Zaheer Kazmi in 3:AM Magazine:

One night in my early teens, my father pulled into the road where we lived in the Lozells district of Birmingham. We had just returned from a family visit to a relative’s house on the other side of town. A few yards from home, we were met by a wall of police officers with helmets and shields blocking the street and told to exit our vehicle. Unknown to us – in a time before the internet, mobile phones, and 24-hour news – riots had suddenly broken out earlier in the evening and our home was near the epicentre of the disturbances. An officer escorted us to our door telling us to keep it bolted and not to venture out. As we awoke the next morning to the detritus of a night’s violence strewn along the streets, politicians and TV cameras at our doorstep, we also learned that two brothers had been killed in a blaze in the local post office. It was 1985, and the scale of the riot had eclipsed even the previous one there only four years earlier.

In her semi-autobiographical debut novel, The Handsworth Times, Sharon Duggal takes the reader back to the scene of the original riots of 1981 at a time when she too was a resident of Handsworth, of which Lozells is a sub-district. The ‘Handsworth Riots’ of 1981 were a seminal part of the first wave of so-called ‘race riots’ that rocked England’s inner-cities, from Liverpool to London, that Summer. They were to erupt again with even fuller force at the height of Thatcherism in 1985 culminating in the murder of police officer Keith Blakelock on the Broadwater Farm Estate in Tottenham and the deaths of the post office brothers in Birmingham.

More here.

In the Economist:

A NEW commodity spawns a lucrative, fast-growing industry, prompting antitrust regulators to step in to restrain those who control its flow. A century ago, the resource in question was oil. Now similar concerns are being raised by the giants that deal in data, the oil of the digital era. These titans—Alphabet (Google’s parent company), Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Microsoft—look unstoppable. They are the five most valuable listed firms in the world. Their profits are surging: they collectively racked up over $25bn in net profit in the first quarter of 2017. Amazon captures half of all dollars spent online in America. Google and Facebook accounted for almost all the revenue growth in digital advertising in America last year.

Such dominance has prompted calls for the tech giants to be broken up, as Standard Oil was in the early 20th century. This newspaper has argued against such drastic action in the past. Size alone is not a crime. The giants’ success has benefited consumers. Few want to live without Google’s search engine, Amazon’s one-day delivery or Facebook’s newsfeed. Nor do these firms raise the alarm when standard antitrust tests are applied. Far from gouging consumers, many of their services are free (users pay, in effect, by handing over yet more data). Take account of offline rivals, and their market shares look less worrying. And the emergence of upstarts like Snapchat suggests that new entrants can still make waves.

But there is cause for concern. Internet companies’ control of data gives them enormous power. Old ways of thinking about competition, devised in the era of oil, look outdated in what has come to be called the “data economy” (see Briefing). A new approach is needed.

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Claude S. Fischer in Boston Review:

Many explanations for growing inequality are on the table. Technical and structural changes, such as computerization and globalization, have strengthened the market position of educated specialists while undermining that of uneducated workers. Business rearrangements, including the growing role of finance in the economy and of “shareholder value” in corporate affairs, enrich managers and asset-holders more than workers. Social trends, such as the increasing delay of marriage, more children raised by single parents, women’s entry into the professions, and growing marital “homogamy”—high earners marrying high earners—have also widened the economic gap between top and bottom.

Almost all the possible causes of growing inequality are, however, conditioned by policy. Inequality trends vary substantially among Western nations. Inequality has surged in the United States and a few other English-speaking countries since 1970, while other countries, such as Australia and France, have experienced only mild or even negligible increases in inequality. Even within the United States, states vary in the pace of increasing inequality, variation that seems connected to state policy. Economist Thomas Piketty, whose work has been interpreted as suggesting that rising inequality is inevitable, demurs: “The history of the distribution of wealth has always been deeply political. . . . It is shaped by the way economic, social, and political actors view what is just and what is not, as well as by the relative power of those actors and the collective choices that result.”

As British economist Tony Atkinson wrote in his last book, Inequality (2015), even the most seemingly technical or market forces are guided by government actions. For Atkinson the rise in inequality has been the joint result of market forces driving inequality (such as global trade) and weakening state action against such forces. Policy can affect earnings through, for example, rules for wages, corporate governance, and labor bargaining. The weakening of organized labor has been the key force, Atkinson argues, for worsening income inequality in the United States and the UK. And policy of course affects any post-market adjustments through taxes, subsidies, health provision, and so on. Policy even shapes social trends such as delayed marriage through provisions for housing and child care, equal rights laws, and the like.

More here.

Edward W Said London Lecture 2017 – Mahmood Mamdani: Justice Not Revenge – Examining the Concept of Revolutionary Justice from The Mosaic Rooms on Vimeo.

Mark Haber at The Quarterly Conversation:

Somehow, South Korean author Bae Suah weaves the strangest and most human narratives from the events of our lives. In her two recent titles, A Greater Music and Recitation, she finds the mysterious border where life and dreams, travel and place, the past and future merge.

Readers that rely on plot will find themselves on unpredictable ground. Bae Suah is a circular writer, and a circle, as we know, has no end. Recitation, especially, whose protagonist is a wandering actress, whose stories and memories become the stories and dreams of other characters, seems akin to gazing at a beautiful painting without a point of focus. Perhaps this is the point; where does one draw a map of life? Or art? Where do these things start and end? Are they supposed to start and end? García Márquez insisted that intuition was fundamental to writing fiction; Bae Suah seems to support this belief, demonstrating how this conviction shapes their work. As the characters in both these books wander through their lives, their pasts, and their memories, so too does the reader.

The main character of Recitation, Kyung-hee, is stateless, traveling across Europe and Asia, between Vienna and Seoul and several other cities, staying at stranger’s homes or hostels. As she tells her stories to different hosts and old friends, her listeners interject, often with their own stories, and soon the contrast between plot and story is evident; plot is altogether absent, but Recitation is replete with stories, awash with characters eager to disclose their theories on life and travel, destiny and family.

more here.

Michael Dirda at the Washington Post:

Again and again, the 19th-century European novel returns to its favorite theme: lost illusions. Balzac’s fiction regularly tracks the corruption of visionaries and idealists; “War and Peace” ends with its surviving characters abandoning the romantic dreams of youth to embrace a complacent, bourgeois middle age; those famously restless wives — Emma Bovary, Effi Briest and Anna Karenina, among many others — learn that adultery can be at least as disappointing as marriage.

In some ways, disillusionment might be viewed as simply another name for maturity. That’s certainly among the underlying meanings of “The Same Old Story ,” Stephen Pearl’s English title for his new translation of Ivan Goncharov’s tragicomic first novel. But there are other, more jaded implications, too, mainly concerning love.

Because 19th-century Russia abounds in stupendous literary figures, Ivan Goncharov (1812-1891) can be easily overlooked, though his masterpiece, “Oblomov ,” should sound vaguely familiar, if only because it is sometimes described as the story of a guy who doesn’t want to get out of bed.

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Joe Klein at the New York Times:

Patrick J. Buchanan is a merry troglodyte, a naughty provocateur. He still calls homosexuality “sodomy,” just to get the goat of a community he will only reluctantly call “gay.” He writes that he wanted to be named ambassador to South Africa by President Ford so he could support the apartheid government. He thinks public television is “an upholstered playpen” for liberals. He considers “The New York Times” an epithet. His stump appearances in his outlaw 1992 and 1996 presidential campaigns were a guilty pleasure for the reporters who followed him, a hilariously clever, and prescient, exhibition of right-wing populism. “Buchanan,” Richard Nixon once told him, “you’re the only extremist I know with a sense of humor.”

And it is Buchanan, not Nixon, who emerges as the central — and most intriguing — character in “Nixon’s White House Wars,” an entertaining memoir of that benighted presidency. Buchanan’s Nixon is a familiar figure: distant, awkward, smart, defensive and damaged, caring a bit too much what the Establishment — a word Buchanan uses frequently — thinks of him. The not-so-tricky president is a policy moderate; he has surrounded himself with brilliant, if mainstream, experts like Henry Kissinger and Daniel Patrick Moynihan. There is also a retinue of traditional moderate Republican aides like Ray Price and Leonard Garment, and technocrats like H. R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman. Buchanan, the house wing nut, finds all this moderation frustrating; he began as a peripheral figure in the Nixon White House, a political gunslinger perhaps a bit too hot for the high-rent nuances of governance.

more here.

Sam Kriss at The Baffler:

If one pollster had failed to accurately predict one result, you could conduct a fairly simple investigation: Had they chosen their samples incorrectly? Had they asked their questions misleadingly? When every poll gets it wrong, with increasing and alarming frequency, the problem is no longer methodological but metaphysical. There are, of course, some perfectly reasonable explanations. For starters, there are anything-but-surveyable patterns of voter suppression and voter lethargy, together with steady influxes of new, never-before-surveyed voters in the electorate. There’s also the huge methodological difficulty that most polling is traditionally carried out via phone, and large sectors of the electorate are no longer happy to answer the phone when unknown numbers appear on the screen.

But these second-order obstacles aren’t enough to explain the current collapse of poll-driven political certainty. They’re just excuses, even if they’re not untrue. Something about the whole general scheme of polling—the idea that you can predict what millions of undecided voters will do by selecting a small group and then just simply asking them—is out of whack. We need to think seriously about what the strange game of election-watching actually is, in terms of our relation to the future, our power to choose our own outcomes, the large-scale structure of the universe, and the mysteries of fate. And these questions are urgent. Because predictions of the future don’t simply exist in the future, but change the way we act in the present. Because in our future something monstrous is rampaging: it paces hungrily toward us, and we need to know if we’ll be able to spot it in time.

more here.

Matti Friedman at the Jewish Review of Books:

In Israel of the 1970s everyone was supposed to speak Hebrew and forget the past. There would be no Yiddish, there would certainly be no Arabic, and being from the Maghreb—a fluid Arabic term encompassing Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia—was nothing to be proud of. Shouting “I’m from the Maghreb” in the confident heart of the new Israel—and in Arabic—in those days was daring. The same poem goes on to imagine the poet sitting among Ashkenazi intellectuals at the nearby Café Roval wearing a colorful Moroccan robe.

All of this might seem innocuous now. But Bitton’s poems had an electrifying effect on many readers—particularly young Mizrahim who had been given the impression in school, as one put it, that their parents arrived “from a smooth and empty place, like the surface of the moon.” That writer, Sami Shalom Chetrit, remembered a school classroom of “forty Mizrahim and one good-hearted Ashkenazi teacher” where he received no inkling of the cultural riches of his Moroccan family, or of any of the Jews who poured into Israel from the Islamic world after 1948. (Today roughly half of Israel’s Jewish population has roots in Islamic countries.)

Few of the stories the new state told about itself—“from annihilation to rebirth,” the kibbutz, Herzl—had much to do with people from Casablanca or Tehran. Their culture wasn’t welcome in public, beyond fragments quarantined as folklore. Some of the greatest Iraqi musicians had been Jews, like the famous brothers el-Kuwaiti, and there was Zohra el-Fassiya, of course, and many others—but the music wasn’t on the radio, kept alive only in living rooms, at private parties, and in small clubs in the area of south Tel Aviv known as the Yemenite Vineyard.

more here.

Thomas de Monchaux at n+1:

HERE ARE TWO THINGS TO KNOW about architects. First, they are fastidious and inventive with their names. Frank Lincoln Wright was never, unlike Sinatra, a Francis. He swapped in the Lloyd when he was 18—ostensibly in tribute to his mother’s surname on the occasion of her divorce, but also to avoid carrying around the name of a still more famous man, and for that nice three-beat meter, in full anticipation of seeing his full name in print. In 1917, Charles-Edouard Jeanneret-Gris—who is to modern architecture what Freud is to psychoanalysis—was given the byline Le Corbusier (after corbeau, crow) by his editor at a small journal, so that he could anonymously review his own buildings. The success of the sock puppet critic meant that after the critiques were collected into a book-length manifesto, the nom-de-plumeeventually took over Jeanneret-Gris’ architect persona, as well. Ludwig Mies—the inventor of the glass-walled skyscraper—inherited an unfortunate surname that doubled as a German epithet for anything lousy or similarly defiled. He restyled himself Miës van der Rohe—vowel-bending heavy-metal umlaut and all—with the Dutch geographical tussenvoegsel “van” from his mother’s maiden name to add a simulation of the German nobiliary particle, von. Ephraim Owen Goldberg became Frank Gehry.

Second, all architects are older than you think. Or than they want you to think. Unlike the closely adjacent fields of music and mathematics, architecture has no prodigies. Design and construction take time. At 40, an architect is just starting out. Dying at 72 in architecture is like dying at 27 in rock and roll. The body of knowledge required is broad and intricate, philosophical and practical, and the training is long.

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From New Statesman:

Somewhere within the mind of this dwarf-like sage, behind the thick spectacles, the angry eyes, the fleshy facial mask with its wide and sensual mouth, the decisive intellectual battle of our century is being fought in microcosm. Yet, despite the single-mindedness of Sartre’s aim and the logical symmetry of his intellectual development, no great thinker has been more misunderstood and provoked such violent and conflicting reactions. Sartre has been denounced as “unfathomably obscure” (Raymond Aron) and as “a deliberate vulgariser” (Merleau-Ponty). L’Être et le Néantwas once called “the most difficult philosophical work ever written”; yet L’Existentialisme Est Un Humanisme has sold more copies (150,000) than any other volume of modern philosophy. The Vatican has placed his works on the Index; yet Gabriel Marcel, himself a militant Catholic, regarded him as the greatest of French thinkers. The State Department found his novels subversive; but Les Mains Sales was the most effective counter-revolutionary play of the entire cold war. Sartre has been vilified by the Communists in Paris and ­fêted by them in Vienna. No great philosopher ever had fewer disciples; but no other could claim the intellectual conquest of an entire generation.

Amid the bitter hatreds and controversies of which Sartre has been the centre, his principal objective—and the logical concentration with which he has pursued it—has tended to become obscured. Around the man has grown a myth; and around the myth, foggy, concentric rings of intellectual prejudice. When we strip the layers, however, we find that increasingly rare—indeed, today, unique—phenomenon: a complete philosophical system, an interlocking chain of speculation which unites truth, literature and politics in one gigantic equation. In the late Thirties, Sartre was a young, under-paid, over-educated philosophy teacher in a smart Paris school, a member—and a typical one—of the most discontented, numerically inflated and socially dangerous group in the world: the French bourgeois intellectuals. He had studied Heidegger and Kierkegaard in Germany; he taught Descartes in France. Like all intellectuals, he asked himself the question: had his knowledge any relevance to the problems of his day? The Fascists were at the gates of Madrid; what was he supposed to do about it? Why had Blum failed? Did it matter that Stalin had seen fit to murder the Old Guard of the Bolsheviks? Why was capitalism in ruins, Hitler triumphant, the democracies afraid?

It is typical of Sartre that he began his search for the answers to these problems by reformulating them at an abstract level. La Nausée (1938), his first major work, is an imaginative inquiry into the problems of existence. Roquentin, its autobiographical and solitary hero, discovers that the bourgeois world in which he lives is senseless and incoherent. His past no longer exists, his future is unknown, his present unrelated; life has no pattern. Through Roquentin’s introspective reveries, Sartre presents his fundamental metaphysical image: a loathing for the incompleteness of existence in the world as he finds it, a longing for completeness which is both intelligible and creative. If Kafka’s The Trial epitomises the nightmare of the ordinary man in a hostile and incomprehensible world, La Nausée is the nightmare of the philosopher, in which physical fear is replaced by intellectual disgust.

More here. (Note: First published on 30 June 1956, a profile of the philosopher and the communist dilemma)

Robert F. Service in Science:

Iron Man may have the cool moniker and that whole flying suit of armor thing, but we all depend on iron for some pretty special abilities. Our bodies rely on the metal to ferry oxygen in our blood and convert blood sugar to cellular energy, among other jobs. Still, too much or too little iron can wreak havoc, and problems moving the element in and out of cells cause dozens of different diseases including anemia and cystic fibrosis. Now, researchers have found a molecule that can correct some of those iron delivery problems in animals. The new compound could help scientists better understand those conditions, and may one day lead to new compounds to treat them. To maintain the proper balance of iron in cells and tissues, a network of proteins either burn energy to pump iron atoms across cell membranes or passively allow them to travel through if too much builds up on one side. Problems arise when one or more of these proteins is mutated or missing. That can lead to diseases such as anemia (too little iron) or hemochromatosis (too much). Such diseases are difficult to treat with drugs, because most medicines work by blocking or changing an existing protein’s activity. What’s needed in these cases is restoring the function of an iron transport protein that’s defective or missing altogether.

Martin Burke, a chemist at the University of Illinois in Champaign, has spent years searching for ways to restore the functions of absent proteins. In this case, to investigate problems with transporting iron, Burke’s group started with yeast cells and deleted the gene for a passive iron transporter, which stopped the cell’s growth. They then assembled a library of naturally occurring so-called small molecules, adding them one by one to the yeast culture to see whether any could restore the cells’ ability to grow. When they added a molecule called hinokitiol, originally isolated from the Taiwanese hinoki tree, growth was immediate. “It popped out of the assay,” Burke says. Tests with two other yeast cultures missing a different iron transporter turned up similar results. Burke’s team later revealed that trios of hinokitiol molecules initially surround iron atoms isolating them from their surroundings. Meanwhile, the outward-facing ends of the hinokitiol molecules contain oil-loving groups that readily dissolve in the fatty membranes that surround cells. This allows iron-baring hinokitinol trios to enter cell membranes and wiggle through, depositing their cargo on the inside. Burke and his colleagues went on to study whether hinokitiol worked when given to animals engineered to be missing iron transport proteins. In today’s issue of Science they report that orally administered hinokitiol restored iron uptake in the guts of mice and rats. Simply adding it to the tank of zebrafish reestablished the animals’ ability to produce hemoglobin.

More here.

The West Bank writer and lawyer Raja Shehadeh documents his troubled relationship with an Israeli with typical grace and power.

Ben Ehrenreich in The Guardian:

It is difficult not to wonder what kind of a man Raja Shehadeh might have become had he been born nearly anywhere else. Surely, he would have been a writer in almost any incarnation, but what kind of writer? Not everyone gets to choose. Shehadeh was born in Ramallah in 1951, three years after the foundation of the Israeli state forced his parents and many thousands of other Palestinians to abandon their homes in the coastal city of Jaffa and take refuge where they could. As a young man, he sought out other worlds. He travelled to Britain to study law and to an ashram in Pondicherry to “try my hand”, he writes in Where the Line Is Drawn, “at a spiritual life”. He was soon called home when his mother fell ill. The freedom to invent oneself, he has been forced to learn repeatedly, is a privilege reserved for the fortunate few.

Whatever he might have been, Shehadeh has become a very specific sort of writer, and an irreplaceable one. No one else writes about Palestinian life under military occupation with such stubborn humanity, melancholy and fragile grace. Over the course of 10 books of literary non-fiction – not to mention several volumes of legal analysis – he has recorded the pain of watching the West Bank be slowly seized, transformed and brutalised while Israel’s settlement enterprise expands. As the land accessible to Palestinians is diminished and disfigured by concrete walls, checkpoints and miles of barbed wire, so too are the contours and possibilities of Palestinian life. One feels the loss in every paragraph Shehadeh writes, but also the inescapable beauty that remains, which both softens and deepens the rage.

More here.

Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe:

Inflationary cosmology is the clever idea that the early universe underwent a brief period of accelerated expansion at an enormously high energy density, before that energy converted in a flash into ordinary hot matter and radiation. Inflation helps explain the observed large-scale smoothness of the universe, as well as the absence of unwanted relics such as magnetic monopoles. Most excitingly, quantum fluctuations during the inflationary period can be amplified to density perturbations that seed the formation of galaxies and large-scale structure in the universe.

That’s the good news. The bad news — or anyway, an additional piece of news, which you may choose to interpret as good or bad, depending on how you feel about these things — is that inflation doesn’t stop there. In a wide variety of models (not necessarily all), the inflationary energy converts into matter and radiation in some places, but in other places inflation just keeps going, and quantum fluctuations ensure that this process will keep happening forever — “eternal inflation.” (At some point I was a bit skeptical of the conventional story of eternal inflation via quantum fluctuations, but recently Kim Boddy and Jason Pollack and I verified to our satisfaction that you can do the decoherence calculations carefully and it all works out okay.) That’s the kind of thing, as we all know, that can lead to a multiverse.

Here’s where things become very tense and emotional. To some folks, the multiverse is great. It implies that there are very different physical conditions in different parts of the cosmos, which means that the anthropic principle kicks in, which might in turn imply a simple explanation for otherwise puzzling features of our observed universe, such as the value of the cosmological constant. To others, it’s a disaster. The existence of infinitely many regions of spacetime, each with potentially different local conditions, suggests that anything is possible, and therefore that inflation doesn’t make any predictions, and hence that it isn’t really science.

More here.