Maria Popova at The New York Times:

Central to LIGO’s success are its three original architects, known as the Troika: Rainer Weiss, the brilliant ruffian who invented the apparatus at the heart of LIGO; Kip Thorne, the revered astrophysicist and relativist with the wildly speculative yet mathematically precise mind, whose charisma saved the project from going under; and Ron Drever, the prickly Scottish genius considered a scientific Mozart — “a childlike spirit attached to a wondrous mind that just seemed to emanate astonishing compositions.” People, Levin intimates, are fragmentary but indivisible — they bring their aptitudes and their flaws to the work. Rigor and self-­righteousness often go in tandem, as do idealism and egotism. These scientists all contain multitudes.

Levin harmonizes science and life with remarkable virtuosity. As a boy, Drever made gadgets from bits of rubber tubing and sealing wax and built an entire television — possibly the only one in his Scottish village — on which locals watched the queen’s coronation. He carried this hacker spirit of zeal and frugality into his ingenious prototypes for LIGO. Thorne’s Mormon mother found her feminism incompatible with their faith, and the family broke with the church — the seedbed of the rebelliousness that made him a visionary scientist. Weiss’s youth in the golden age of high fidelity and his romance with a pianist catalyzed his obsession with making music easier to hear; he later envisioned an instrument to make the sound of space discernible. “LIGO covers the same frequency range as the piano,” he tells Levin.

These aren’t coincidences, Levin suggests as she dismantles the eureka convention of science, exposing the invisible, incremental processes that produce the final spark we call genius.

more here.

Jonathan Derbyshire at the Financial Times:

Frank’s argument in Success and Luck is easily summarised: the idea of meritocracy and the assumption that successful people get where they are solely by dint of their own efforts disguise the extent to which “success and failure often hinge decisively on events completely beyond any individual’s control”.

Take the case of Al Pacino. He has been at the top of his chosen field for so long that it’s hard to imagine an alternative history in which he did not succeed as an actor. Yet, Frank observes, Pacino owes his dazzling career to a “highly improbable early casting decision”: Francis Ford Coppola’s insistence, against the wishes of studio executives, that Pacino play Michael Corleone in the film adaptation of Mario Puzo’s novel The Godfather. The studio wanted Warren Beatty or Ryan O’Neal in the role, and only gave in when Coppola threatened to abandon the project. You might say that Pacino would have succeeded eventually anyway, but, as Frank notes, there are thousands of talented actors who simply never got the kind of break he owed to a tyro director in charge of his first big-budget film.

It is hard to think clearly about luck and success (although Frank makes a pretty good fist of doing so). This difficulty stems partly from the fact that we all share some very deep-rooted intuitions about concepts such as talent and entitlement or desert, which tend to collide with claims about the role that luck plays in our lives. Frank suggests, for instance, that it is “perfectly intelligible that most of us feel entitled to credit for possessing skills we did nothing to earn” — or at least for putting those skills to good use.

more here.

Jeff Waxman at The Quarterly Conversation:

There’s nothing terribly new about the confessional as a literary form. It can just as easily appear as swagger as it can an act of contrition, and this book has the flavor of both. And as a form, often in the guise of a personal essay, the confessional is having quite a moment. In the wake of the successful autoerotic exposures of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s multivolumeStruggles and the critically gorgeous self-scrutiny of Maggie Nelson’s more slenderArgonauts, there’s a contemporary appetite for the personal essay that has hardly been sated. And in the act of confession, there’s as much to be proud of in a debauched or dissolute life as there is to regret or repent. Lest the reader of this review fall into the trap most common for first-time encounterers of Frisch, this isn’t some kind of Swiss-intellectual misogynist rant, an I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell for the pretentious. It is very honestly self-interested and self-critical. It’s messy in the way that psychotherapy is messy, or that our unvarnished motives would be if the world could see them. It’s loving, in its way, and sadly aware of how much time has passed and how badly.

And I like the tendency in this kind of narrative to self-correct, to DAMN! oneself as Frisch does. To understand that the mistakes that we make are not just interpersonal, but a matter of style and substance. Frisch writes:

The morning sea beneath the deep clouds is the color of mother-of-pearl, the waves lifeless, the sun obscured. He finds it better to take off his shoes and walk barefoot, shoes in hand. Gulls over the empty beach, louder than any feeling, louder than the waves.

more here.

Revenge

At times … I wish
I could meet in a duel
the man who killed my father
and razed our home,
expelling me
into
a narrow country.
And if he killed me,
I'd rest at last,
and if I were ready—
I would take my revenge!

But if it came to light,
when my rival appeared,
that he had a mother
waiting for him,
or a father who'd put
his right hand over
the heart's place in his chest
whenever his son was late
even by just a quarter-hour
for a meeting they'd set—
then I would not kill him,
even if I could.

Likewise … I
would not murder him
if it were soon made clear
that he had a brother or sisters
who loved him and constantly longed to see him.
Or if he had a wife to greet him
and children who
couldn't bear his absence
and whom his gifts would thrill.
Or if he had
friends or companions,
neighbours he knew
or allies from prison
or a hospital room,
or classmates from his school …
asking about him
and sending him regards.

But if he turned
out to be on his own—
cut off like a branch from a tree—
without a mother or father,
with neither a brother nor sister,
wifeless, without a child,
and without kin or neighbours or friends,
colleagues or companions,
then I'd add not a thing to his pain
within that aloneness—
not the torment of death,
and not the sorrow of passing away.
Instead I'd be content
to ignore him when I passed him by
on the street—as I
convinced myself
that paying him no attention
in itself was a kind of revenge.

Andrew Solomon in The Guardian:

It would seem to make sense that doctors start off with youthful emotion and then graduate to a self-protective distancing, but in his award-winning The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, New York-based oncologist Mukherjee likewise speaks of being propelled willy-nilly into humanism: “I had never expected medicine to be such a lawless, uncertain world. I wondered if the compulsive naming of parts, diseases and chemical reactions – frenulum, otitis, glycolysis – was a mechanism invented by doctors to defend themselves against a largely unknowable sphere of knowledge.” Writing is a means to fight back against that defence. A doctor needs defences – but not too many. “It is an old complaint about the practice of medicine that it inures you to the idea of death,” Mukherjee writes. “But when medicine inures you to the idea of life, to survival, then it has failed utterly.” And elsewhere he observes: “Good physicians are rarely dispassionate. They agonise and self-doubt over patients.” He adds: “An efficient, thrumming, technically accomplished laboratory is like a robot orchestra that produces perfectly pitched tunes but no music.” Mukherjee chronicles his gradual revelation that while benevolence without discipline is an ineffective cure, precision without empathy is tone-deaf; his books, including the forthcoming The Gene: An Intimate History, can feel like overcompensation for the efficiency of his life as a physician.

How to bridge this gap? Part of it had to come from a study of what had gone before, but Mukherjee “had a novice’s hunger for history, but also a novice’s inability to envision it”. His books chronicle the emergence of that envisioning as he learned to reveal the vulnerability he shares with his patients. “Medicine … begins with storytelling,” he concludes. “Patients tell stories to describe illness; doctors tell stories to understand it. Science tells its own story to explain diseases.” In other words, explaining what is going on is part of the treatment itself.

More here.

Jennifer Ouellette in The New York Times:

Have you heard the joke about the elderly rabbi who tries to settle a bitter dispute between two men? The rabbi listens to one man’s case and pronounces him right. Then he hears the second man’s case, and concludes the second man is right. At this point his eavesdropping wife steps in and points out that both men can’t possibly be right. To which the ­rabbi replies, “And you are right as well!” That conundrum lies at the heart of two new books: Christophe Galfard’s “The Universe in Your Hand,” and Carlo ­Rovelli’s “Seven Brief Lessons on Physics.” Rovelli uses the case of the indecisive rabbi to illustrate the dilemma faced by theoretical physicists in the 21st century, except in this case what is under dispute are two competing “rule books” for reality: Einstein’s general theory of relativity, and quantum mechanics. Each functions perfectly well within its specific realm: Quantum mechanics governs the subatomic world of the very small, while general relativity describes how the world works at very large scales. But neither offers a complete description of how the world works.

Galfard is a protégé of Stephen Hawking’s, co-authoring a young adult book with Hawking and his daughter, Lucy, in 2007 (“George’s Secret Key to the Universe”). Those Y.A. roots show in “The Universe in Your Hand.” There’s a lot to be said in defense of plain, simple language, but in this case it proves a mixed bag. The earlier chapters read more like draft scripts for the television series “Cosmos,” covering very familiar ground (the sun, the moon, our solar system, stars and galaxies) without doing much to make the material seem fresh. More problematic is Galfard’s frequent use of the second person — no doubt to provide a stronger sense of immediacy for the reader — which wears thin rather quickly and adds a whiff of condescension to the overall tone. He also tends to repeat himself a great deal; for Galfard, if a point is worth making, it’s worth restating at least twice more. The book could easily be trimmed by a third by eliminating some of those redundancies.

More here.

Richard Bourke in The Nation:

Over the past 50 years, the philosopher who’s played the most significant role in the cultural life of the United States isn’t Richard Rorty, Jerry Fodor, or Martha Nussbaum, but rather Immanuel Kant. This is largely because of his impact on postwar trends in moral philosophy. Kant’s influence during this period coincided with the rise of ethics as a dominant concern in political theory. John Rawls, Ronald Dworkin, and Thomas Nagel are among the most prominent examples of this widespread tendency. It is possible to exaggerate the novelty of this development; after all, questions of morality have always had a place in reflective debate about politics. Yet the strict subordination of politics to morals in recent decades does represent some kind of departure, or at least a return to a style of Kantian thought that had long been out of favor. Compared with current tendencies in political philosophy, normative inquiry was of marginal importance to the leading political thinkers in the first half of the 20th century, among them Max Weber, Otto Bauer, Michael Oakeshott, John Maynard Keynes, Friedrich Hayek, Raymond Aron, and Hannah Arendt.

I don’t mean to suggest that these thinkers took no interest in human values. Because politics is a product of the struggle over values, political thinking can hardly avoid such a pivotal issue. But there’s a difference between the study of human preferences and attachments and a preoccupation with an ideal theory of value.

More here.

Andy Greenberg in Wired:

Reza, a 20-something mechanical engineer working at an automotive parts factory in the northeastern Iranian city of Sabzevar, takes his web videos seriously. He’s watched theTED talk of amputee snowboarding champion Amy Purdy“over and over again.” The YouTube videos of Boston Dynamics robots Big Dog and Cheetah, which most of us find creepy, he describes as inspirational. “I was mesmerized by those videos,” he writes in an email, asking that WIRED not use his real name. “I wonder what would happen if I had the chance to watch [them] when I was a teenager. I might have studied harder in college.” If those viral clips mean more to Reza than to the average American, it’s probably because he has to work so much harder to see them. YouTube is blocked in Iran. The TED site isn’t, but Iran’s trickling internet speeds make its videos virtually unwatchable anyway. So every couple of days, Reza plugs a USB drive into his satellite TV’s set-top box receiver and changes the channel to a certain unchanging green and white screen that shows only fixed text instructions. He sets the receiver to record to the USB. Then a few hours later he takes the resulting MPEG file on the USB over to his computer, where he decodes it with a piece of software called Toosheh. The result, each time, is more than a gigabyte of compressed, fresh digital contraband pulled directly from space, past both Iran’s infrastructure bottlenecks and its draconian censors.

Last month, a Los Angeles-based group of eight Iranian and American activists that calls itself Net Freedom Pioneers officially launched Toosheh, that free anti-censorship system. Toosheh, Farsi for “knapsack” or “bundle,” is designed to allow Iranians to use their ubiquitous TV satellite dishes as an alternative to the country’s underdeveloped and highly censored internet, where a government body called the Supreme Council for Cyberspace blocks everything from “anti-Islamic” sites to news coverage of opposition political groups. By broadcasting on its own satellite TV channel anddistributing a piece of Windows desktop software that can decode that satellite video stream, the Toosheh project sends thousands of Iranians a daily digital bundle of news articles, videos, and audio—everything from Persian music videos to critical news coverage of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. “When they use our software all the content disguised in the video file is extracted and opens in a folder for them,” says Mehdi Yahyanejad, the founder of Net Freedom Pioneers as well as Balatarin, a Reddit-like social news site in Persian. “It can’t be censored…it comes from the sky. Our users just get a big folder of content, and there’s no trace of it on the internet.”

More here.

John Horgan in Scientific American:

1. Have you become what you wanted to be when you were a kid?

Come on, that’s too high a bar! When I was a kid, I wanted to be the founder and ruler of a rationalist space colony, who also wrote video games and invented the first human-level AI and led a children’s liberation movement and discovered the mathematical laws underlying society.

On the other hand, as far as childhood dreams go, I have no right to complain. I have a wonderful wife and three-year-old daughter. I get paid to work on engrossing math problems and mentor students and write about topics that interest me, to do all the things I’d want to do even if I weren’t getting paid. It could be worse.

2. Why do you call your blog “Shtetl-Optimized”?

I get that a lot. It’s one of those things, like a joke, that dies a little when you have to explain it—but when I started my blog in 2005, it was about my limitations as a human being, and my struggle to carve out a niche in the world despite those limitations. It also gestured toward the irony of someone whose sensibility and humor and points of reference are as ancient as mine are—I mean, I already felt like a senile, crotchety old man when I was 16—but who also studies a kind of computer that’s so modern it doesn’t even exist yet.

Shtetls were Jewish villages in pre-Holocaust Eastern Europe. They’re where all my ancestors came from—some actually from the same place (Vitebsk) as Marc Chagall, who painted the fiddler on the roof. I watched Fiddler many times as a kid, both the movie and the play. And every time, there was a jolt of recognition, like: “So that’s the world I was designed to inhabit.

More here.

Sarah Larson at The New Yorker:

Prince moved in mysterious ways. He invented his own aesthetic, his own symbol, his own style of music. He was short and slim. He dressed in purple. He liked canes, pajamas, ruffles, scarves. He lived on a giant compound named after one of his songs, where he sometimes hosted mysterious, thrilling events with strict rules. (No cameras, no photos, no alcohol; he might play or he might not.) He was masculine and feminine and casually, frankly sexual. He was forever prolific. His music was deeply satisfying, with a sophistication that was both intellectual and physical. It got to us everywhere. When I first became aware of him, in fourth grade, it was because of “Little Red Corvette,” which sounded irresistibly cool, unassuming yet sly, brilliant but not necessarily indicative of the lengths that Prince would take us to. That became clearer when we heard “1999,” with its eye on the future, its talk of Judgment Day, purple skies, and destruction, and the sensible response of observing this calamity with dancing: “So if I’ve got a dime, going to listen to my body tonight.” That was 1982; one of the joys of being a young adult on New Year’s Eve as the calendar turned to 1999 was playing this song, dancing like a nut, and considering the passage of time. (I also loved that album’s single “Delirious,” a great, hyper song for a fourth grader to expend some after-school wiggliness on.)

“Purple Rain,” of course, was like a gift from the gods, and not just because of the churchly intro to “Let’s Go Crazy.” There was “When Doves Cry,” so smart and electrifying it was almost shocking. That fierce opening guitar lick, for starters, and then the beat—Prince’s beats! I’m going to cry—and then that weird, funky vocal, like a mouth harp or a rubber band, and then the minimal, irresistible melody, and the amazingly hilarious first line “Dig if you will the picture.” We dug it, all right.

more here.

Simon Winchester at Lapham's Quarterly:

Haiyan, the admiral might have pointed out, was only the latest storm in a sequence of climatological disasters that had started to spiral out of control as much as four decades before. The first in this cycle of catastrophes occurred south of the equator and flattened the Australian city of Darwin on Christmas Day, 1974. It was named Cyclone Tracy, and there has never been a more destructive event in all of Australian history.

Ten thousand of Darwin’s houses—80 percent of the city’s homes—were destroyed. They were nearly instantly demolished, reduced almost to matchwood and pulverized concrete. The process was identical, house after Christmas-decorated house. First the roof was ripped off its stanchions and whirled away into the rain-soaked night. Then the windows shattered, slicing people with slivers of glass. The walls would next blow out—people would speak of running in darkness and panic from room to room, locating by feel the bathroom doors and racing inside in the belief that the smallest room would be the strongest—only to find the outside wall gone, exposed to the darkness beyond, a frenzy of gales and rain.

Everything failed. The telephones were out. Electricity was down. Antennas were blown down. Aircraft had been tossed about like chaff, smashed beyond recognition. Ships broke loose in the harbor, and sank or drifted far from their moorings, useless. Scores of people who might have helped were away for the Christmas holiday. The broadcast stations had only skeleton crews and no light or water—though one of them, the local Australian Broadcasting Corporation station, managed to get messages out to an affiliate station in the Queensland outback.

more here.

Pedro Nicolaci da Costa at Foreign Policy:

It’s not like we didn’t know what was going on. But the “Panama Papers,” the largest-ever document leak and one that implicates political leaders and business executives around the world, confirms it — cementing a widespread distrust of public and private institutions in the global economy.

It remains to be seen whether the scale of the revelations, whose full scope is only slowly starting to emerge, will be a catalyst for positive change or just more fodder for curmudgeonly conspiracy theorists. But one thing is clear: The debate over global economic policy is going to be deeply affected for a while to come.

The epic document dump, which includes 11.5 million files from the Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca, implicates a string of world leaders, their families, and close associates in an intricate web of shell companies constructed for the sole purpose of hiding money from tax authorities.

Following the Great Recession and world financial meltdown, policymakers have fallen broadly into two camps: those who see a significant role for official intervention through fiscal and monetary stimulus policies, and those who see government as the problem and push for structural changes to push it out of the way.

Both Europe and the United States imposed considerable austerity on government finances despite prevailing modern economic thinking suggesting governments should spend more, not less, in times of economic weakness.

more here.

Anna Nowogrodzki in Scientific American:

There’s a little too much wishful thinking about mindfulness, and it is skewing how researchers report their studies of the technique. Researchers at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, analysed 124 published trials of mindfulness as a mental-health treatment, and found that scientists reported positive findings 60% more often than is statistically likely. The team also examined another 21 trials that were registered with databases such as ClinicalTrials.gov; of these, 62% were unpublished 30 months after they finished. The findings—reported in PLoS ONE on April 8— hint that negative results are going unpublished. Mindfulness is the practice of being aware of thoughts and feelings without judging them good or bad. Mental-health treatments that focus on this method include mindfulness-based stress reduction—an 8-week group-based programme that includes yoga and daily meditation—and mindfulness-based cognitive therapy.

A bias toward publishing studies that find the technique to be effective withholds important information from mental-health clinicians and patients, says Christopher Ferguson, a psychologist at Stetson University in Florida, who was not involved in the study. “I think this is a very important finding,” he adds. “We’ll invest a lot of social and financial capital in these issues, and a lot of that can be misplaced unless we have good data.” For the 124 trials, the researchers calculated the probability that a trial with that sample size could detect the result reported. Experiments with smaller sample sizes are more affected by chance and thus worse at detecting statistically significant positive results. The scientists’ calculations suggested that 66 of 124 trials would have positive results. Instead, 108 trials had positive results. And none of the 21 registered trials adequately specified which of the variables they tracked would be the main one used to evaluate success.

More here.

Home
.
Driving Route 20 to Syracuse past pastures of cows and falling silos

you feel the desert stillness near the refineries at the Syrian border.

Walking in fog on Mecox Bay, the long lines of squawking birds on shore,

you’re walking along Flinders Street Station, the flaring yellow stone and walls
of windows where your uncle landed after he fled a Turkish prison.

You walked all day along the Yarra, crossing the sculptural bridges with their
twisting steel,

the hollow sound of the didgeridoo like the flutes of Anatolia.

One road is paved with coins, another with razor blades and ripped condoms.

Walking the boardwalk in January past Atlantic City Hall, the rusted Deco
ticket sign, the waves black into white,
you smell the grilled ćevapi in the Baščaršija of Sarajevo,

and that street took you to the Jewish cemetery where the weeds grew over
the slabs and a mausoleum stood intact.
There was a trail of carnelian you followed in the Muslim quarter of Jerusalem

and picking up those stones now, you’re walking in the salt marsh on the
potato fields,
the day undercut by the flatness of the sky, the wide view of the Atlantic, the
cold spray.

Your uncle stashed silk and linen, lace and silver in a suitcase on a ship that
docked not far from here; the ship moved in and out of port for years, and
your uncle kept coming

and going, from Melbourne to London to Kolkata and back, never returning to
the Armenian village near the Black Sea.

The topaz ring you passed on in a silver shop in Aleppo appeared on Lexington
off 65th;
the shop owner, a young guy from Ivory Coast, shrugged when you told him you
had seen it

before; the shuffled dust of that street fills your throat and you remember how a
slew of
coins poured out of your pocket like a slinky near the ruined castle now a disco in

Thessaloniki where a young girl was stabbed under the strobe lights—lights that
lit the

sky that was the iridescent eye of a peacock in Larnaca at noon, when you walked
into the

church where Lazarus had come home to die and you forgot that Lazarus died

because the story was in one of your uncle’s books that were wrapped in
newspaper in a suitcase and
stashed under the seat of an old Ford, and when he got to the border

he left the car and walked the rest of the way, and when you pass the apartment

on 116th and Broadway—where your father grew up (though it’s a dorm now)—
that suitcase is buried in a closet under clothes, and when you walk past the
security guard

at the big glass entrance door, you’re walking through wet grass, clouds
clumped on a hillside, a subway station sliding into water.
.

by Peter Balakian
from New Letters
University of Chicago Press, 2016

Lionel Shriver in Prospect:

From childhood, I experienced being female as an imposition. Growing up between two brothers, I was the one who had to wear stupid dresses, and worry about (the horror, in my day) letting my panties show on the swings. My brothers got to take off their shirts during sultry North Carolinian summers, while I wasn’t allowed to, even during the years my chest looked just like theirs.

Yet the impositions were just beginning. Periods were hideous. Did my brothers get puffy once a month, suffer terrible back aches and go back to wearing smelly de facto diapers? I was the one, too, who had the fear of God put in her about getting pregnant. In comparison to their sons, my parents clearly had reduced expectations for my career prospects. Ruefully, at 87, my father finally conceded last year: “You know, we may have underestimated you.” He still hasn’t quite brought himself to admit why: I was the girl.

But I was historically fortunate. By the time I entered university in 1974, a revolution was well under way. As I understood it, “women’s liberation” meant that the frilly cookie-cutter template of femininity had been chucked out. Being female was no longer defined in terms of skirts, high heels, and homemaking. Men and women were equal. Both sexes were just people. We had entered the post-gender world.

Fast-forward to 2016: I was wrong.

We have entered instead an oppressively gendered world, in which identity is more bound up in one’s sex than ever before.

More here.

Alison Gopnik in The Atlantic:

For 2,000 years, there was an intuitive, elegant, compelling picture of how the world worked. It was called “the ladder of nature.” In the canonical version, God was at the top, followed by angels, who were followed by humans. Then came the animals, starting with noble wild beasts and descending to domestic animals and insects. Human animals followed the scheme, too. Women ranked lower than men, and children were beneath them. The ladder of nature was a scientific picture, but it was also a moral and political one. It was only natural that creatures higher up would have dominion over those lower down.

Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection delivered a serious blow to this conception. Natural selection is a blind historical process, stripped of moral hierarchy. A cockroach is just as well adapted to its environment as I am to mine. In fact, the bug may be better adapted—cockroaches have been around a lot longer than humans have, and may well survive after we are gone. But the very word evolution can imply a progression—New Agers talk about becoming “more evolved”—and in the 19th century, it was still common to translate evolutionary ideas into ladder-of-nature terms.

Modern biological science has in principle rejected the ladder of nature. But the intuitive picture is still powerful. In particular, the idea that children and nonhuman animals are lesser beings has been surprisingly persistent.

More here.

An in-depth report on the inconclusive battle to take one little village called Kudilah exposes the weakness of the strategy to retake Mosul, Iraq’s second-biggest city.

Scott Atran in the Daily Beast:

It is April, and fighting is stalled, with part of the Iraqi army forces camped at the village of Kudilah and unable to advance because of fierce resistance and counterattacks by the so-called Islamic State. The research team that first came here in February to talk to fighters on all sides about a ferocious battle that was supposed to be over, or at least ending, is continuing its interviews.

Our aim is to better understand the “will to fight.” President Barack Obama and his National Intelligence Director, James Clapper, have called this “the imponderable” that has led to an overestimation of the allied ability to degrade and destroy Islamic State forces and an underestimation of their ability to resist.

At Kudilah, fighters from the Islamic State (also known by the acronyms ISIS, ISIL, and Daesh) are pitted against Arab Sunni tribesmen along with Kurds of the Iraqi Army and the Peshmerga of the Kurdish Regional Government.

American and German military advisors and contractors planned the battle, in part, to test out the coalition of forces needed for the eventual assault on the nearby city of Mosul, the second biggest metropolis in Iraq and by far the largest population center under ISIS control anywhere.

More here.