Lawrence Summers in the Washington Post:

In economics, as in life, things often take longer to happen than you think they will and then happen faster than you thought they could. So it may turn out with the catastrophic international economic policies of President Trump. It is possible that last week will be remembered as a hinge in history — a moment when the United States and the world started moving on a path away from the peace, prosperity and stability that have defined the past 75 years.

For all that has gone wrong in the past three-quarters of a century, this period has witnessed more human betterment than any time. The rate of fatalities in war has steadily declined, while growing integration has driven global growth and improvement in life expectancy and living standards. Progress is too slow, and not well enough shared, but Americans have never lived so well. This has been driven by remarkable developments in human thought, especially in science and technology, and a relatively stable global order that has been underwritten by the United States.

Will these trends continue? Optimists have suggested that despite the revanchist and often anti-rationalist rhetoric of his campaign, Trump has in the international sphere surrounded himself with rational establishment advisers and has either retreated or been stymied by Congress on proposals such as launching trade wars and building walls.

Until last week, they had a reasonable argument. No longer. We may have our first post-rational president.

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Anil Ananthaswamy in New Scientist:

“Time is a road without any bifurcations, intersections, exits, or turnarounds.” With that, neuroscientist Dean Buonomano sets up the meat of his new book, Your Brain is a Time Machine – and an intriguing difference between the way we animals navigate time as opposed to space.

Not that contrasting time and space makes the task of understanding time any easier, as Buonomano illustrates later: “The physicist’s talk on the nature of time ended on time, but it seemed to drag on for a long time.” This captures various notions of time: natural time, clock time and subjective time.

Natural time is what physicists fuss about. Is time real? Or is the passage of time an illusion, and do all moments in time exist in much the same way that all coordinates of space exist? Neuroscientists, on the other hand, fuss about clock time and subjective time.

To explain natural time, physicists and philosophers back eternalism, according to which the past, present and future are all equally real. “There is absolutely nothing particularly special about the present: under eternalism now is to time as here is to space,” writes Buonomano.

The other main explanation of natural time is presentism, according to which only the present moment is real – a view that tallies with our sense of subjective time. The past is gone, the future hasn’t happened yet. “Neuroscientists are implicitly presentists,” says Buonomano. “But despite its intuitive appeal, presentism is the underdog… in physics and philosophy.”

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Daniel Luban in Dissent:

Karl Polanyi had thought of calling his magnum opus Origins of the Cataclysm, or The Liberal Utopia, or Freedom from Economics. His publisher, worried about the book’s marketability, instead gave it the title by which it eventually became famous: The Great Transformation. It was an ambiguous phrase. Readers might imagine that “the great transformation” refers to the history the book traces: the imposition, equally utopian and violent, of the market economy upon a recalcitrant society, spreading from England to encompass the globe and ultimately bringing on the collapse of world order in the twentieth century. But for Polanyi the great transformation lay not in the past but in the future. It referred not to the coming of market liberalism but of socialism, understood as “the tendency inherent in an industrial civilization to transcend the self-regulating market by consciously subordinating it to a democratic society.” And this transformation would be the culmination of the dynamic that he famously called the “double movement,” in which the ravages of the market inevitably lead society to “protect itself” against depredation.

The more optimistic title did not make the work a rousing success upon its publication in 1944. As the book went to press, its itinerant author returned to London from the United States and promptly failed once again in his attempts to secure permanent academic employment. By the time he finally landed at Columbia a few years later, he was over sixty years old and approaching retirement. Upon Polanyi’s death in 1964, his brief New York Times obituary identified him simply as “an economist and former Hungarian political leader”—the indefinite article as revealing as the misleading choice of labels.

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Stuart Walton in Aeon:

One wants to break free of the past,’ Theodor Adorno, one of the Frankfurt School’s leading luminaries, wrote in an essay in 1959. ‘Rightly, because nothing at all can live in its shadow, and because there will be no end to the terror as long as guilt and violence are repaid with guilt and violence; wrongly, because the past that one would like to evade is still very much alive.’ In an age when the meanings of the past and the functions they are called upon to serve are so hotly contested, Adorno’s insight reminds us, in a typically double-edged way, that humanity is both composed of and trapped inside its history. This view of history underpinned the work of the boldest and bravest philosophers of the past century: the first generation of the Frankfurt School. Their arguments lacked for nothing in theoretical aspiration, and have scarcely begun to be assimilated, even today.

A key point of disputation for this generation of thinkers arose from the notion that society, in its progress from barbarism to civilisation according to the narrative of the European Enlightenment, had been increasingly founded on the principle of reason. Where mythology once held sway, the rationalistic sciences now reigned supreme. Among the Frankfurt School’s most provocative contentions was that Western civilisation had unwittingly executed a reversal of this narrative. The heroic phase of the 18th-century Enlightenment purported to have freed humankind of antique superstition and the demons of the irrational, but the horrors of the 20th century gave the lie to that triumphalism. Far from humane liberation, 20th-century Europeans had plunged into decades of savage barbarism. Why? The Frankfurt School theorists argued that universal rationality had been raised to the status of an idol. At the heart of this was what they called ‘instrumental reason’, the mechanism by which everything in human affairs was ground up.

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Scott Esposito at Literary Hub:

There are hits, and then there are smash hits, and then there are rocket ships to Mars—One Hundred Years of Solitude would qualify as the last. Estimates of its sales are around 50 million worldwide, which would put it in the range of books like The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Lolita, To Kill a Mockingbird, and 1984. College syllabi can certainly account for some of this figure, but when one considers by just how much García Márquez’s sales dwarf his fellow Boom greats—Carlos Fuentes, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Julio Cortázar—something more than higher education must be called to account. Nor is it easy to explain One Hundred Years of Solitude’s global diffusion: published in at least 44 languages, it is the most translated Spanish-language literary work after Don Quixote.

I think what can be said of this book is that it captured something vital about the historical experience of hundreds of millions of people, not only in Latin America but in other colonized lands as well. Nii Ayikwei Parkes, the award-winning British novelist born to Ghanaian immigrants, has said of the book: “[It] taught the West how to read a reality alternative to their own, which in turn opened the gates for other non-Western writers like myself and other writers from Africa and Asia.” He added that, “Apart from the fact that it’s an amazing book, it taught Western readers tolerance for other perspectives.”

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Andrew Cockburn and Michael Hudson at Harper's Magazine:

So are we heading for another explosion comparable to 2008?

I’m not sure it’ll be an explosion. It’s more like a slow crash. It’s more like people are getting desperate. They’re having to live off their credit cards, not to buy luxuries but just simply to break even. They’re falling further and further behind, and as they fall behind the interest rate rises, the penalties rise, so people are getting more and more squeezed.

That’s why where I live in New York City, on all the big shopping streets there are more and more storefronts for rent. The stores are going out of business, especially the stores that are either mom and pops, or small well-known stores like art supply stores that have been there for a generation. Only the big chains are surviving, and even the chains are closing down, Sears and others. Entire shopping malls are going into default.

But we keep being told that this is because people are shifting to online shopping. Is that not the case?

Certainly many people are shopping online, but that’s not the real cause. The real cause is that overall retail sales are going down, because the average wage earner is only able to spend between a quarter and a third of their income on goods and services, after what’s left over from housing and taxes. The Federal Housing Authority now guarantees government mortgages up to 42 percent of your income. In New York City it’s normal to pay 40 percent of your income for rent.

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Jerry Saltz at New York Magazine:

A great work of art from 1875 never seen in any museum, almost never seen at all, and all but lost to history, sat radioactive on the wall of a small gallery at the recent Frieze New York art fair. A simple depiction in prismatic hues — pencil and lustrous color — somehow expressed a thousand anxieties, lost freedom, emotions secreted away, omens of anger, empty worlds, tears, and the life of a captive. We see a canary yellow locomotive pulling a decorated red coal car and an invisible payload moving in an 1875 landscape of fields of corn, front yards, wooden fences, towns, buildings, and tracks, all running through the back of America’s memory. This is the end of the journey of 72 Cheyenne, Arapaho, and Kiowa prisoners of war found guilty without trial and all taken south and east away from their native lands of eastern Colorado, western Kansas, northern New Mexico, Oklahoma, and the Texas panhandle. Removed from a region that once teemed with herds of wild horses and bison and the traditional Plains way of life, they were piled on horse carts, ships, and train and brought to a prison camp at Fort Marion in St. Augustine, Florida.

The artist is Bear’s Heart, one of the 72 prisoners on that fateful forgotten train. Once the captives reached Fort Marion they were subjected to rigorous military discipline and forced labor. However, to please visiting tourists the prisoners were also encouraged to draw. Thus, like prisoners everywhere, these artists found coded ways to depict their captivity.

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Nicholas Wade in The New York Times:

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

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

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Henry Rollins in LA Weekly:

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

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

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

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

More here.

Ed Yong in The Atlantic:

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

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

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Christopher Lydon in The Nation:

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

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

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

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

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