been one,” 
Coetzee writes, referring to himself in the third person, “he feels he understands Jesus better” than his religion teacher does. “He does not particularly like Jesus—Jesus flies into rages too easily—but he is prepared to put up with him.” Still, Coetzee finds himself drawn to Jesus, in particular when he comes to the point in the Gospel of Luke when the sepulcher is discovered to be empty: “If he were to unblock his ears and let the words come through to him, he knows, he would have to stand on his seat and shout in triumph. He would have to make a fool of himself forever.”

It is this kind of foolishness—this rejection of worldly wisdom, in the spirit of Jesus’s own exhortation to imitate the lilies of the field—that Coetzee dramatizes in his two Jesus novels. For as Childhood and Schooldays develop, it becomes increasingly clear that the figure of David is meant to illustrate, or incarnate, the scandalous freedom of Jesus’s teachings. Yet Coetzee brings out the parallels with a light, even teasing touch.

For instance, at the outset of Childhood, Simón tells everyone who will listen that he is not David’s father; rather, he met the boy on the ship that brought them to Novilla, and his mission is to reunite the child with his mother, which he is certain he can do, though he doesn’t know her name or what she looks like. Soon enough, Simón decides that he has found her in Inés, a woman with no recollection of David and no obvious qualifications for motherhood.

more here.

Emma Butcher at The Guardian:

We are currently in the middle of Brontë bicentenary mania. This year, on the 200th anniversary of his birth, we are diverting attention away from the famous sisters and focusing on the often-overlooked Brontë brother, Branwell.

We remember him as the failure of the family. Despite being a passionate poet, writer and artist, he failed to hold down conventional jobs, and repeatedly succumbed to vice. Finally, his world fell apart after the end of an affair with a married woman, Lydia Gisborne, which accelerated his dependence on opiates and alcohol. He died at the young age of 31 from the long-term effects of substance abuse.

Branwell’s legacy has been shaped by sensation, such as the story that he once set his own bed on fire, or the suggestion that he died standing up. His erratic, out-of-control behaviour has contributed to his legacy as the family’s black sheep.

This year, however, the Brontë Parsonage is trying to tone down the Branwell bashing, recognising his flaws but celebrating the merits of the brother with the salutary hashtag #TeamBranwell. The poet Simon Armitage is the museum’s creative partner for this bicentenary, curating an exhibition that pairs his own poetry with objects owned by Branwell; inviting us to reflect on the workings of his mind and our relationship with this problematic fellow. At the heart of the exhibition is a letter to the Romantic poet William Wordsworth. Branwell, then a earnest 19-year-old, encloses one of his own poems, and expresses his hopes and dreams of building “mansions in the sky”.

more here.