Randall Fuller in Nature:

One night in 1851, Henry David Thoreau woke from a dream. In it, astride two ungovernable horses — literal nightmares — he galloped through the woods, “but the horses bit each other and occasioned endless trouble and anxiety, and it was my employment to hold their heads apart”. At that time, the 34-year-old naturalist–writer was trying to reconcile two contending forces in his life: the transcendentalism he had long espoused and the rigours of science he had recently discovered. Transcendentalism emerged in the mid-1830s as an intoxicating set of philosophical, literary and spiritual tendencies unified by discontent with American life. Its core tenet, derived from Romantic philosophy, was that God permeated everything. As the movement's best-known spokesperson, philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson, put it, “behind nature, throughout nature, spirit is present”. Transcendent divinity could be perceived only through intuition and inspiration — not through reason — and was best found in nature. This set of beliefs fuelled the experiment in self-reliance and simple living on Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts, in the mid-1840s that led to Thoreau's masterpiece, Walden, published in 1854. But something happened to Thoreau before his best-known book was finished, subtly changing its final form, making it more empirical, and thus scientific. Always fascinated by the natural world, he began to ponder more on its physical processes. Every day, rain or shine and usually for at least four hours, he tramped through the woods and fields surrounding his native Concord, collecting specimens and writing down what he observed in a series of small notebooks. He measured and weighed, pressing the leaves of red currant, poison sumac and many other species for his herbarium. In the evening, he transferred his observations into larger journals. Occasionally he worried about this new tendency. “I fear,” he wrote on 19 August 1851, “that the character of my knowledge is from year to year becoming more distinct and scientific — that, in exchange for views as wide as heaven's cope, I am being narrowed down to the field of the microscope.” He tried to fit the data he gathered into a larger, transcendentalist vision of the cosmos, but his focus was inexorably drawn to the material world.

In 1860, he encountered Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species, published the previous year. He was already familiar with Darwin, having devoured The Voyage of the Beagle (1839) almost a decade earlier. Thoreau first learnt of Origin at a dinner party on New Year's Day 1860, a gathering that included radical abolitionist Franklin Sanborn, child-welfare reformer Charles Loring Brace and transcendental philosopher Bronson Alcott. This quartet of progressive intellectuals discussed the book at length, and Thoreau was immediately captivated.

More here.

Bernie Sanders in the New York Times:

In 2016, the Democratic Party lost the presidency to possibly the least popular candidate in American history. In recent years, Democrats have also lost the Senate and House to right-wing Republicans whose extremist agenda is far removed from where most Americans are politically. Republicans now control almost two-thirds of governor’s offices and have gained about 1,000 seats in state legislatures in the past nine years. In 24 states, Democrats have almost no political influence at all.

If these results are not a clear manifestation of a failed political strategy, I don’t know what is. For the sake of our country and the world, the Democratic Party, in a very fundamental way, must change direction. It has got to open its doors wide to working people and young people. It must become less dependent on wealthy contributors, and it must make clear to the working families of this country that, in these difficult times, it is prepared to stand up and fight for their rights. Without hesitation, it must take on the powerful corporate interests that dominate the economic and political life of the country.

There are lessons to be learned from the recent campaign in Britain. The Conservatives there called the snap election with the full expectation that they would win a landslide. They didn’t. Against all predictions they lost 13 seats in Parliament while Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party won 32. There is never one reason elections are won or lost, but there is widespread agreement that momentum shifted to Labour after it released a very progressive manifesto that generated much enthusiasm among young people and workers. One of the most interesting aspects of the election was the soaring turnout among voters 34 or younger.

More here.

From Phys.org:

Machine learning, the field that's driving a revolution in artificial intelligence, has cemented its role in modern technology. Its tools and techniques have led to rapid improvements in everything from self-driving cars and speech recognition to the digital mastery of an ancient board game.

Now, physicists are beginning to use machine learning tools to tackle a different kind of problem, one at the heart of quantum physics. In a paper published recently in Physical Review X, researchers from JQI and the Condensed Matter Theory Center (CMTC) at the University of Maryland showed that certain neural networks—abstract webs that pass information from node to node like neurons in the brain—can succinctly describe wide swathes of quantum systems .

Dongling Deng, a JQI Postdoctoral Fellow who is a member of CMTC and the paper's first author, says that researchers who use computers to study quantum systems might benefit from the simple descriptions that neural networks provide. "If we want to numerically tackle some quantum problem," Deng says, "we first need to find an efficient representation."

On paper and, more importantly, on computers, physicists have many ways of representing quantum systems. Typically these representations comprise lists of numbers describing the likelihood that a system will be found in different quantum states. But it becomes difficult to extract properties or predictions from a digital description as the number of quantum particles grows, and the prevailing wisdom has been that entanglement—an exotic quantum connection between particles—plays a key role in thwarting simple representations.

The neural networks used by Deng and his collaborators—CMTC Director and JQI Fellow Sankar Das Sarma and Fudan University physicist and former JQI Postdoctoral Fellow Xiaopeng Li—can efficiently represent quantum systems that harbor lots of entanglement, a surprising improvement over prior methods.

More here. [Thanks to Farrukh Azfar.]

Jacob Mchangama in Areo:

It’s a paradox: The ability to communicate, spread and access information freely across borders and barriers has never been more readily available to people around the globe. Yet the belief in freedom of thought and expression as fundamental values underpinning an uber-connected world seems to be eroding. Even in democracies. Whether its American college students protesting (sometimes violently) speakers they disagree with, European democracies panicking about fake news, populism and extremism, or the American president labelling the media an “enemy of the people.” Instead free speech has increasingly come to be viewed as an excuse and a vehicle for racism, bigotry, populism, disinformation and a general threat to social peace, harmony and order. This is backed up by data from Freedom House showing that global respect for press freedom reached a 13-year low in 2016 following constant decline since 2004. The message in Reporters Without Borders’ (RSF) 2017 Press Freedom Index is hardly more uplifting:

“violations of the freedom to inform are less and less the prerogative of authoritarian regimes and dictatorships. Once taken for granted, media freedom is proving to be increasingly fragile in democracies as well. In sickening statements, draconian laws, conflicts of interest, and even the use of physical violence, democratic governments are trampling on a freedom that should, in principle, be one of their leading performance indicators.”

Using RSF data from 2016 all but two of 28 democratic European countries experienced declines in press freedom compared to 2013. A 2017 survey on the attitudes of 15-21 year olds in 20 countries around the world found that around half believe people should have the right to non-violent free speech even when it is offensive to a religion (56%) or minority groups (49%). And while 93% of American millennials favour free speech in general, these figures drop to 62% and 57% when it comes to offensive speech regarding religion and minority groups respectively. These figures drop significantly among millennials in other democratic countries such as France and the United Kingdom.

If we take free speech for granted and have become apathetic about its value that would not be the first time in history.

More here.

Justin E. H. Smith at berfrois:

It is hard to read about SETI and more recent related projects looking for intelligent life in the stars without discerning in them certain silent presuppositions about what counts or should count as intelligent life on earth. In particular, the search for intelligent extraterrestrial life is almost always taken to be the same thing as the search for technologically advanced extraterrestrial life. The search for other life that is intelligent in this respect is, in turn, almost always conceived as a search for any other intelligent life whatever, since it takes for granted that the search on earth has been exhaustive, and it has turned up no other species that are intelligent in any truly noteworthy way. The best candidates for intelligence among terrestrial species are taken to be the ones that have mastered some sort of modest technology: chimpanzees putting sticks down ant holes for example. On this scale, all other terrestrial species are bound to come in a distant second to homo sapiens. They use sticks, we use iPhones, etc., and thus no real comparison is possible.

Two considerations however compel us to question this approach to establishing a hierarchy.

First, it is not at all clear that tool-use, or a fortiori complex-tool-use, pertains to my own species essence in a significantly different way than it pertains to a chimpanzee’s species essence. If a chimpanzee and I were stranded on a desert island with only our wits to help us survive, I would not myself be able to build any tools, from available raw materials, that would be significantly more sophisticated than what the chimpanzee would come up with.

more here.

Natalia Zorkaya at Eurozine:

At the beginning of the 1990s, prospects for modernisation and democratic change in Russian society were linked to the younger generation. Sociologists identified the bearers of new values not only in the educated classes, or in the modern, more complex social environment of large cities and megacities, but first and foremost amongst the youth. At the beginning of the 1990s, young people stood out from other generations for their inclination towards liberal-democratic values, civil rights and freedom, their openness towards the West and their attitude towards social achievement and success. Even at the start of the economic reforms, when – after a short period of euphoric expectation that things would rapidly change for the better – the majority of the population was plunged into a state of frustration and confusion and increasingly took the view that any changes in the country were imposed from above, young people demonstrated a more positive attitude and were more content with their own lives.

Hopes that young people would be able to quickly adopt western ideas and democratic principles were also characteristic of the liberal and democratic parties and social movements of the 1990s. Ideas about how Russian society and its economy might be modernized emerged directly from the educated classes – primarily residents of large cities and youth – and involved complex ideas of justice, human rights, a democratic state, the independence of the judiciary, the protection of private property and so on. These social environments were expected to encourage the institutional consolidation of the values of democratic rule-of-law state, civil rights and freedoms and the displacement of former Soviet stereotypes and complexes.

more here.

Frank Furedi in Spiked:

Contemporary society has a paradoxical relationship with the ideals of human autonomy and self-determination. These concepts are rhetorically upheld as values that are fundamental to liberal democracy. Yet, in practice, the principle of autonomy is frequently dismissed as a myth or downsized into a relatively undistinguished second-order principal. Today, as in the past, autonomy is criticised from an elitist and paternalistic standpoint that insists that people lack the capacity, time, resources or opportunity required for self-determination. Critics of autonomy point to the power of the media, the influence of consumer society or the pervasiveness of ideologies to argue that ordinary people are far too overwhelmed by these forces to think for themselves and act in accordance with their interests. In one form or another, these illiberal arguments against autonomy have been directed at enlightened thinkers since the time of antiquity.

Human flourishing

The idea of autonomy is historically bound up with the quest to express and give meaning to human development and potential. Through the centuries, this search led to the crystallisation of the Enlightenment conception of personhood – the idea that personhood is accomplished through the exercise of personal agency and autonomy. Autonomy was understood as the expression of our personal, subjective, individual selves. Since the ancient Greeks, the development of the value of freedom was inextricably linked with the attempt to formulate an ideal of self-governance. Over the centuries, this quest for self-determination led to the conviction that human action and behaviour were not entirely determined by forces external to the individual. By the 18th century, an optimistic view of personhood became coupled with a moral outlook that claimed that the exercise of autonomy – of individuals making choices – was the precondition for the flourishing of humanity. The 18th-century Enlightenment regarded autonomy as an attribute of a person who engages with the world as an active, reasoning and conscious individual. The etymology of this word – autos (self) and nomos (rule or law) – conveys the meaning of self-rule. The term was first used in the Greek city states: According to one account, a ‘city had autonomia when its citizens made their own laws, as opposed to being under the control of some conquering power’.

More here.

From PhysOrg:

Impairment of a particular gene raises increases susceptibility to opioid addiction liability as well as vulnerability to binge eating according to a new study. Dysfunction of the gene, casein kinase1-epsilon (CSNK1E), increases opioid's euphoric response and produces a marked increase in sensitivity to binge eating in a female experimental model but not in the male. Similar to opioid addiction, very little is known regarding the genetic basis of binge eating. These combined findings provide further support indicating that shared genetic factors may underlie behavioral traits associated with the addictions and eating disorders. Furthermore, they also provide an important clue that the genetic basis of binge eating and eating disorders in women versus men is likely to differ. The findings appear online in the journal Genes, Brain and Behavior. Addiction is a multi-stage process that begins with drug exposure and the initial pleasurable experience and progresses toward tolerance, dependence, physiological and emotional withdrawal upon cessation of use, protracted withdrawal that can last years, and finally, relapse to drug taking. The genes associated with risk for opioid addiction could potentially affect one or more of these stages.

"Because increasing evidence points toward an association between CSNK1E and opioid addiction in humans, our findings indicate that genetic variation in CSNK1E could function as a potential risk factor that influences the initial pleasurable/euphoric response to opioids and thus, could ultimately have implications for personalized medicine with regard to drug choice for therapeutic treatment (e.g., non-opioid pain relief) and therapeutic dosing of opioids," explained corresponding author Camron Bryant, PhD, assistant professor of pharmacology and experimental therapeutics & psychiatry at BUSM. The researchers also believe the female-specific binge eating property associated with Csnk1e dysfunction suggests that different genetic loci (position on the chromosome) are likely to be uncovered for binge eating and eating disorders in women versus men and may lead to sex-specific treatments ultimately being developed for treating eating disorders.

More here.

David Papineau in the Times Literary Supplement:

What’s the purpose of philosophy? Alfred North Whitehead characterized it as a series of footnotes to Plato. You can see his point. On the surface, we don’t seem to have progressed much in the two and a half millennia since Plato wrote his dialogues. Today’s philosophers still struggle with many of the same issues that exercised the Greeks. What is the basis of morality? How can we define knowledge? Is there a deeper reality behind the world of appearances?

Philosophy compares badly with science on this score. Since science took its modern form in the seventeenth century, it has been one long success story. It has uncovered the workings of nature and brought untold benefits to humanity. Mechanics and electromagnetism underpin the technological advances of the modern world, while chemistry and microbiology have done much to free us from the tyranny of disease.

Not all philosophers are troubled by this contrast. For some, the worth of philosophy lies in the process, not the product. In line with Socrates’ dictum – “The unexamined life is not worth living” – they hold that reflection on the human predicament is valuable in itself, even if no definite answers are forthcoming. Others take their lead from Marx – “The philosophers have only interpreted the world. The point, however is to change it” – and view philosophy as an engine of political change, whose purpose is not to reflect reality, but disrupt it.

Even so, the majority of contemporary philosophers, myself included, probably still think of philosophy as a route to the truth. After all, the methods we use wouldn’t make much sense otherwise.

More here.

Dan Knopf in Quartz:

Being wealthy has become so passé that rich people are increasingly choosing not to display that wealth—that’s the theory behind a new book exploring the changing consumption habits of rich people in the West.

In 1899, the American economist and sociologist Thorstein Veblen published the classic polemic The Theory of the Leisure Class. Veblen’s book was among the first to examine how the wealthy used purchasing decisions to demonstrate their class. To describe this behavior, Veblen coined the term “conspicuous consumption”—defined as spending on publicly observable goods like clothing and accessories. Veblen argued, as an example, that the main point (pdf) of wearing high-heel shoes or a top hat for the rich was to demonstrate that you could not possibly do any manual labor. The book became well-known as an early criticism of the excesses of capitalism.

Almost 120 years later, sociologist Elizabeth Currid-Halkett has taken the baton from Veblen—but with a modified target. In her new book, The Sum of Small Things: A Theory of the Aspirational Class, Currid-Halkett takes aim at “Aspirationals”—the group that she sees as the new elite. They’re best characterized on the book’s webpage as:

Highly educated and defined by cultural capital rather than income bracket, these individuals earnestly buy organic, carry NPR tote bags, and breast-feed their babies. They care about discreet, inconspicuous consumption—like eating free-range chicken and heirloom tomatoes, wearing organic cotton shirts and TOMS shoes, and listening to the Serial podcast. They use their purchasing power to hire nannies and housekeepers, to cultivate their children’s growth, and to practice yoga and Pilates.

Currid-Halkett’s biting, often humorous commentary is not just a send up of the so-called “coastal elites.” It’s a trenchant analysis that combines economic and sociological evidence to describe major trends.

More here.

Kendra Pierre-Louis in Popular Science:

For the first time in a century, humpback whales have returned to the waters of New York harbor. And not just occasionally, either. They're coming in enough numbers that a company can reliably trot tourists out to the ocean—within sight distance of Manhattan’s skyscrapers—to see them.

“Because of the improvement of the water quality, algae and zooplankton have multiplied, giving good food for the menhaden [a small oily forager fish beloved by whales], which have returned in numbers that the fishermen say they have not seen in their lifetimes,” Paul L. Sieswerda told PopSci. Once a curator at the New York Aquarium, Sieswerda has since founded Gotham Whales, an organization that conducts tours and monitors the presence of whales, seals, and dolphins in NYC. “Our surveys show an exponential increase in the number of whales since 2011 when we first began our studies," he said. "Prior to that, whales were only seen intermittently."

While Sieswerda dates the presence of whales back to 2011, 2014 was the year that whales caught the attention of many New Yorkers: one especially charismatic whale was captured on camera. A humpback seamlessly parted the water's surface, maneuvering its forty-foot, forty-ton form so that it was floating perfectly erect. Although its tail stayed below the surface, its rostrum (or beak-like snout) and head stood proudly exposed. The incredible power and buoyancy of its pectoral fins kept it aloft in a slow and controlled motion that bore a striking visual similarity to a person treading water. Whales use this motion, called spyhopping, to get a better view of what's on the surface—like prey, or humans gawking at them from whale watching boats. This is a marvel to behold anywhere in the world; to see it in New York City, with the Empire State building glimmering in the background, borders on the fantastical.

More here.

Mohammed Hanif in Dawn:

I met the only Jewish-Pakistani in Israel by accident. It turned out he had also ended up there through a historic misunderstanding.

I wasn’t looking for him. He wasn’t expecting me.

In the last days of the last millennium, just before the millennium bug was predicted to wipe out all our computer memory, there were reliable rumours of peace between Israel and Palestine.

The proof of this impending peace was in my passport. I was given a reporting visa by the Israeli embassy in London on a Pakistani passport.

They were understanding enough not to stamp the visa on the passport. I had grown up with a green passport which said in bold letters, ‘Valid for travel to all countries of the world except Cuba and Israel.’

I was convinced that peace was about to break out when I reported to the Directorate of Censors in Jerusalem and discovered all its staff was on strike.

Having lived under various forms of censorship in Pakistan (from midnight knocks to what your uncle will think of what you are writing), I found it exhilarating: when your directorate of censorship goes on strike, who is there to fear?

Hours later, trying to score a meal, I was terrified. Like a naive tourist who believes that the best way to get to know a city is to get lost in the city, I tried to walk into random shops and cafes and bars.

When I tried this in the upmarket district of West Jerusalem I was pounced upon at the doors.

Your name? Your ID? And as I presented my passport with the hope of hearing, ‘Oh where is Pakistan? What brings you to our country?’ I was told, ‘We don’t allow.’

I almost wanted to say ‘But I am not Palestinian’ but I realised it all probably sounded the same.

I retreated to the safety of the Jerusalem Hotel, where a tour operator with three mobile phones gave weary directions to lost souls like me.

More here.

William J. Maxwell at Literary Hub:

When did the Bureau lose sleep over the popularity of Baldwin’s “recent books . . . ringing up best-selling figures,” the “100,000 copies in hardcover” sold of The Fire Next Time and “the two million mark in soft covers” in sight for Another Country? It did so when a column in the Washington Post conveyed the news that Baldwin planned to publish another “book about the F.B.I. in the South.”

Hoover’s sensitivity to literary competition and challenge, always acute, had been exquisite since 1950, when Max Lowenthal’s study The Federal Bureau of Investigation, the first rigorously unauthorized history of the organization, somehow made its way to the printers without the Bureau’s knowledge. “Mr. Hoover, if I had known this book was going to be published,” swore Louis Nichols, then head of the Crime Records Division, “I’d have thrown my body between the presses and stopped it.” Nichols’s successors at Crime Records made certain that Baldwin’s FBI book—shortly given the working title of The Blood Counters—would not take them unawares.

The June memo to Cartha DeLoach identifies the book’s expected publisher, the Dial Press, and indicates in an addendum that “should the book be published, naturally it will be reviewed.” A July memo to the head of the New York field office requests a less passive form of vigilance: “Supervisor [name redacted] requested that if possible, through established sources at Dial Press, a copy of the proposed book concerning the FBI be discreetly obtained prior to publication.”

more here.

Sally O'Reilly at Cabinet Magazine:

Dear WhiteWave Foods,

I am writing to complain about one of your products: namely, Silk Cashewmilk (with a touch of almond). I imagine that you receive many complaints about your use of the word “milk,” and frequent challenges to specify where exactly on the cashew nut the teats are located. This, however, is not a problem for me, since I simply mop up what I take to be a sloppy euphemism with a pair of quotation marks. No, what I wish to complain about is the recent redesign of your half-gallon “milk” cartons.

My bipartite beef with this redesign is 1) the reduction in realism of the illustration and 2) the stance of the nuts represented therein. To start with the latter point: I have come, in recent years, to identify with the two nuts who, like game siblings, plunge pell-mell into their fate. I hope that it is not an anthropomorphism too far to suggest that one splashes down as if propelled from a water chute, and the other arcs forward, as if diving headlong, emboldened by the first’s joyful splash. This is an image of excitement and of freedom (from what, I presume, is for the “milk” drinker to decide). In the new arrangement, however, the two nuts face one another, turning their backs on the world to assume a conservative relation based in partnering and stability. My concern is that here you are affirming and perpetuating recent troubling shifts in political attitudes the world over. Your open and energetic cashews have become inward-looking; even their spatial alignment is now in almost complete agreement with one another, as if no differently oriented nut would be welcome.

more here.

Matteo Pericoli at The Paris Review:

We’re used to seeing skyscrapers towering over cities. We’re used to imagining the fabric of a city as the footprint of solids over voids.

The protagonist of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s White Nights is, as he himself tells us, a dreamer. A lonely man, with no friends or acquaintances, who only knows the look and soul of the physical places around his city, Saint Petersburg. Hiding from the sunlight, he wanders the city at nighttime, animating each street corner with character—filling its voids.

The novel is an adventure that lasts four nights. On the first night, the dreamer meets a woman in tears, bravely approaches her as he’s never approached anyone before, and consoles her.

Although her heart beats for someone else, she lets him in and the two spend four nights getting to know each other. The closer he gets to her, the farther he distances himself from his lonely life. He has finally found the one chance he’ll ever have to rise above the city from which he feels estranged.

The improbable union between the two protagonists approaches in an unbearable crescendo until the final moment, when the story ends as abruptly as it had begun, and the dreamer suddenly sees even the physical city as a lifeless and meaningless place.

more here.

Marta Bausells in The Guardian: