Terry Eagleton in Commonweal:

The “form of life” is a crucial concept in the late philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein. It is more an anthropological notion than a political one. Forms of life consist of practices such as rubbing noses, burying the dead, imagining the future as lying ahead of you, or marking in one’s language a distinction between various forms of laughter (chortling, braying, tittering, and so on), but not between an adolescent and pre-adolescent nephew, as some tribal society might feel it appropriate to do. None of these practices is immune to change; but here and now they constitute the context within which our discourse makes sense, and are thus in some provisional sense foundational. A foundation is not necessarily less of a foundation because it might not exist tomorrow or somewhere else in the world. As Wittgenstein remarks in his homespun style, don’t claim that there isn’t a last house in the road on the grounds that one could always build another. Indeed one could; but right now this is the last one.

Wittgenstein insisted that forms of life are simply “given.” When asked why one does things in a certain way, one can only respond, “This is simply what I do.” Answers, he maintains, must come to an end somewhere. It is no wonder, then, that Wittgenstein has gained a reputation for conservatism. Yet though he is indeed in some ways a conservative thinker, it is not on this account. To acknowledge the givenness of a form of life is not necessarily to endorse its ethical or political values. “This is just what we do” is a reasonable enough response when asked why one measures distances in miles rather than kilometers, but not when asked why one administers lethal injections to citizens who are no longer able to work.

Morally and politically speaking, Wittgenstein was certainly no apologist for the form of life known as twentieth-century Western civilization.

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Amna Akbar and Keanne Theorharis offer the lead piece in a forum over at The Boston Review, with responses by Wadie Said, Sudha Setty, Lisa Stampnitzky, Tarek Z. Ismail, Sahar F. Aziz, and Su'ad Abdul Khabeer:

Focused largely on the domestic War on Terror (and only briefly touching on the interconnected global dimension), this forum examines the paradigms and legal infrastructure of U.S. domestic counterterrorism policy. The essays look at the impact of surveillance and the lack of First Amendment protections for American Muslims; the deference of federal courts to government assertions of national security; the rights-abusing paradigms of preventive prosecution, radicalization, and extremist networks; and the intersectional realities of American Muslims as (predominantly) communities of color in the United States.

These essays highlight the public silences and racialized assumptions that constitute some of the devastating legacies of 9/11 in law and culture. They show us the dangerous paradigms that have built and nourished anti-Muslim policy and law enforcement. Taken together, they reveal six key misapprehensions—even more dangerous now under a Trump presidency —that we must understand and challenge if we do not wish to see a world defined by bans and registrations.

One: Framing a defense of Muslims based solely on innocence, thereby leaving in place the idea of the “dangerous” Muslim who might deserve special measures.

In the days after the ban was announced and the first immigrants were detained, tens of thousands of people packed airports across the country: “Not in our name, not on our watch,” the protestors said. But much of this public outcry rested on a particularized notion of Muslim innocence, emphasizing the children and elderly detained at airports in inhumane conditions. But the airport has long been a place of peril for Muslims—for those Muslims whose actions, travel patterns, or social media posts are deemed questionable and who are then held for extra screening (devices searched, associations questioned, more and more information required to be allowed to pass through) and for those who are placed on the No Fly List—with almost no public challenge. The No Fly List is a secret list, expanded considerably after 2009, routinely updated without transparency about who is on it or why, and with no clear pathway for getting off the list. In 2013 civil rights groups sued on behalf of clients who were pressured to become informants under the threat of being left on the No Fly List. Democrats have celebrated the No Fly List; for instance, John Lewis’s sit-in to limit access to guns for those on the No Fly List garnered widespread liberal praise.

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William Deresiewicz in The American Scholar:

Let us eschew the familiar examples: the disinvited speakers, the Title IX tribunals, the safe zones stocked with Play-Doh, the crusades against banh mi. The flesh-eating bacterium of political correctness, which feeds preferentially on brain tissue, and which has become endemic on elite college campuses, reveals its true virulence not in the sorts of high-profile outbreaks that reach the national consciousness, but in the myriad of ordinary cases—the everyday business-as-usual at institutions around the country—that are rarely even talked about.

A clarification, before I continue (since deliberate misconstrual is itself a tactic of the phenomenon in question). By political correctness, I do not mean the term as it has come to be employed on the right—that is, the expectation of adherence to the norms of basic decency, like refraining from derogatory epithets. I mean its older, intramural denotation: the persistent attempt to suppress the expression of unwelcome beliefs and ideas.

I recently spent a semester at Scripps, a selective women’s college in Southern California. I had one student, from a Chinese-American family, who informed me that the first thing she learned when she got to college was to keep quiet about her Christian faith and her non-feminist views about marriage. I had another student, a self-described “strong feminist,” who told me that she tends to keep quiet about everything, because she never knows when she might say something that you’re not supposed to. I had a third student, a junior, who wrote about a friend whom she had known since the beginning of college and who, she’d just discovered, went to church every Sunday. My student hadn’t even been aware that her friend was religious. When she asked her why she had concealed this essential fact about herself, her friend replied, “Because I don’t feel comfortable being out as a religious person here.”

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Paul Halpern in Forbes:

Confronted with a theoretical question, such as whether or not gravitational waves exist, Richard Feynman never trusted authorities. Rather, he tried to develop and convince himself of a solution in the simplest way possible, constructing an argument from first principles. Once he managed to build a case for a particular point of view in his own mind, he felt equipped to persuade others. At the first American conference on general relativity, GR1, held in Chapel Hill in January 1957, Feynman offered a brilliant argument that gravitational waves must carry energy. The argument anticipated by almost sixty years the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) discovery, announced in February 2016, that confirmed the reality of gravitational waves.

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Lauren Michelle Jackson at The Point:

America wants to be everywhere by land, sea, bomb and/or cinema. America has mostly succeeded. Blackness, meanwhile, is everywhere in fact, touching every mappable corner of the earth. Blackness is the funniest, saddest, most beautiful, weirdest, most irreplicable thing visible and invisible to the human eye. From the lofty-minded labors of the academic elite to the capital passed in folded bills and loose change, to the arts and splendor that animate our unguarded moments—all these things owe their existence to Blackness and most of all to Black peoples.

As a Black person, this is not the treat you’d want it to be. As a Black American, omnipresence rather feels like choking. I wake up and live Blackness American, which is one way of saying I live with death. The refrain haunts the working, sitting, playing, driving, parking and walking hours, minutes and seconds of my day and night. I see death shrouded over little children running circles on the half court, the elders huddled together at the bus stop. This is one kind of living death in America.

There is another kind of death, sent from America to the shores and borders excluded from world-history curricula and only mentioned when it’s time to export all of America’s ills.

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Suzy Hansen at Bookforum:

Several books on Syria have emerged over the past few years, but those, too, often slip by without making the impact you might expect. There have been conventional nonfiction narratives like Burning Country: Syrians in Revolution and War by Robin Yassin Kassab and Leila Al-Shami, The Battle for Syria by Christopher Phillips, and Syria Burning by Charles Glass; journalistic dispatches like The Morning They Came for Us by Janine di Giovanni; memoirs like The Crossing by Samar Yazbek; Arab Spring compendiums like Robert Worth's A Rage for Order; and books that concentrate, like Patrick Cockburn's The Age of Jihad, on the rise of ISIS. But the Syrian tragedy seems not to have received the sort of intensely focused, character-driven-nonfiction treatment that has brought to life for readers other societies under siege, such as Anand Gopal's account of the war in Afghanistan, No Good Men Among the Living, or Anthony Shadid's Night Draws Near, about Iraq. Even after almost six years of war, I suspect most foreigners have little sense of either Syria's past or its daily life, which is why Alia Malek's new memoir, The Home That Was Our Country, feels like such a necessary, conscious corrective. Malek, an American-born Syrian journalist and lawyer, entwines the story of Syria with that of her family, from the birth of her great-grandfather to her own arrival as an adult during the Arab Spring. The power of her narrative suggests that the one thing that might counteract the numbing effect of incessant disconnected images is the rootedness of written history.

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Leslie Savan at The Nation:

Nat’s fierce love for jazz underlay his devotion to free speech, and vice versa. In fact, for him, they were made of the same stuff. “The Constitution and jazz are my main reasons for being,” Nat said in the 2013 documentary about his life by journalist David Lewis, The Pleasures of Being Out of Step, a clip of which was shown at the event. “The reason we have jazz, the reason we have anything worthwhile, is the fact that we’re a free people, and that comes about because of James Madison and those improvisers.”

The service was highlighted with two piano solos. Ninety-year-old jazz pianist Randy Weston played a rendition of “Berkshire Blues” (he said he and Nat became friends in the Berkshires), and the young pianist Joe Altermanperformed “Gaslight,” a song composed by Erroll Garner. During the discussion, Alterman, who got to know Hentoff while studying at NYU, recalled that Nat “said jazz was the perfect representation of democracy.”

During the panel discussion, Michael Meyers, the president and executive director of the New York Civil Rights Coalition, called Hentoff “my Wyatt Earp, because he was brave, courageous, and bold.… We agreed on virtually everything about freedom, due process of law long before it was fashionable, long before the civil-rights community caught up to the notion that freedom is indivisible.”

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Sheila Bapat in bitchmedia:

“The personal is political” is a second-wave feminist phrase. It articulates the concept that the material realities of our lives form our political consciousnesses and our priorities. Today, young feminist women of color are fighting to transform the economic status of women—and they are succeeding. Their work has taken the concept that the personal is political to a deeper level. Driven by an intersectional feminist lens—meaning a lens that encompasses race, class, gender, sexuality, ability, and age, all the realities that make up a person’s social position—young feminist women of color are building the future of the U.S. labor movement. They are imagining—and implementing—successful alternative organizing strategies for low-wage sectors that are transforming the labor movement as a whole. A key example of this is found in the domestic workers’ movement, a movement of nannies, housekeepers, and caregivers working together to codify basic labor protections for their historically unregulated sector. The National Domestic Workers Alliance is comprised of approximately 53 workers center affiliates throughout the country, including the Chicago Coalition of Household Workers, Mujeres Unidas y Activas in California, and the Brazilian Worker Center in Massachusetts.

Critically, many of these organizations were founded and are led by women of color. Many of these leaders have been domestic workers themselves or are the children of domestic workers. Priscilla Gonzalez led the New York–based Domestic Workers United for many years before becoming leader of police reform organization Communities United for Police Reform. Her activism contributed to local and state policy victories for domestic workers in New York. Gonzalez’s personal story influences her activism. Her Ecuadorian mother worked as a nanny and housekeeper for a wealthy family on the Upper East Side of New York and experienced poor treatment by her employers. Despite working long hours, Gonzalez’s mother was not paid overtime. She was expected to pay out of pocket for the children’s snacks and toys, and she'd have to fight to be reimbursed for these expenses.

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Laura Spinney in Nature:

Strange things have been happening in the news lately. Already this year, members of US President Donald Trump's administration have alluded to a 'Bowling Green massacre' and terror attacks in Sweden and Atlanta, Georgia, that never happened. The misinformation was swiftly corrected, but some historical myths have proved difficult to erase. Since at least 2010, for example, an online community has shared the apparently unshakeable recollection of Nelson Mandela dying in prison in the 1980s, despite the fact that he lived until 2013, leaving prison in 1990 and going on to serve as South Africa's first black president. Memory is notoriously fallible, but some experts worry that a new phenomenon is emerging. “Memories are shared among groups in novel ways through sites such as Facebook and Instagram, blurring the line between individual and collective memories,” says psychologist Daniel Schacter, who studies memory at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “The development of Internet-based misinformation, such as recently well-publicized fake news sites, has the potential to distort individual and collective memories in disturbing ways.”

Collective memories form the basis of history, and people's understanding of history shapes how they think about the future. The fictitious terrorist attacks, for example, were cited to justify a travel ban on the citizens of seven “countries of concern”. Although history has frequently been interpreted for political ends, psychologists are now investigating the fundamental processes by which collective memories form, to understand what makes them vulnerable to distortion. They show that social networks powerfully shape memory, and that people need little prompting to conform to a majority recollection — even if it is wrong. Not all the findings are gloomy, however. Research is pointing to ways of dislodging false memories or preventing them from forming in the first place.

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John Quiggin in the NYT:

The February Revolution is one of history’s great “What if” moments. If this revolution — which actually took place in early March 1917 according to the West’s Gregorian calendar (Russia adopted that calendar only later) — had succeeded in producing a constitutional democracy in place of the czarist empire as its leaders hoped, the world would be a very different place.

If the leading figure in the provisional government, Aleksandr Kerensky, had seized on an opportunity presented by a now-forgotten vote in the German Reichstag, World War I might have been over before American troops reached Europe. In this alternative history, Lenin and Stalin would be obscure footnotes, and Hitler would never have been more than a failed painter.

By February 1917, after more than two years of bloody and pointless war, six million Russian soldiers were dead, wounded or missing. Privation on the home front was increasing. When the government of Czar Nicholas II announced the rationing of bread, tens of thousands of protesters, many of them women, filled the streets of St. Petersburg. Strikes broke out across the country. The czar tried to suppress the protests by force, but his calls to the army were either met with mutinies or simply ignored.

By the beginning of March, the situation was untenable: Nicholas abdicated, bringing an end to the Romanov dynasty.

The vacuum created by the collapse of the autocracy was filled in part by a provisional government, formed from the opposition groups in the previously powerless Duma, or Parliament, and in part by workers’ councils, called soviets. At the outset, the initiative lay with the provisional government, which seemed to embody the hopes of a majority of the Russian people.

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Kunal Shankar interviews Akeel Bilgrami in Frontline:

Spontaneous protests broke out across the country, for example, the protest right after the visa ban on seven Muslim countries, or the Women’s March in Washington. Is that not a healthy sign?

Some things are obvious. Trump is a combination of a xenophobe, a racist, a misogynist, and, I suppose, as we have been witnessing in his pronouncements, something of an idiot. So, of course, people are understandably shocked and dismayed and the protests are most heartening. The deeper issues, however, are not about how terrible Trump is, but about why he got elected in the first place. What does his election signify about the electorate’s instincts and dissatisfactions? Everyone knows that his constituency is the working population. And I suppose that from the point of the view of the Left, it looks like a classic case of false consciousness—I mean to expect a Trump-led government to address these dissatisfactions. But, you should also remember that there was an even more classic form of false consciousness when the African-American population voted in far larger numbers for Hillary Clinton rather than Sanders. That was sheer identity politics dominating over material interests. Sanders would have done much more for working and workless blacks than Hillary Clinton. Don’t forget that Bill Clinton signed an infamous Bill that took away welfare provisions from the blacks. And Hillary Clinton subscribes to exactly the same economic ideology. It is true that the Clintons are not racist in the social sense, but from the material point of view, Sanders’ economic policies were much more in their interests. Sanders honourably refused to play identity politics and he paid the price for it. If African-Americans had voted in large numbers for Sanders, he would have won the primaries.

Here is my worry about the reaction to the Trump victory today. The hand-wringing and the hysteria about his election and post-election pronouncements, though perfectly understandable and justified—since he is monstrous on a whole range of issues—nevertheless may have the effect of giving the impression that there was some real intrinsic merit to the political establishment that Hillary Clinton represents. That would be complacent. My own view is that it should go without saying that Hillary Clinton would have been better than Trump, but if it goes without saying, then don’t say it. Because to keep saying it may give rise to the complacence that the political establishment in the U.S. has intrinsic merit.

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Amanda Montañez in Scientific American:

A couple of weeks ago I listened to an excellent podcast series on poverty in America. One message that stuck with me is just how many factors the poor have working against them—factors that, if you’re not poor, are all too easy to deny, disregard, or simply fail to notice. In the March issue of Scientific American, neuroscientist Kimberly Noble highlights one such invisible, yet very real, element of poverty: its effect on brain development in children.

When considering such a complex topic, any sort of data-driven approach can feel mired in confounding factors and variables. After all, it’s not as if money itself has any impact on the structure or function of one’s brain; rather, it is likely to be an amalgamation of environmental and/or genetic influences accompanying poverty, which results in an overall trend of relatively low achievement among poor children. By definition, this is a multifaceted problem in which correlation and causation seem virtually impossible to untangle. Nonetheless, Noble’s lab is tackling this challenge using the best scientific tools and methods available.

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John Thornhill in the Financial Times:

Among rival philosophers, Dennett is sometimes depicted as the great “deflationist” for arguing that consciousness is just a “bag of tricks”. Everyone believes they are an expert on consciousness because they think they are conscious. But Dennett is here to tell them they are wrong. He is the spoilsport at the party who points out how the magic tricks are done. Don’t even try him on such concepts such as mysticism, the soul, or God.

So why did he become a philosopher? He says that when he was a freshman at college he read Descartes’ Meditations. “I thought: ‘This is fascinating but it’s wrong. I’m going to see if I can show what’s wrong with it.’ More than 50 years later I’m still working on it.”

Dennett was convinced that Descartes’ dualism — the idea that an immaterial mind interacts with a material body — was a “cul-de-sac”. To illustrate the dualist delusion, he makes an improbable reference to the cartoon character, Casper the Friendly Ghost, who could both walk through walls and catch a baseball with his ghostly hand. “There was a latent contradiction built into the very idea of Casper the Friendly Ghost and basically that’s what’s wrong with dualism. Nobody’s ever solved that problem remotely satisfactorily.”

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Carl Zimmerman in Nautilus:

It’s hard to tell precisely how big a role biotechnology plays in our economy, because it infiltrates so many parts of it. Genetically modified organisms such as microbes and plants now create medicine, food, fuel, and even fabrics. Recently, Robert Carlson, of the biotech firm Biodesic and the investment firm Bioeconomy Capital, decided to run the numbers and ended up with an eye-popping estimate. He concluded that in 2012, the last year for which good data are available, revenues from biotechnology in the United States alone were over $324 billion. “If we talk about mining or several manufacturing sectors, biotech is bigger than those,” said Carlson. “I don’t think people appreciate that.”

What makes the scope of biotech so staggering is not just its size, but its youth. Manufacturing first exploded in the Industrial Revolution of the 19th century. But biotech is only about 40 years old. It burst into existence thanks largely to a discovery made in the late 1960s by Hamilton Smith, a microbiologist then at Johns Hopkins University, and his colleagues, that a protein called a restriction enzyme can slice DNA. Once Smith showed the world how restriction enzymes work, other scientists began using them as tools to alter genes. “And once you have the ability to start to manipulate the world with those tools,” said Carlson, “the world opens up.” The story of restriction enzymes is a textbook example of how basic research can ultimately have a huge impact on society. Smith had no such grand ambitions when he started his work. He just wanted to do some science. “I was just having a lot of fun, learning as I went,” Smith, now 85, said.

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Fatima Bhutto in The Guardian:

Gurinder Chadha’s Raj film Viceroy’s House begins with an ominous warning: “History is written by the victors.” It sure is. The empire and its descendants have their fingerprints all over this story. Viceroy’s House, the story of the Mountbattens’ arrival in India and the subcontinent’s subsequent breakup, opens to the sight of bowing, preening and scraping Indians at work on the lawns, carpets and marble floors that are to greet the last viceroy of colonised India, Lord Louis Mountbatten – or Dickie, as he was known – played by the rosy Hugh Bonneville. In one of his first scenes, Mountbatten instructs his Indian valets that he never wants to spend more than two minutes getting dressed – fitting for the man who dismembered India in less than six weeks. As always, it is the Indians, not the British, who fail in the simplest of tasks set out for them (they take 13 minutes). The benevolence of the Mountbattens and, by association, the British Raj is laced throughout Chadha’s film. The second world war, we are told at the start by another pair of Indian valets, has exhausted the British and that is why they have “announced” they will be leaving India. There is no mention of the freedom struggle, Gandhian civil disobedience and resistance that brought the empire to its knees without firing a shot. Nor of the persecution and imprisonment of India’s independence leaders, successful economic boycotts of the industrialised British behemoth or the savagery and theft of imperialism (at least three million Indians died in the Bengal famine, a man-made disaster). It is simply that the British were “exhausted” – and that, too, by the Germans.

…Viceroy’s House is the film of a deeply colonised imagination. Its actors are collateral damage; no ill can be spoken of their talent or their craft. But as a south Asian I watched this film in a dark cinema hall and wept. This August will mark the 70th anniversary of the largest migration in human history. Fifteen million Indians were displaced and more than a million killed as the subcontinent was torn asunder. What value was freedom if it did not empower people to think without chains? If this servile pantomime of partition is the only story that can be told of our past, then it is a sorry testament to how intensely empire continues to run in the minds of some today.

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George Blecher in Eurozine:

Not since the sweeping changes of the Roosevelt presidency in the 1930s have the constitutional “checks and balances” – the structural procedures built into the constitution that ostensibly protect the republic from demagoguery – been put so early and blatantly to the test. And it was just beginning: the next months will be filled with constant battles between the various branches of government.

Maybe the best way to describe the turbulent, terrible month that we just lived through is to say that the new President played two rather distinct roles, neither of which resembled that of any previous president: the public and the private Trump, the Performer and the Shady Businessman.

The public Trump was obsessed with the media – and vice versa. He clung to an image of himself as the star of a reality show whose ratings were in perpetual jeopardy. There was a frenetic, crazed quality to his performance that we didn’t see during the campaign. His tweets were directed at his fans, but they also served to confound and titillate the general public. And in those tweets and raucous press conferences, he acted out a kind of morality play in which he was the victimized child, while the establishment – the media, the courts, all his enemies in Congress and the general public – was the parent who didn’t understand him. Self-righteousness and self-pity were the play’s main themes.

It has to be admitted that his fan base enjoyed Trump’s performance. They shared his sense of persecution and belief in his definition of fake news; most of all, they appreciated his gestures at making good on his campaign promises, though much of what he did was in the nature of public pronouncements rather than proposals to Congress or executive orders.

But Trump supporters are a patient lot, and up to this point seem to be comfortable with someone who voices and respects their complaints rather than a chief executive who can actually do something about them. Plus it all made good TV. We were glued to our newsfeeds and TV news channels night and day. The Trump show was the only show in town. Whether one liked or hated his performance, he managed to keep the whole world enthralled.

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