James Longenbach in The Nation:

No poet is more formally precise than Walt Whitman at his most expansive, no poet more wildly extravagant than Emily Dickinson at her most curtailed; freedom is not sloppiness, structure is not constriction. But perhaps more clearly than any poet of the 20th century, Moore allows us to see why this is the case. Hence her extraordinary usefulness for other poets, hence her lasting influence even on poets who do not sound like her, much less transform her discoveries into mannerisms.

Moore was born near St. Louis, Missouri, in 1887. Her parents separated before her birth, and subsequently her father, already institutionalized, severed his hand, taking literally the injunction of Matthew 5:30 (“If thy right hand offend thee, cut it off”). To her mother and her brother Warner, who became a Presbyterian minister, Moore remained fiercely, sometimes pathologically close. Though she attended Bryn Mawr College, became a suffragette, moved to a tiny Greenwich Village apartment in 1918, and edited the legendary magazineThe Dial from 1925 until its demise in 1929 (an achievement that would ensure our interest in Moore even if she had written no poems), she lived with her mother until her mother’s death in 1947.

More here.

Quanta Editor's Note: In January, we ran an Insights column about the much-debated Sleeping Beauty problem. Now, our puzzle columnist Pradeep Mutalik claims to have discovered why this problem is so polarizing. In the spirit of experimentation, we will be inviting a panel of experts to weigh in on whether this insight adds any new clarity to the problem.

Pradeep Mutalik in Quanta:

In the puzzle, the fairy-tale princess participates in an experiment that starts on Sunday. She is told that she will be put to sleep, and while she is asleep a fair coin toss will determine how the experiment is to proceed. If the coin comes up heads, she will be awakened on Monday, interviewed, and put back to sleep, but she won’t remember this awakening because of an amnesia inducing drug she is given. If the coin comes up tails, she will be awakened and interviewed on Monday and Tuesday, again without remembering either awakening. In either case, the experiment ends when she is awakened on Wednesday without being interviewed.

Whenever Sleeping Beauty is awakened and interviewed, she won’t know which day it is or whether she has been awakened before. During each awakening, she is asked: “What is your degree of certainty that the coin landed heads?” (“Degree of certainty” is sometimes expressed as “belief,” “degree of belief,” “subjective certainty,” “subjective probability” or “credence.”) What should her answer be?

This simple mathematical problem has generated an unusually heated debate. The entrenched arguments between those who answer “one-half” (the camp called “halfers”) and those who say “one-third” (the “thirders”) put political debates to shame. In my columnintroducing the problem, I compared it to a Necker cube, the popular visual illusion that can be perceived in two completely different ways. But while most people can flip quite easily between the two views of the Necker cube, halfers and thirders tend to remain firmly rooted in their view of the Sleeping Beauty problem. Both camps can certainly do the math, so what makes them butt heads in vain? Is the problem underspecified? Is it ambiguous?

More here.

Kevin Drum in Mother Jones:

Giuliani won the election, and he made good on his crime-fighting promises by selecting Boston police chief Bill Bratton as the NYPD's new commissioner. Bratton had made his reputation as head of the New York City Transit Police, where he aggressively applied broken-windows policing to turnstile jumpers and vagrants in subway stations. With Giuliani's eager support, he began applying the same lessons to the entire city, going after panhandlers, drunks, drug pushers, and the city's hated squeegee men. And more: He decentralized police operations and gave precinct commanders more control, keeping them accountable with a pioneering system called CompStat that tracked crime hot spots in real time.

The results were dramatic. In 1996, the New York Times reported that crime had plunged for the third straight year, the sharpest drop since the end of Prohibition. Since 1993, rape rates had dropped 17 percent, assault 27 percent, robbery 42 percent, and murder an astonishing 49 percent. Giuliani was on his way to becoming America's Mayor and Bratton was on the cover of Time. It was a remarkable public policy victory.

But even more remarkable is what happened next. Shortly after Bratton's star turn, political scientist John DiIulio warned that the echo of the baby boom would soon produce a demographic bulge of millions of young males that he famously dubbed “juvenile super-predators.” Other criminologists nodded along. But even though the demographic bulge came right on schedule, crime continued to drop. And drop. And drop. By 2010, violent crime rates in New York City had plunged 75 percent from their peak in the early '90s.

More here.

William Logan at The New Criterion:

About the early history of the sonnets, we know almost nothing. The first reference comes in 1598, when Shakespeare already had a reputation on the stage—the plays behind him included A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Romeo and Juliet, Richard II, Richard III, and The Merchant of Venice. That year Francis Meres praised him inPalladis Tamia as the “most excellent” English playwright, like Plautus and Seneca a master of comedy and tragedy. Shakespeare had first come to attention as author of a popular pillow-book, Venus and Adonis (1593), and what he called a “graver labor,” The Rape of Lucrece(1594). Meres remarked that the “sweet witty soul of Ovid lives in mellifluous and honey-tongued Shakespeare, witness his Venus andAdonis, his Lucrece, his sugared Sonnets among his private friends.” The sugared sonnets were eventually published in quarto as Shake-speares Sonnets (1609).

Who those private friends were and what they possessed has excited speculation ever since. If not an outright liar, Meres was close enough to that circle to have heard of these private verses. Perhaps he had seen a few—“sugared” sounds like firsthand acquaintance, not gossip. In the surviving manuscripts of the next century, there are almost 250 copies of Sidney’s poems, over seven hundred of Jonson’s, and more than four thousand of Donne’s. Of Shakespeare’s there are only twenty-six, almost all dating to the 1630s or later, none probably earlier than 1620. Either Shakespeare’s private circle was very small, or its members guarded the sonnets closely. The poems were probably untitled and for the most part unpunctuated, like his contribution toThe Book of Sir Thomas More.

more here.

Lorin Stein at The Paris Review:

The print headline of Haggard’s New York Times obituary called him “a poet of the common man.” He was that, certainly. When Merle released his first singles, in the early sixties, he had spent half his adult life in prison, and in his songs he wrote eloquently—for a mass audience—about being in prison, getting out of prison, and running from the law. My sister and I used to sing those songs with our father, pretty much from the time we could talk. I remember asking my father about the explosive refrain of “Mama Tried”: “I turned twenty-one in prison, doing life without parole.” I understood the words, but I found the past tense confusing and upsetting. Didn’t it mean the man singing was still in prison … and always would be? That refrain is the key to the song. It’s about having already been condemned to life. It is a line from beyond the grave.

As I got older, we sang together less and I listened to records more. Merle still had hits on the radio in those days—the late seventies and early eighties. These songs weren’t all about prison, or about growing up in the dust bowl and the oil fields. His 1979 LP, Serving 190 Proof, is not about the common man at all. “I live the kind of life most men only dream of” is how the first song, “Footlights,” begins:

I make my living writing songs and singing them.
But I’m forty-one years old, and I ain’t got no place to go when it’s over,
So I’ll hide my age and take the stage
And try to kick the footlights out again.

more here.

Suzana Herculano-Houzel in Nautilus:

We have long deemed ourselves to be at the pinnacle of cognitive abilities among animals. But that is different from being at the pinnacle of evolution in a number of very important ways. As Mark Twain pointed out in 1903, to presume that evolution has been a long path leading to humans as its crowning achievement is just as preposterous as presuming that the whole purpose of building the Eiffel Tower was to put that final coat of paint on its tip. Moreover, evolution is not synonymous with progress, but simply change over time. And humans aren’t even the youngest, most recently evolved species. For example, more than 500 new species of cichlid fish in Lake Victoria, the youngest of the great African lakes, have appeared since it filled with water some 14,500 years ago. Still, there is something unique about our brain that makes it cognitively able to ponder even its own constitution and the reasons for its own presumption that it reigns over all other brains. If we are the ones putting other animals under the microscope, and not the other way around,¹ then the human brain must have something that no other brain has.

Sheer mass would be the obvious candidate: If the brain is what generates conscious cognition, having more brain should only mean more cognitive abilities. But here the elephant in the room is, well, the elephant—a species that is larger-brained than humans, but not equipped with behaviors as complex and flexible as ours. Besides, equating larger brain size with greater cognitive capabilities presupposes that all brains are made the same way, starting with a similar relationship between brain size and number of neurons. But my colleagues and I already knew that all brains were not made the same. Primates have a clear advantage over other mammals, which lies in an evolutionary turn of events that resulted in the economical way in which neurons are added to their brain, without the massive increases in average cell size seen in other mammals.

We also knew how many neurons different brains were made of, and so we could rephrase “more brain” and test it.

More here.

Carl Zimmer in The New York Times:

Five days a week, you can tune into “Paternity Court,” a television show featuring couples embroiled in disputes over fatherhood. It’s entertainment with a very old theme: Uncertainty over paternity goes back a long way in literature. Even Shakespeare and Chaucer cracked wise about cuckolds, who were often depicted wearing horns. But in a number of recent studies, researchers have found that our obsession with cuckolded fathers is seriously overblown. A number of recent genetic studies challenge the notion that mistaken paternity is commonplace. “It’s absolutely ridiculous,” said Maarten H.D. Larmuseau, a geneticist at the University of Leuven in Belgium who has led much of this new research.

The term cuckold traditionally refers to the husband of an adulteress, but Dr. Larmuseau and other researchers focus on those cases that produce a child, which scientists politely call “extra-pair paternity.” Until the 20th century, it was difficult to prove that a particular man was the biological father of a particular child. In 1304 a British husband went to court to dispute the paternity of his wife’s child, born while he was abroad for three years. Despite the obvious logistical challenges, the court rejected the husband’s objection. “The privity between a man and his wife cannot be known,” the judge ruled. Modern biology lifted the veil from this mystery, albeit slowly. In the early 1900s, researchers discovered that people have distinct blood types inherited from their parents. In a 1943 lawsuit, Charlie Chaplin relied on blood-type testing to prove that he was not the father of the actress Joan Barry’s child. (The court refused to accept the evidence and forced Chaplin to pay child support anyway.)

More here.

Hello Readers and Writers,

We received a large number of submissions of sample essays in our search for new columnists. Most of them were very good (with a small number of incomprehensible pieces thrown in just to test our sanity, I suppose) and it was hard deciding whom to accept and whom not to. If you did not get selected, it does not at all mean that we didn't like what you sent, we just have a limited number of slots. We will once again be expanding the number of 3QD columns on Mondays, which have withered by attrition in the last couple of years. Today we welcome to 3QD the following persons, in alphabetical order by last name:

1. Humera Afridi
2. Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad
3. Christopher Bacas
4. Aasem Bakhshi
5. Katalin Balog
6. Libby Bishop
7. Holly Case
8. Evan Edwards
9. Elise Hempel
10. Richard King
11. Michael Liss
12. Paul North
13. Daniel Ranard
14. Ryan Ruby
15. Max Sirak
16. Genese Marie Sodikoff
17. Katrin Trüstedt
18. Olivia Zhu

I will be in touch with all of you in the next days to schedule a start date. The “About Us” page will be updated with short bios and photographs of the new writers no later than the day they start.

Thanks to all of the people who sent samples of writing to us. It was a pleasure to read them all. Congratulations to the new columnists!

Best wishes,

Abbas

David Hammons. In The Hood. 1993.

More here, here, and here.

Robinson Meyer in The Atlantic:

A&Q is a special series that inverts the classic Q&A, taking some of the most frequently posed solutions to pressing matters of policy and exploring their complexity.

ANSWER

There’s no need to read any further: As this 2013 paper from Cato Unbound argues, it’s folly for the government to fund public science. Terence Kealey, a sociologist of science, argues that scientific research is not a public good—and, regardless, investment in, and the advancement of, science will occur regardless of who pays for it. Nikola Tesla and Thomas Edison, after all, did not have DARPA. Following Kealey’s argument, and considering past examples, research should be concentrated in industries, alongside “an armamentarium of private philanthropic funders of university and of foundation science by which non-market, pure research (including on orphan diseases) would be funded.”

QUESTION

The first question we must ask: What the hell’s an armamentarium? “A collection of resources available for a certain purpose,” answers the New Oxford American, supplying the more concise arsenal as a synonym. But I digress. Kealey imagines the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and other organizations like it stepping in to fund basic research. Right now, he says, money from those organizations are getting crowded out. So how would he answer Bill Gates himself, who in the pages of this magazine called for the U.S. government to triple its energy investment funding? Gates himself says he would only invest (patiently, at great risk, and looking to the long term) “the spin-offs that will come out of that government-funded activity.”

More here.

Salman Rushdie in The New Statesman:

As we honour the four hundredth anniversaries of the deaths of William Shakespeare and Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, it may be worth noting that while it’s generally accepted that the two giants died on the same date, 23 April 1616, it actually wasn’t the same day. By 1616 Spain had moved on to using the Gregorian calendar, while England still used the Julian, and was 11 days behind. (England clung to the old ­Julian dating system until 1752, and when the change finally came, there were riots and, it’s said, mobs in the streets shouting, “Give us back our 11 days!”) Both the coincidence of the dates and the difference in the calendars would, one suspects, have delighted the playful, erudite sensibilities of the two fathers of modern literature.

We don’t know if they were aware of each other, but they had a good deal in common, beginning right there in the “don’t know” zone, because they are both men of mystery; there are missing years in the record and, even more tellingly, missing documents. Neither man left behind much personal material. Very little to nothing in the way of letters, work diaries, abandoned drafts; just the colossal, completed oeuvres. “The rest is silence.” Consequently, both men have been prey to the kind of idiot theories that seek to dispute their authorship.

More here.

Andrew Tarantola in Gizmodo:

Access to steady supplies of clean water is getting more and more difficult in the developing world, especially as demand skyrockets. In response, many countries have turned to the sea for potable fluids but existing reverse osmosis plants rely on complicated processes that are expensive and energy-intensive to operate. Good thing, engineers at Lockheed Martin have just announced a newly-developed salt filter that could reduce desalinization energy costs by 99 percent.

The Reverse Osmosis process works on a simple principle: molecules within a liquid will flow across a semipermeable membrane from areas of higher concentration to lower until both sides reach an equilibrium. But that same membrane can act as a filter for large molecules and ions if outside pressure is applied to one side of the system. For desalinization, the process typically employs a sheet of thin-film composite (TFC) membrane which is made from an active thin-film layer of polyimide stacked on a porous layer of polysulfone. The problem with these membranes is that their thickness requires the presence of large amounts of pressure (and energy) to press water through them.

Lockheed Martin's Perforene, on the other hand, is made from single atom-thick sheets of graphene. Because the sheets are so thin, water flows through them far more easily than through a conventional TFC.

More here. [Thanks to Sean Carroll.]

Jesse McCarthy in The Point:

The Bataclan is one of the oldest music venues in Paris. Situated on the Boulevard Voltaire and named after an 1855 operetta by Jacques Offenbach, it has operated as an entertainment venue more or less continuously since its opening in 1865 under the Second Empire. After a period of decline in the Sixties and Seventies it was reopened in 1983 with a particular emphasis on providing a platform for post-punk and rock on the Parisian scene. Perhaps befitting its name, onomatopoetic for a sonorous cacophony, it has long maintained a reputation for eclecticism.

Offenbach’s 1855 Ba-ta-clan is an orientalist comic operetta about a Chinese emperor whose subjects are ostensibly in a conspiracy to revolt and overthrow him. It turns out, however, that the emperor and the conspirators are all French aristocrats who share a desperate homesickness for the gay life of Paris that they enjoyed in their youth. It’s a light satire spoofing Napoleon III and the hapless members of the courtier class around him. But it also suggests a pervasive French fantasy: that cultural differences are really more like costumes, and that underneath those exotic garbs, which are amusing but insubstantial, all people want to be French—or at least to live the life of pleasure as the French conceive it. When things are set aright, as they must be at the end of any comic play, all will sing together as one. All will be dissolved in the irresistible cheer of a French republican chorus.

More here.

Yanis Varoufakis in The Guardian:

The first German word I ever learned was Siemens. It was emblazoned on our sturdy 1950s fridge, our washing machine, the vacuum cleaner – on almost every appliance in my family’s home in Athens. The reason for my parents’ peculiar loyalty to the German brand was my uncle Panayiotis, who was Siemens’ general manager in Greece from the mid-1950s to the late 1970s.

A Germanophile electrical engineer and a fluent speaker of Goethe’s language, Panayiotis had convinced his younger sister – my mother – to take up the study of German; she even planned to spend a year in Hamburg to take up a Goethe Institute scholarship in the summer of 1967.

Alas, on 21 April 1967, my mother’s plans were laid in ruins, along with our imperfect Greek democracy. For in the early hours of that morning, at the command of four army colonels, tanks rolled on to the streets of Athens and other major cities, and our country was soon enveloped in a thick cloud of neo-fascist gloom. It was also the day when Uncle Panayiotis’s world fell apart.

Unlike my dad, who in the late 1940s had paid for his leftist politics with several years in concentration camps, Panayiotis was what today would be referred to as a neoliberal. Fiercely anti-communist, and suspicious of social democracy, he supported the American intervention in the Greek civil war in 1946 (on the side of my father’s jailers). He backed the German Free Democratic party and the Greek Progressive party, which purveyed a blend of free-market economics with unconditional support for Greece’s oppressive US-led state security machine.

More here.

Natasha Loder in More Intelligent Life:

Martin Varsavsky, a serial technology entrepreneur, takes a radical view of reproduction. “Sex is great, but maybe it is not the best way to make a baby,” he says. This startling proposition is behind his plan to build a network of clinics offering millennials an alternative to the unreliable and unpredictable business of creating offspring the usual way. Varsavsky argues that leaving it to nature is risky, especially when people are breeding later and later (see chart on next page): the chances of conceiving fall, not only for women but for men too. At the same time, the chances of a child being born with Down’s syndrome rise with the age of the mother, and those of a child developing autism or schizophrenia rise with the age of the father. The risks remain tiny, but some people would prefer not to take them.

The technology to improve on nature is developing. Healthy eggs and sperm can be frozen while people are young and stored for use later in life. Freezing sperm is a trivial matter, but freezing eggs requires hormone treatments and minor surgery to extract eggs, which must then be frozen safely and stored for years; later they must be thawed, mixed with sperm to create embryos and implanted. The process can be unpleasant for the women who undergo the treatment, and risky for the eggs, which can get damaged, though freezing techniques are improving and raising the survival rate. The technique was pioneered mainly to help women likely to be rendered sterile by cancer treatments, but there is growing interest in the method as a solution to the problem of the ticking biological clock. Almost 1,000 women in Britain and Denmark were asked about egg freezing in 2014: 19% said they were considering it and another 27% were interested.

More here.