Nicholas Wade in The New York Times:

The brain has an amazing capacity for recognizing faces. It can identify a face in a few thousandths of a second, form a first impression of its owner and retain the memory for decades. Central to these abilities is a longstanding puzzle: how the image of a face is encoded by the brain. Two Caltech biologists, Le Chang and Doris Y. Tsao, reported in Thursday’s issue of Cell that they have deciphered the code of how faces are recognized. Their experiments were based on electrical recordings from face cells, the name given to neurons that respond with a burst of electric signals when an image of a face is presented to the retina. By noting how face cells in macaque monkeys responded to manipulated photos of some 2,000 human faces, the Caltech team figured out exactly what aspects of the faces triggered the cells and how the features of the face were being encoded. The monkey face recognition system seems to be very similar to that of humans.

Just 200 face cells are required to identify a face, the biologists say. After discovering how its features are encoded, the biologists were able to reconstruct the faces a monkey was looking at just by monitoring the pattern in which its face cells were firing. The finding needs to be confirmed in other laboratories. But, if correct, it could help understand how the brain encodes all seen objects, as well as suggesting new approaches to artificial vision. “Cracking the code for faces would definitely be a big deal,” said Brad Duchaine, an expert on face recognition at Dartmouth. It is a remarkable advance to have identified the dimensions used by the primate brain to decode faces, he added — and impressive that the researchers were able to reconstruct from neural signals the face a monkey is looking at. Human and monkey brains have evolved dedicated systems for recognizing faces, presumably because, as social animals, survival depends on identifying members of one’s own social group and distinguishing them from strangers.

More here.

Henry Rollins in LA Weekly:

As I sit here, I am consumed by curiosity as to what will be tomorrow at Capitol Studios, where at 1030 hrs., Giles Martin, son of the legendary producer George Martin, will play his new stereo mix of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, which will be part of a 50-year anniversary edition of the iconic album. I lucked out and got an invite.

My curiosity stems from why this album needs remixing. A few hours ago, I listened to the stereo mix yet again and once more was taken by how truly amazing it is. George Martin has been called the fifth Beatle. I think he’s the fifth, sixth and seventh. His production skills are at least as great as the awesome talent of the band. I would go further to say that without George Martin and engineer extraordinaire Geoff Emerick, The Beatles’ music would still be popular all over the world but not nearly as captivating. It was a perfect team.

What Giles can do to top his father’s mix, or better my understanding of this album, which I’ve loved since my mother bought it soon after it came out in 1967, I am all ears to hear. Report to follow.

Fifteen hours, 48 minutes later. Back from Capitol. Giles Martin and his engineers knocked it out of the park.

More here.

Ed Yong in The Atlantic:

Most web-spinning spiders line their silken threads with droplets of glue, which snag blundering insects. But one group—the cribellate spiders—does something different. Their threads are surrounded by clouds of even more silk—extremely fine filaments, each a hundred times thinner than regular spider silk. These nanofibers give the silk a fuzzy, woolly texture, and since they have no glue, they’re completely dry. And yet they’re clearly sticky. Insects that stumble into the webs of cribellate spiders don’t stumble out again.

Raya Bott and colleagues at Aachen University in Germany have now shown that cribellate silk adheres to insects in a previously unknown and unsettlingly macabre way. When an insect touches the strands, waxy chemicals in its outer surface get sucked into the woolly nanofibers and reinforce them, turning the tangled mass of delicate threads into a solid, sturdy rope. The victim literally becomes a part of the web, inadvertently strengthening the instrument of its own capture.

More here.

Christopher Lydon in The Nation:

The world in trouble today still beats a path to Noam Chomsky’s door, if only because he’s been forthright for so long about a whirlwind coming. Not that the world quite knows what do with Noam Chomsky’s warnings of disaster in the making. Remember the famous faltering of the patrician TV host William F. Buckley Jr., meeting Chomsky’s icy anger about the war in Vietnam, in 1969.

It’s a strange thing about Noam Chomsky: The New York Times calls him “arguably” the most important public thinker alive, though the paper seldom quotes him, or argues with him, and giant pop-media stars on network television almost never do. And yet the man is universally famous and revered in his 89th year: He’s the scientist who taught us to think of human language as something embedded in our biology, not a social acquisition; he’s the humanist who railed against the Vietnam War and other projections of American power, on moral grounds first, ahead of practical considerations. He remains a rock star on college campuses, here and abroad, and he’s become a sort of North Star for the post-Occupy generation that today refuses to feel the Bern-out.

He remains, unfortunately, a figure alien in the places where policy gets made. But on his home ground at MIT, he is a notably accessible old professor who answers his e-mail and receives visitors like us with a twinkle.

Last week, we visited Chomsky with an open-ended mission in mind: We were looking for a nonstandard account of our recent history from a man known for telling the truth.

More here.

Caperton in Feministe:

Let’s talk about Confederate monuments. They’re going down. Some of them are, anyway. But they’re not going down without a fight from the heritage-not-hate devotees of the tributes to the fight to preserve slavery and white supremacy. New Orleans has taken down statues honoring generals Robert E. Lee and P.G.T. Beauregard, Confederate President Jefferson Davis, and assorted vigilantes who worked to overthrow the city’s Reconstruction government.

…Let’s look away, for the moment, from the plight of people who are not real because they’re 14 feet tall and made of bronze. Let’s look at real, human people — for instance, the black citizens of and visitors to New Orleans who have to walk around every day amid bronze and stone monuments to the architects of atrocities against people who looked like them who were abused and murdered in the name of economics and white supremacy. And for that matter, let’s talk about real, human people across the South, black and white, who get 28 days of tribute to black history every year and 365 days of tribute to the foundations of the institutionalized white supremacy that required many of such heroics from oppressed black people in the first place. New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu gave a speech to explain the relocation of Confederate monuments around the city, and it should be required reading/viewing. (Video and transcript are available at the link.) He addresses frankly the history of the Civil War and slavery in New Orleans, the origins of the statues that have been removed, and their impact on real, human people.

First erected over 166 years after the founding of our city and 19 years after the end of the Civil War, the monuments that we took down were meant to rebrand the history of our city and the ideals of a defeated Confederacy. It is self-evident that these men did not fight for the United States of America; they fought against it. They may have been warriors, but in this cause they were not patriots. These statues are not just stone and metal. They are not just innocent remembrances of a benign history. These monuments purposefully celebrate a fictional, sanitized Confederacy; ignoring the death, ignoring the enslavement, ignoring the terror that it actually stood for.

And after the Civil War, these statues were a part of that terrorism as much as a burning cross on someone’s lawn; they were erected purposefully to send a strong message to all who walked in their shadows about who was still in charge in this city.

More here.

Shahzia Sikander in LA Times:

Despite my pluralistic upbringing, I was anxious about encountering my first Jewish family — the Fains, my assigned hosts in Providence. I imagined the inevitable discussion around our respective disparate faiths. As I settled into their home, I was taken aback at the uncanny similarities with my own tight-knit family system: lots of affection, a healthy attitude toward spirituality and an appreciation for communication and education. I babysat their two young children, reading them stories about our different cultures and rituals. Exchanging ideas and understanding each other's Muslim and Jewish faiths were instrumental in building the bonds that still serve us. My 6-year-old son goes to a secular Jewish school in New York where we live, and his godmother is a sculptor and Jewish. I am designing a ketubah for the global Jewish community. My son is fluent in Urdu and deeply connected to his Muslim roots while also speaking Spanish. More than half the children in his kindergarten class are multiracial and multi-religious.

Yet I am dumbfounded that in 2016, here in New York, one of the most diverse cities in the world, it is almost impossible to find a children's book that celebrates a Muslim child's heritage, family, culture and tradition. Why is it that we do not care to assimilate the Muslim American experience in the same effortless ways as we do for other cultural and religious groups? The onus to explain our Pakistani and Muslim heritage has always been on me as an artist as well as a parent. While generating a variety of cultural references for my son to express to his classmates over the past three years, I realized that therein lay an opportunity for us to create our own personal books. Luckily both of us love to draw and I have been able to tap into the lessons ingrained by my father's unwavering commitment to storytelling. Recently the Museum of Modern Art invited me to participate in its children's book line by reflecting from within my unique experience of cross-cultural observation. Movements like #weneeddiversebooks have also been instrumental in bringing to light underrepresented narratives and identities.

More here.

Does an essential yet still unthought relation between death and language exist? Martijn Buijs turns to the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben to reconstruct his analysis of the voice in relation to death and with reference to both Aristotle and Martin Heidegger, examining along the way being, language and the ethical consequences arising from it.

Martijn Buijs in IIIIXIII Magazine:

In The Essence of Language, Martin Heidegger writes:

Mortals are they who can experience death as death. Animals cannot do so. But animals cannot speak either. The essential relation between death and language flashes up before us, but still remains unthought.

Man as mortal speaks; speaking, man is mortal. Do these two sentences present the contingent overlapping of two attributes of man, either of which could be thought without the other? Or is there, indeed, an essential yet still unthought relation between death and language? And if one were to grant there is such a relation, would it perhaps provide the way for us to understand the being of man in its most intimate sense? Or yet, might it rather be the case that the relation between language and death, strong if inarticulate a hold as it may have on the history of Western thought, is itself fundamentally problematic, not as a mistake one could with more rigorous logic rectify, but as a net within which thinking is wrapped up and from which it needs to extricate itself if it is to overcome its present predicament? Is there such a predicament?

That there is such a predicament, and that this predicament is essentially an ethical one, is the fundamental thesis of Giorgio Agamben’s early study Language and Death. Agamben writes:

Both the ‘faculty’ for language and the ‘faculty’ for death, inasmuch as they open for humanity the most proper dwelling place, reveal and disclose this same dwelling place as always already permeated by and founded in negativity. Inasmuch as he is speaking and mortal, man is, in Hegel’s words, the negative being who “is that which he is not and not that which he is” or, according to Heidegger, the “placeholder (Platzhalter) of nothingness”.

Agamben’s analysis focuses on this place of negativity which, by his lights, man occupies in the tradition of Western metaphysics; and he will conclude that if one cannot account for what is proper to man other than through the negative, one will not be able to think the ethical either – and thus remain mired in the disturbing political consequences of that failure.

More here.

Natalie Wolchover in Quanta:

Once again, a gust of gravitational waves coming from the faraway collision of black holes has tickled the instruments of the Advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (Advanced LIGO), bringing the count of definitive gravitational-wave detections up to three. The new signal, detected in January and reported today in Physical Review Letters, deepens the riddle of how black holes come to collide.

Before Advanced LIGO switched on in the fall of 2015 and almost immediately detected gravitational waves from a black-hole merger, no one knew whether it would see merging black holes, merging neutron stars, black holes merging with neutron stars or none of the above. (As Albert Einstein figured out a century ago, pairs of dense, tightly orbiting objects are needed to generate ripples in the fabric of space-time, or gravitational waves.) But the three signals spotted by LIGO so far have all come from merging black holes, suggesting pairs of these ultradense, invisible objects abundantly populate the universe.

Astronomers have since been struggling mightily to understand how black holes (which, for the most part, are remnants of collapsed stars) can wind up so close to each other, without having been close enough to have merged during their stellar lifetimes. It’s a puzzle that has forced experts to think anew about many aspects of stars.

They’ll now have to think even harder.

More here. [Thanks to Jennifer Ouellette.]

Katie Nodjimbadem in Smithsonian Magazine:

A narrative of racially discriminatory landlords and bankers—all independent actors—has long served as an explanation for the isolation of African-Americans in certain neighborhoods in large cities. But this pervasive assumption rationalizing residential segregation in the United States ignores the long history of federal, state and local policies that generated the residential segregation found across the country today.

In The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America, Richard Rothstein, a research associate at the Economic Policy Institute, aims to flip the assumption that the state of racial organization in American cities is simply a result of individual prejudices. He untangles a century’s worth of policies that built the segregated American city of today. From the first segregated public housing projects of President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, to the 1949 Housing Act that encouraged white movement to the suburbs, to unconstitutional racial zoning ordinances enacted by city governments, Rothstein substantiates the argument that the current state of the American city is the direct result of unconstitutional, state-sanctioned racial discrimination.

More here.

George Prochnik in the LA Review of Books:

Nestled inside Arendt and Scholem’s discussion of the nature of evil is a controversy over language. Scholem implies that the cool note of urbane wit Arendt employs not only fails to capture the essence of the event she is witnessing, but actually contributes to the project of dehumanization that Eichmann helped actualize. She loses sight of her subject in the sparkling exercise of her own cleverness. Ironically, in accusing Arendt of practicing facile mockery at the expense of real engagement with the events in Jerusalem, Scholem is charging Arendt with the flipside version of the crime she pins on Eichmann himself: thoughtlessness. Only in Arendt’s case it is an excess of linguistic dexterity that fouls up her thinking rather than the deficit she perceives in Eichmann.

Arendt’s diagnosis of Eichmann’s banality was not intended to minimize the harm he inflicted, as she attempted repeatedly to make clear in response to attacks against her work, but to underscore his mediocrity. In Arendt’s view, Eichmann’s astonishing superficiality, on display throughout his trial, could be understood as even more ominous than the character of some classic satanic figure since it represented an easily communicable strain of wickedness. Eichmann’s banality underscored the susceptibility of unremarkable men and women to becoming collaborators in spectacular crimes under pressure of the right kind of leadership and within the self-contained moral universe of bureaucratic systems that enabled perpetrators to shuck off their sense of personal responsibility. As Arendt wrote Scholem, having watched Eichmann in action she had ceased to believe in the idea of “radical evil” that had been part of her philosophical lexicon in her earlier work on totalitarianism. Evil, she now proposed, had no depth, “and therefore has nothing demonic about it. Evil can lay waste the entire world, like a fungus growing rampant on the surface.”

More here.

Patrick Blanchfield in The Baffler:

Americans have an established protocol for making sense (and page views, and dollars) out of headline-grabbing violence. With news still coming in, we’ll take to the internet and perform all sorts of heavy-handed social media sleuthing trying to parse the supposed motivations and ideologies of cop-killers and spree shooters, with media and politicians helping us form narratives. The interpretative frames have become predictable, with the clearest example being race. If a killer is black, their act invariably presented in terms of criminality, and often used to discredit nonviolent black activist groups or to demand accountability from “the black community” at large; a similar heuristic applies to how we parse violence carried out by Muslims. Meanwhile, if a killer is white, we’ll rapidly cycle through point-scoring attributions of party membership to talk of “lone wolves” or mental illness, or make quasi-theological and ultimately useless appeals to “senselessness.” The overarching logic is transparent and deeply cynical: identity overdetermines action. Certain kinds of violent actors are emblematic of the traits of various essentialized stereotypes—black thuggishness, Muslim barbarity—while others (white men) are more often than not given the mantle of personal tragedy or individual pathology. Meanwhile, the stark realities of how our society actually distributes violence are effaced, and the structural, quotidian violence of white supremacy and misogyny—which include mass shootings and attacks like the one in Portland as part of their spectrum—remain underexamined and tacitly ratified as the norm. And thus our body politic metabolizes headline-grabbing acts of violence while avoiding any real confrontation with the systematic, continual violence on which our miserable way of life depends.

The interpretations surrounding the attack in Portland are simply another iteration of this process. Making the violence primarily about the killer’s supposed identity as a “leftist” has clear dividends for various players. The right wants to distance itself from the Portland attacks, since it has looked the other way at extrajudicial violence against minorities and Muslims in particular. The GOP is the party, after all, that has ownership of Trump’s cartoonishly grotesque DHS program, VOICE (Victims of Immigration Crime Engagement), a program which, as the President described in his February speech before Congress, is tasked with amplifying the voices of “American victims” by propagandizing their suffering at the hands of “illegals.” And this is the same party that required extensive pressure to even acknowledge the shooting of a pair of Indian men in Kansas this past February.

More here.

Melinda Cooper in Boston Review:

When we take a close look at American social history, the rules of familial responsibility can be seen at work most clearly during periodic episodes of sexual revolution. By invigorating the poor laws’ emphasis on kinship, the state could contain the costs of evolving sexual mores by imposing marital and familial support as an economic obligation. That is, at each historical juncture where the legal obligations of family were somehow weakened or threatened by the generalization of divorce, the waning importance of marriage, or the liberation of slaves who had never been married, the poor laws would be reinforced to punish those who threatened to transfer the costs of their welfare onto the state.

One of the great victories of the American left in the 1960s was to almost completely expunge the last vestiges of the poor law tradition from the American welfare system. Throughout this decade, public interest lawyers associated with the welfare rights movement brought a series of test cases before the federal courts to challenge the array of moral regulations that bore down on unwed women in public assistance programs. Their explicit aim was to bring the “sexual revolution” in family law to the welfare poor. If the Supreme Court now recognized a constitutional right to sexual privacy, why would this right not be extended to women on welfare? If middle-class white women were escaping the dependence of the Fordist family wage by exiting the home, demanding equal wages and freer access to divorce, why would this freedom not be extended to women on welfare? And if marriage no longer counted in determining the legal status of middle-class children, why would the children of welfare mothers still be classified as illegitimate and punished for the sins of the parents? In a series of cases brought before the Supreme court between the 1960s and 1970s, almost every normative stricture on the welfare benefits paid to single women were overturned.

More here.