Melissa Dinsman in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

MELISSA DINSMAN: Like me, you come from a literary background, so how did you first come to enter what we will broadly call, at this point, the digital field?

FRANCO MORETTI: I have been interested in a scientific approach to literature for a long time, since the late-1980s when I wrote on evolutionary theory in literature. From here I moved to geography and wrote the Atlas of the European Novel. While doing geographical research, I realized that quantitative methods helped considerably with mapmaking. So I became interested in quantitative approaches to history of all kinds. Around 2000-2001, I gave a series of lectures at the University of California, Berkeley that pulled all these threads together. This became the book Graphs, Maps, Trees. But the lucky moment was that right then Matt Jockers came to Stanford as a technology specialist. We met and started working together. So for me, digital humanities was really like the fourth or fifth station along a much longer course, which also means that I've never seen digital humanities as, so to speak, a total novelty as some of its practitioners do. For me it’s basically the form taken in the digital age by scientific, explanatory, empirical, rationalistic, call it what you want, approaches to the history of literature and culture.

More here.

Michael Shermer in Scientific American:

In the past couple of years imbroglios erupted on college campuses across the U.S. over trigger warnings (for example, alerting students to scenes of abuse and violence in The Great Gatsby before assigning it), microaggressions (saying “I believe the most qualified person should get the job”), cultural appropriation (a white woman wearing her hair in cornrows), speaker disinvitations (Brandeis University canceling plans to award Ayaan Hirsi Ali an honorary degree because of her criticism of Islam's treatment of women), safe spaces (such as rooms where students can go after a talk that has upset them), and social justice advocates competing to signal their moral outrage over such issues as Halloween costumes (last year at Yale University). Why such unrest in the most liberal institutions in the country?

Although there are many proximate causes, there is but one ultimate cause—lack of political diversity to provide checks on protests going too far. A 2014 study conducted by the University of California, Los Angeles, Higher Education Research Institute found that 59.8 percent of all undergraduate faculty nationwide identify as far left or liberal, compared with only 12.8 percent as far right or conservative. The asymmetry is much worse in the social sciences. A 2015 study by psychologist José Duarte, then at Arizona State University, and his colleagues in Behavioral and Brain Sciences, entitled “Political Diversity Will Improve Social Psychological Science,” found that 58 to 66 percent of social scientists are liberal and only 5 to 8 percent conservative and that there are eight Democrats for every Republican. The problem is most relevant to the study of areas “related to the political concerns of the Left—areas such as race, gender, stereotyping, environmentalism, power, and inequality.” The very things these students are protesting.

More here. [Thanks to Omar Ali.]

Claudia Dreyfus in the New York Times:

This week, the biologist Edward O. Wilson, professor emeritus at Harvard University and recipient of two Pulitzer Prizes, will publish his 32nd book, a personal exhortation to conserve biodiversity titled “Half Earth: Our Planet’s Fight for Life.”

The book offers an improbable prescription for the environment: Dr. Wilson suggests that humans set aside roughly 50 percent of the planet as a sort of permanent preserve, undisturbed by man.

We spoke for three hours in the cafeteria of the assisted-living facility in Lexington, Mass., where Dr. Wilson and his wife, Irene, have lived the past 14 years. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for space and clarity.

Q. Why publish this book now?

A. Because a lifetime of research has magnified my perception that we are in a crisis with reference to the living part of the environment.We now have enough measurements of extinction rates and the likely rate in the future to know that it is approaching a thousand times the baseline of what existed before humanity came along.

Reading your book, one senses you felt a great urgency to write it?

The urgency was twofold. First, it’s only been within the last decade that a full picture of the crisis in biodiversity has emerged. The second factor was my age. I’m 86. I had a mild stroke a couple of years ago. I thought, “Say this now or never.”

And what I say is that to save biodiversity, we need to set aside about half the earth’s surface as a natural reserve. I’m not suggesting we have one hemisphere for humans and the other for the rest of life. I’m talking about allocating up to one half of the surface of the land and the sea as a preserve for remaining flora and fauna.

More here.

Jane Brody in The New York Times:

Throughout the country, the arts are pumping new life into the bodies and minds of the elderly. Two summers ago, a remarkable documentary called “Alive Inside” showed how much music can do for the most vulnerable older Americans, especially those whose memories and personalities are dimmed by dementia. The film opens with a 90-year-old African-American woman living in a nursing home being asked about her life growing up in the South. All she could say in response to specific questions was, “I’m sorry, I don’t remember.” But once she was fitted with an iPod that played the music she had enjoyed in her youth, her smile grew wide and her eyes sparkled as vivid memories flooded her consciousness. She was now able to describe in detail the music and dances she had relished with her young friends. At another nursing home, a man named George with advanced dementia refused to speak or even raise his head when asked his name. He too was outfitted with an iPod, and suddenly George came back to life, talking freely, wiggling to the music in his wheelchair and singing along with the songs he once loved.

The Music and Memory project that provided the iPods was the inspiration of a volunteer music lover named Dan Cohen, and has since spread to many nursing homes and facilities for the aged around the country. Alas, not nearly enough of them. Medicaid, which fully covers the cost of potent drugs that can turn old people into virtual zombies, has no policy that would pay for far less expensive music players. So the vast majority of nursing home residents who might benefit are deprived of this joyous experience. Nonetheless, across the country, the arts in their myriad forms are enhancing the lives and health of older people — and not just those with dementia— helping to keep many men and women out of nursing homes and living independently.

More here.

M. Anthony Mills at The New Atlantis:

One of the controversies attending the publication of Laudato Si’ is about the claim that the encyclical is “anti-modern,” a description that has been alternatively a point of cautious praise and a barbed criticism. Matthew Schmitz and R.R. Reno of First Things magazine provide good examples of the two interpretations. Both argue in different ways that, for better or for worse — for Schmitz better, for Reno worse — the encyclical attacks the heart of modern social, political, and economic life, namely, the techno-economic nexus that draws science, technology, and capitalism together in a system of efficient economic production and material consumption. In so doing, the pontiff is said to break with his more conciliatory predecessors, allying himself with an older strain of Catholic orthodoxy that never came to terms with modernity.

This strain, exemplified by Pope Pius IX’s 1864 Syllabus of Errors, holds that the economic self-interest and scientific rationalism characteristic of modernity are incompatible with the truths of the Gospel, which are rooted in spiritual poverty and caritas. Pope Francis allegedly casts his lot with the anti-moderns, while adding, in a nod to his namesake — and to the ecologists who look up to Saint Francis — that environmental degradation is among the important sins of the modern era. A return to Christian virtue, then, entails a return to pre-modern forms of economic production and social organization, whereby nature is tilled for the common good, not exploited for the few.

Descriptions of Laudato Si’ as “anti-science” or “anti-progress” are particularly striking, since so many self-described progressives, representatives of the scientific community, and environmentalists have warmly welcomed the recent encyclical in the hope that it would motivate action on climate change.

more here.

Nathaniel Popkin at The Cleaver:

In early 1951, when the Mexican writer Homero Aridjis was almost eleven, he came home from playing soccer with friends and, following a vague urge, took his brother’s shotgun to the yard. He shot into the air, scattered the birds aloft from the sapodilla tree, and dropped the shotgun to the ground. The gun fired and struck Aridjis in the stomach. He barely survived. The accident, writes Chloe Aridjis, his daughter, “cleaved in two” his life and sealed off his early childhood “like a locked garden.” In the aftermath of the accident, Homero Aridjis began reading and writing in earnest, the crucible of an astonishingly prolific career, but without access to memories of his own boyhood.

Twenty years after the gun accident, with his wife, Betty Ferber, pregnant with Chloe, the couple’s first child, Aridjis began to have “astonishingly vivid dreams” of his childhood. These dreams unlocked the garden of memory. He eventually recounted them in a slender memoir of childhood, El poeta niño, published in 1991. Now, Chloe Aridjis, the author of the novel Book of Clouds, has produced an English translation, The Child Poet, brought out by Archipelago Books this month.

I am particularly hungry for this book because my own childhood is locked away, and my writing suffers for it. It isn’t clear why—there is nothing so acute as a gun accident in my history.

more here.

Mel Ahern at The New Inquiry:

In 1980, Michel Foucault gave an anonymous interview for Le Monde because he was, in his words, “nostalgic for a time when, being quite unknown, what I said had some chance of being heard.” Calling himself the “Masked Philosopher,” he suggested that the unknown author has an “unrippled” “surface of contact” with the reader, and that the book without an author might “land in unexpected places and form shapes that I had never thought of.” He temporarily shed the authority of his name, because “a name makes reading too easy.”

Genres, too, make reading easy. Genres are information-bearing: like a kind of literary meta-data, a text’s genre tells you what discourses regulate it and what counts as knowledge within; it says who the author is and where her authority lies. The psychoanalyst does not reach for hard-numbered sociological data, and the quantitative researcher cares nothing for his subject’s dreams. Genre is therefore, as the good Masked Philosopher taught us, an apparatus of power. Ask any high school student, journalist, grant writer, or PhD candidate, and she will tell you that the things she writes must offer up certain kinds of observations, arguments, and evidence. The modes in which we write determine what we’re able say. Even the art critic lacks permission to dream.

The problem with this is not so much that discourses confine us, or even that they produce us. That they do both is old news. No, the problem is that this whole process of comporting certain facts to certain discourses just takes so much time. Say—to borrow an episode from The Irresponsible Magician—that you have a dream in which the actor Ed Harris plays a madcap minimalist sculptor slash magician slash respected art professor who obtained tenure by building an endless glass window into ancient Rome.

more here.

The People of the Other Village

hate the people of this village
and would nail our hats
to our heads for refusing in their presence to remove them
or staple our hands to our foreheads
for refusing to salute them
if we did not hurt them first: mail them packages of rats,
mix their flour at night with broken glass.
We do this, they do that.
They peel the larynx from one of our brothers’ throats.
We de-vein one of their sisters.
The quicksand pits they built were good.
Our amputation teams were better.
We trained some birds to steal their wheat.
They sent to us exploding ambassadors of peace.
They do this, we do that.
We canceled our sheep imports.
They no longer bought our blankets.
We mocked their greatest poet
and when that had no effect
we parodied the way they dance
which did cause pain, so they, in turn, said our God
was leprous, hairless.
We do this, they do that.
Ten thousand (10,000) years, ten thousand
(10,000) brutal, beautiful years.
.

by Thomas Lux
from New and Selected Poems
Houghton Mifflin, 1997
.

Iris van Herpen. Water Splash Dress. From the Crystallization Collection, 2013.

PET plastic, acrylic spray.

Photograph by Sughra Raza on March 6, 2016 at Boston's MFA.

More here and here.

David Rieff in The Guardian:

As a reporter in the Bosnian war, in 1993 I went to Belgrade to visit Vuk Drašković, the Serb nationalist politician and writer who was then leading the mass opposition against the Slobodan Milošević regime. Drašković had drawn liberal as well as ultra-nationalist support in Serbia for his cause. As I was leaving his office, one of Drašković’s young aides pressed a folded bit of paper into my hand. It turned out to be blank except for a date: 1453 – the year Orthodox Constantinople fell to the Muslim Ottomans.

Friends of mine who had worked in the former Yugoslavia during the Croatian and Bosnian wars had similar experiences in Zagreb and Sarajevo, though the dates in question were different. It seemed as if the “sores of history”, as the Irish writer Hubert Butler once called them, remained unhealed more than half a millennium later – at least in the desperate, degraded atmosphere of that time and place.

And yet, while alert to the possibility that history can be abused, as it unquestionably was in the Balkans in the 1990s, most decent people still endorse George Santayana’s celebrated dictum: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” The consequence of this is that remembrance as a species of morality has become one of the more unassailable pieties of the age. Today, most societies all but venerate the imperative to remember. We have been taught to believe that the remembering of the past and its corollary, the memorialising of collective historical memory, has become one of humanity’s highest moral obligations.

But what if this is wrong, if not always, then at least part of the time?

More here.

From Science Daily:

In an attempt to determine the replicability of psychological science, a consortium of 270 scientists known as The Open Science Collaboration (OSC) tried to replicate the results of 100 published studies. More than half of them failed, creating sensational headlines worldwide about the “replication crisis” in psychology.

But an in-depth examination of the data by Daniel Gilbert (Edgar Pierce Professor of Psychology at Harvard University), Gary King (Albert J. Weatherhead III University Professor at Harvard University), Stephen Pettigrew (doctoral student in the Department of Government at Harvard University), and Timothy Wilson (Sherrell J. Aston Professor of Psychology at the University of Virginia) has revealed that the OSC made some serious mistakes that make this pessimistic conclusion completely unwarranted:

The methods of many of the replication studies turn out to be remarkably different from the originals and, according to Gilbert, King, Pettigrew, and Wilson, these “infidelities” had two important consequences.

First, they introduced statistical error into the data which led the OSC to significantly underestimate how many of their replications should have failed by chance alone. When this error is taken into account, the number of failures in their data is no greater than one would expect if all 100 of the original findings had been true.

Second, Gilbert, King, Pettigrew, and Wilson discovered that the low-fidelity studies were four times more likely to fail than were the high-fidelity studies, suggesting that when replicators strayed from the original methods, they caused their own studies to fail.

More here.

Keaton Patti in McSweeney's:

It was all lies.

Everything that I put forth as true in my book was fabricated, and I can’t keep the secret balled up inside of me anymore. I’m letting it all out. I won’t continue to sit back and watch parents use my bullshit shit book to teach their children that their bodily functions are normal and healthy. It’s not right.

I made it all up.

Everyone Poops? Looking back, it was such an absurd blanket statement that I can’t believe I got away with it. Everyone?EVERYONE? Most people, probably, but everyone? Nobody can know that. Not me, not you, not even God. Yet that didn’t stop me from writing that I poop, you poop, and God poops every Sunday and on the major holidays. It was crazy that nobody flushed out the truth.

I fudged the data.

“An elephant makes a big poop.”

“A mouse makes a tiny poop.”

All nonsense. For all I know it’s the other way around.

More here.

Andrew Bacevich in Moyers & Company:

Whether or not Donald Trump ultimately succeeds in winning the White House, historians are likely to rank him as the most consequential presidential candidate of at least the past half-century. He has already transformed the tone and temper of American political life. If he becomes the Republican nominee, he will demolish its structural underpinnings as well. Should he prevail in November, his election will alter its very fabric in ways likely to prove irreversible. Whether Trump ever delivers on his promise to “Make America Great Again,” he is already transforming American democratic practice. Trump takes obvious delight in thumbing his nose at the political establishment and flouting its norms. Yet to classify him as an anti-establishment figure is to miss his true significance. He is to American politics what Martin Shkreli is to Big Pharma. Each represents in exaggerated form the distilled essence of a much larger and more disturbing reality. Each embodies the smirking cynicism that has become one of the defining characteristics of our age. Each in his own way is a sign of the times.

In contrast to the universally reviled Shkreli, however, Trump has cultivated a mass following that appears impervious to his missteps, miscues and misstatements. What Trump actually believes — whether he believes in anything apart from big, splashy self-display — is largely unknown and probably beside the point. Trumpism is not a program or an ideology. It is an attitude or pose that feeds off of, and then reinforces, widespread anger and alienation. The pose works because the anger — always present in certain quarters of the American electorate but especially acute today — is genuine. By acting the part of impish bad boy and consciously trampling on the canons of political correctness, Trump validates that anger. The more outrageous his behavior, the more secure his position at the very center of the political circus. Wondering what he will do next, we can’t take our eyes off him. And to quote Marco Rubio in a different context, Trump “knows exactly what he is doing.”

Targeting Obama’s Presidency

There is a form of genius at work here. To an extent unmatched by any other figure in American public life, Trump understands that previous distinctions between the ostensibly serious and the self-evidently frivolous have collapsed. Back in 1968, then running for president, Richard Nixon, of all people, got things rolling when he appeared on Laugh-In and uttered the immortal words, “Sock it to me?” But no one has come close to Trump in grasping the implications of all this: in contemporary America, celebrity confers authority. Mere credentials or qualifications have become an afterthought. How else to explain the host of a “reality” TV show instantly qualifying as a serious contender for high office?

More here. (Thanks to Nermeen Shaikh)

Nancy Owano in PhysOrg:

The mind at its laziest sees the old—books in print—and the new—the digital universe—as opposites, in an either-or historic transition from one to the other. Goodbye, brick and mortar book shops, hello, Kindle. Reading words on paper with binding, so yesterday. Reading the same words off a screen, so now. One publishing industry response is that everyone benefits if there is a merging of digital and print for learning as well as entertainment. Publishing Perspectives, a trade journal for the book publishing industry, reported that consultant Bruce Harris voiced enthusiasm for the role of augmented reality (AR) in publishing, saying there was potential in “a true amalgamation of digital and print.”

Not just physical print forms but even digital forms could benefit from AR. Harris said, “In some ways, digital has been “a frozen print experience,” in that the reader is often looking at the same thing in both print and digital versions.” Once you add AR, you are experiencing movement, extra sound, “a lot of extra qualities” with the content. Reading behavior in the AR vein might involve people using their phones or tablet apps to scan their physical page and see extra elements pop up. You are not throwing your printed book into the dustbin to read the same online. Instead, “You use your device to discover more content. The content is digitally appealing and has stuff you can manipulate, but you need the actual book in order to do it.”

More here.

Self-Portrait

My childhood is all memories of a patio in Seville,
A orchard in the light where lemons ripened every fall,
My life as a young man- some twenty years about Castille,
My adult life- a few things I would rather not recall.

I've never gone Lothario or played at Don Juan at parties.
It's obvious from my slovenly apparel that I can't.
Still, I endured the arrow meted out to me by Cupid
And loved as much as women's hospitality could grant.

Though drops of leftist rebel blood may pulse throughout my body,
My verse has welled forth from a peaceful spring through all my days
More so than the good boys who follow all the holy strictures,
I stand as a good man, and in the good sense of the phrase.

I give myself to beauty. In contemporary fashion
I've cut some classic roses from the garden of Ronsard
But I've no love for make-up of the Modernist beauticians
And do not flock with birds that sing in high-flown avant-garde.

And I dislike the balladry of hollow lovelorn tenors,
The cricket-choirs and tweety-birds who warble at the moon.
I cock my ear to try and tell the voices from the echos,
And of the many voices I but listen to the one.

Read more »