Tamsin Shaw in the New York Review of Books:

In 1971, the psychologist B.F. Skinner expressed the hope that the vast, humanly created problems defacing our beautiful planet (famines, wars, the threat of a nuclear holocaust) could all be solved by new “technologies of behavior.” The psychological school of behaviorism sought to replace the idea of human beings as autonomous agents with the “scientific” view of them as biological organisms, responding to external stimuli, whose behavior could be modified by altering their environment. Perhaps unsurprisingly, in 1964 Skinner’s claims about potential behavior modification had attracted funding from the CIA via a grant-making body called the Human Ecology Society.

Skinner was extremely dismayed that his promise of using his science to “maximize the achievements of which the human organism is capable” was derided by defenders of the entirely unscientific ideal of freedom. When Peter Gay, for instance, spoke of the “innate naïveté, intellectual bankruptcy, and half-deliberate cruelty of behaviorism,” Skinner, clearly wounded, protested that the “literature of freedom” had provoked in Gay “a sufficiently fanatical opposition to controlling practices to generate a neurotic if not psychotic response.” Skinner was unable to present any more robust moral defense of his project of social engineering.

In spite of the grandiosity of Skinner’s vision for humanity, he could not plausibly claim to be a moral expert. It is only more recently that the claims of psychologists to moral expertise have come to be taken seriously. Contributing to their new aura of authority has been their association with neuroscience, with its claims to illuminate the distinct neural pathways taken by our thoughts and judgments.

More here.

Ed Yong in The Atlantic:

In the darkness of the Akeley Hall of Mammals, swarms of kids gawk at beautifully staged dioramas of Africa’s wildlife. The stuffed safari, nestled in the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) in New York, includes taxidermied leopards stalking a bush pig, preserved ostriches strutting in front of warthogs, and long-dead baboons cautiously considering a viper. In one corner, in a display marked “Upper Nile Region,” a lone hippo grazes next to a herd of lechwe, roan antelope, and a comically stern shoebill stork.

“This is my favorite one,” says Evon Hekkala, pointing to the display. “There’s a taxidermied crocodile tucked away down there.”

It takes a while to spot it and I have to crane my head to do so, but yes, there it is—a large crocodile, in the back, mouth agape, next to the hippo. It’s mostly hidden from view, and until recently, it was hidden from science, too.

Five years ago, scientists would have classified it as a Nile crocodile (Crocodylus niloticus)—one of the largest of the family, and among the most feared. But in 2011, after extracting DNA from this specimen and dozens of others, Hekkala proved that the iconic species is actually two species. One had been disguised as its more widespread cousin all this time. Hekkala called it Crocodylus suchus—the sacred crocodile. It’s the species in the diorama.

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Ram Manikkalingam in Open Democracy:

Last week the national anthem was sung in Tamil for the first time at the official celebration of Sri Lanka’s independence day. Six years ago the government’s own regional director for education in the Tamil north, Markandu Sivalingam, was assassinated by “unidentified” gunmen for disagreeing with then President Rajapaksa’s directive to ban the singing of the national anthem in Tamil at official functions. The United Nation’s High Commissioner for Human Rights, Prince Zeid, who is currently visiting Sri Lanka, should welcome the transformation this signals in Sri Lanka’s politics in just over a year since President Sirisena’s election.

No doubt, the High Commissioner will also express the UN view – set out in a Human Rights Council resolution last September – that President Sirisena must set up a court to try war crimes committed during the bloody civil war that ended in 2009. The President is on record in favour of holding violators of humanitarian and human rights law to account. But he is also committed to reaching a deal that would give the Tamil community in the north and east of Sri Lanka power to manage economic, land and cultural issues. Some argue both objectives can be realized in tandem, but the political realities in post-conflict Sri Lanka suggest otherwise.

Demands for accountability for war crimes and autonomy are made by Tamil leaders but still resisted by much of the Sinhala establishment—these remain deeply polarising issues. To achieve both requires sensitivity to the politics.

More here,

Lilly Lampe at The Brooklyn Rail:

Is the supposed crisis in painting a product of the medium’s own neurosis? Perhaps it isn’t that painting is dead but that, like many of us, it suffers from anxiety about death? Maybe painting is depressed, a sentiment I dare say many critics would validate, or narcissistic (undeniably), or irrationally obsessed with the threat of other mediums. Obsession of some sort seems the most likely diagnosis, with the result being compulsive inward-looking as well as an unhealthy fixation on what painting or sculpture or video might be doing.

The narcissistic self-obsession of painting was certainly on view in The Forever Now. The exhibition seemed particularly hung up on three primary qualities of painting today: possession of a stretcher or the illusion or reference to one, use of canvas or other painting surfaces, and the gestural mark, something akin to a painterly brushstroke. This dogged insistence on the traditional structure of painting—done on a panel, canvas, or linen, and pulled over stretcher bars—and expressive mark-making done by hand is, minus a dogmatic insistence on the use of paint itself, hardly a step removed from Greenberg’s idea of medium specificity. Both Lowry and Hoptman described the artists in The Forever Now as traditionalists in so many words. Lowry wrote the artists “made their work in the most traditional manner—using paint and brushes on canvas.”³ Hoptman elided her choices as “practitioners of painting qua painting,” perhaps synonymous with the elusive moniker of “painter-painter.”⁴ If MoMA is correct, the move towards the flatness that Greenberg described is not only alive, but dominant, and while medium specificity seems to have gotten away from necessarily involving paint on canvas, the moves made by Bradley, Johnson, and Mehretu, with a grease stick, carved soap, and ink, respectively, substitute painterly mark-making without using a drop of paint.

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Keith Miller at Literary Review:

In the years after the Second World War, during Dmitri Shostakovich’s second period of disfavour with the Soviet authorities, he wasn’t just humiliatingly wheeled out at the Cultural and Scientific Congress for World Peace in New York, a fellow travellers’ jamboree that just about snuck in under the McCarthyist wire. He was also packed off to Leipzig to judge a piano competition inaugurated to commemorate J S Bach on the bicentenary of his death. Hearing gold medallist Tatyana Nikolayeva rattle through The Well-Tempered Clavier, he went home and wrote his 24 Preludes and Fugues for her.

Opinions remain divided on how good Shostakovich was, or might have been but for the fear that hunched ogreishly over him from the morning in 1936 when Pravda published a damning editorial, ‘Sumbur vmesto muzyki’ (‘muddle instead of music’), about the up-to-then pretty successful and well-reviewed opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, to the last and, in a strange way, greatest humiliation: his enforced joining of the Party in 1960. But the 24 Preludes and Fugues, to put it one way, aren’t half bad for a composer with one ear perpetually cocked in the direction of the doorbell.

The New York episode constitutes the second of three sections – we might call them ‘movements’ – in Julian Barnes’s new novel. It’s a third-person account of Shostakovich’s tribulations at the hands of Stalin and his chief cultural muppet, Andrei Zhdanov, and the different challenges posed by his rehabilitation in the eyes of a regime that had stopped murdering people in industrial numbers but remained somewhat controlling in matters of artistic practice.

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Natasha Vargas-Cooper at The Baffler:

In the early 1990s a conservative criminologist at Princeton, John J. DiIulio, scanned the horizon and predicted that a new superbreed of hoodlums was coming like a demographic tidal wave. Over a twenty-year span, DiIulio forecast, 270,000 juvenile offenders would roam the nation’s streets, looking to rob, rape, or assault law-abiding citizens. Due to the depravation of the drugs ingested by their mothers, these young men would be too neurologically damaged to feel empathy; growing up, they would be “fatherless, Godless, and jobless.” According to DiIulio, these youths would prove to be superpredatory, “more terrorist than criminal.”

In his 1996 essay, “My Black Crime Problem and Ours,” DiIulio later wrote, “Think how many black children grow up where parents neglect and abuse them, where other adults and teenagers harass and harm them, where drug dealers exploit them. Not surprisingly, in return for the favor, some of these children kill, rape, maim, and steal without remorse.” DiIulio’s prophecy was echoed by other respected criminologists like James Q. Wilson, Alfred Blumstein, and James Fox, who christened the future “a bloodbath.”

The public at large already had an image for packs of feral black teens destined to terrorize civilians: the Central Park Five, a group of mostly black boys from gritty uptown projects who took to the park to swagger, bully, and punk well-to-do locals. When they were (wrongfully) accused of brutally raping and assaulting a female jogger, the images of glowering young black boys saturated nightly news coverage.

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Yanan Wang in The Washington Post:

Sunday's game between the Denver Broncos and the Carolina Panthers was the third most-watched television broadcast in U.S. history, according to numbers released by Nielsen on Monday. The viewership peaked at an average of 115.5 million not during the game itself, but rather during the 30-minute halftime show. This confirms what many (including The Washington Post's Chris Richards) have been saying: Beyoncé dominated the Super Bowl. With a performance of her new single, “Formation,” which touched upon police brutality, the Black Panthers and Malcolm X, the singer handily upstaged fellow performers Coldplay and Bruno Mars. Even after the last of her leather-clad dancers left the field, there was no shortage of material to keep viewers talking. Now, the debate rages on about whether it was appropriate for Beyoncé to inject politics into her performance. The same elements that have been widely praised for showcasing black empowerment also have attracted ire from the likes of former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani, who on Monday called Beyoncé's “attack” on police officers “outrageous.”

At issue are, among other things, the “X” formation that dancers created on the field and the Afros and black berets they sported, channeling black activist Malcolm X and the aesthetic of the Black Panther Party of the 1960s and '70s. What wasn't shown on-screen but is now catching fire online is a quieter political display that occurred after the halftime show, when a group of Beyoncé's dancers was approached by two organizers for the Bay Area chapter of the Black Lives Matter movement.

More here. (Note: At least one post will be dedicated to honor Black History Month throughout February)

Natalie Angier in The New York Times:

Whether to enliven a commute, relax in the evening or drown out the buzz of a neighbor’s recreational drone, Americans listen to music nearly four hours a day. In international surveys, people consistently rank music as one of life’s supreme sources of pleasure and emotional power. We marry to music, graduate to music, mourn to music. Every culture ever studied has been found to make music, and among the oldest artistic objects known are slender flutes carved from mammoth bone some 43,000 years ago — 24,000 years before the cave paintings of Lascaux. Given the antiquity, universality and deep popularity of music, many researchers had long assumed that the human brain must be equipped with some sort of music room, a distinctive piece of cortical architecture dedicated to detecting and interpreting the dulcet signals of song. Yet for years, scientists failed to find any clear evidence of a music-specific domain through conventional brain-scanning technology, and the quest to understand the neural basis of a quintessential human passion foundered. Now researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have devised a radical new approach to brain imaging that reveals what past studies had missed. By mathematically analyzing scans of the auditory cortex and grouping clusters of brain cells with similar activation patterns, the scientists have identified neural pathways that react almost exclusively to the sound of music — any music. It may be Bach, bluegrass, hip-hop, big band, sitar or Julie Andrews. A listener may relish the sampled genre or revile it. No matter. When a musical passage is played, a distinct set of neurons tucked inside a furrow of a listener’s auditory cortex will fire in response.

Other sounds, by contrast — a dog barking, a car skidding, a toilet flushing — leave the musical circuits unmoved.

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Kerry James Marshall. Lost Boys: AKA 8 ball, 1992.

More here, here, and here.

Tim Parks in the New York Review of Books:

Perhaps inevitably when reading translations, from time to time one comes across a strange word: “ankylosed,” for example. “Nor was it easy to understand how he had survived in Auschwitz,” we read in Ann Goldstein’s new translation of Primo Levi’s The Truce, “since he had an ankylosed arm.” If we turn back to Stuart Woolf’s 1965 translation of what was Levi’s second book, we get the same word with a different spelling, “anchylosed.”

This strange word is, of course, the English cognate of Levi’s original: anchilosato. But the two words are hardly equivalent in effect. If we type “an ankylosed arm” into the Google search engine of the entire English language Internet, we get just five hits, three of them from surgical texts published a century ago; the remaining two are The Complete Works of Primo Levi, in which Goldstein’s translation appears, and a long online discussion of King Philip II of Macedonia’s ankylosis, “a stiffness of a joint due to abnormal adhesion and rigidity of the bones of the joint.”

On the other hand, if we ask Google to search “un braccio anchilosato” we get 477 results (and we remember that Italian, being less widely spoken than English, usually has far fewer hits for equivalent phrases—“concentration camp,” 7.5 million, “campo di concentramento,” 581,000). This time the results are mainly from journalism and popular fiction, including one of Emilio Salgari’s famous novels for young adults.

More here.

Ed Yong in Not Exactly Rocket Science:

There’s a group of fossils insects that look really quite a lot like butterflies. They had broad wings with scales and pigmented eyespots. Their mouthparts were long probing straws. They likely fed from plants and pollinated them in return. They’re as butterfly-esque as it’s possible to be.

Except these creatures were flying around between 40 and 85 million years before the first butterflies existed.

They were kalligrammatid lacewings, and they were doing butterflies before butterflies even were a thing. Their resemblance is a coincidence, an extraordinary example of convergent evolution, the process two groups turn up to life’s party accidentally wearing the same outfits.

The kalligrammatids appeared around 165 million years ago, during the Jurassic period, and died out 45 million years later. During their reign, they were among the largest and most conspicuous insects around. Time has since been unkind to them: many became fossilised but most have been badly preserved. Scientists have commented on their similarities to butterflies for more than a century, but no one has been able to thoroughly study their anatomy—that is, until Conrad Labandeira and Dong Ren from Capital Normal University in Beijing got their hands on some beautifully preserved specimens from northeastern China.

More here.

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Justin E. H. Smith in his blog:

An official reform of French spelling was recently announced, causing no small uproar on the Internet, and presumably in real life too (I don't really talk to people), as to whether this is good or bad.

There were three broad sorts of change. The first are changes to the spelling of words in order to better reflect their pronunciation. The most common example cited has been the replacement ofoignon by ognon. I confess I had always thought the first syllable of this word was supposed to be pronounced as in oie ('goose'), that is, roughly as in the first syllable of the English water. I noticed people around me were pronouncing it as ognon, but took this for a regionalism or a sort of laziness. I can't say I care so much about this change, but ognon looks awfully strange to me, too much like a variation on some proto-Slavic root for fire, as in the Russian огонь ('ogon''), whose genitive is огня ('ognya') and whose Sanskrit cousin is the goddess अग्नि (Agni): in all of which cases the g is pronounced before the n, rather than indicating a softening in the termination of the n and providing a faint iotation to the vowel that follows. I expect I will be practicing orthographic disobedience whenever I write that word in the future, not out of firm principle, but only out of soft preference.

The second sort of reform has mostly to do with hyphens, e.g., transforming that most French of words (at least since Godard), week-end, into weekend. This seems to follow a broad trend that is much further along in English (a hundred years ago it was common to see dog-house, out-fit, and so on), and I find I really could not care less.

More here.

Ghazal for White Hen Pantry
.

beverly be the only south side you don’t fit in
everybody in your neighborhood color of white hen

brown bag tupperware lunch don’t fill you
after school cross the street, count quarters with white friends

you love 25¢ zebra cakes mom would never let you eat
you learn to white lie through white teeth at white hen

oreos in your palm, perm in your hair
everyone’s irish in beverly, you just missin’ the white skin

pray they don’t notice your burnt toast, unwondered bread
you be the brownest egg ever born from the white hen

pantry in your chest where you stuff all the Black in
distract from the syllables in your name with a white grin

keep your consonants crisp, coffee milked, hands visible
never touch the holiday-painted windows of white hen

you made that mistake, scratched your initials in the paint
an unmarked crown victoria pulled up, full of white men

they grabbed your wrist & wouldn’t show you a badge
the manager clucked behind the counter, thick as a white hen

they told your friends to run home, but called the principal on you
& you learned Black sins cost much more than white ones
.

by Jamila Woods
from Poetry Magazine
December 2015
.

Oliver Morton in More Intelligent Life:

In the far reaches of the sky there are sun-bright discs as wide as solar systems, their hearts run through by spears of radiation that outshine galaxies. The energies that feed these quasars beggar all metaphor, and their quantification seems all but meaningless. What does it serve to know that they are converting matter to energy at a rate that equates to the complete annihilation of a planet the size of the Earth ten times a second? Or that all the fires of the sun, from its birth to its death, would be a few weeks’ worth of work to one of them? No human sense can be made from so inhuman a scale. Boggle, and move on. Or stop, and appreciate that for all their grandeur, quasars are actually rather hard to see. Not one of them is close enough for the naked eye to pick out; even through the largest telescopes their mighty discs are but points of light. Again, the numbers are incomprehensibly enormous: billions of light years, when the longest trip taken by humans, to the Moon and back, is just a few light seconds. Yet here is a human connection that makes something wonderful of the spectacle. The billion-year journeys of the quasars’ light end at human telescopes. And there this far-flung light is not merely absorbed, but also understood.

…In 1960 no one had knowingly observed a quasar in any wavelength whatsoever. By 1969 hundreds were known, and a detailed theory of black holes had been developed which accounted for the quasars’ remarkable properties. Matter pulled towards a large black hole is heated to extraordinary brightness by friction; from the swirling disc thus formed a constant stream of matter passes into the hole’s oblate “ergosphere” whence some is squirted out with even greater energy in jets that protrude from the quasar’s poles. That men and women can, in a few short years, take tiny smidges of data from often ill-behaved instruments around the world and judiciously combine them with a wide range of physical theory – including the demanding mathematical subtleties of general relativity – to form an account of something not only unimagined but unimaginable to anyone without the new mental equipment this joint endeavour provided: that seems to me a source of wonder greater than the vastest of astronomical numbers.

More here.