Berny Belvedere in Arc:

Political philosophers make a distinction between ideal and non-ideal theory.

Ideal theory, as its name implies, is all about specifying what the perfect society would look like. But the goal isn’t purely academic; the point of ideal theory isn’t simply to satisfy an intellectual curiosity. Rather, conceptualizing the perfect society can supply us with a target to aim for.

If we can draw the outlines of the Good City, we can pattern our society after it. We can set sail for it.

Non-ideal theory sees this approach as hopelessly detached from reality. Since society is characterized by non-ideal circumstances — or, to put it more negatively (and accurately): since society is beset by far-from-ideal realities — and since some of these circumstances appear to be intractable, it makes little sense to discuss social justice within the rarefied air of ideal theory.

According to this view, doing ideal theory is almost like talking about what heaven might be like, which is interesting but not relevant to present concerns. An unbridgeable gap exists between the two worlds, and focusing on the happy afterlife one is an abdication of intellectual responsibility.

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What started as a body-tinkering, mind-hacking, supplement-taking productivity craze in Silicon Valley is now spreading to more respectable workplaces, maybe even to your office, where the guy down the hall might already be popping a new breed of brain-boosting pills or micro-dosing LSD—all in the name of self-improvement.

Josh Dean in GQ:

The small brown vial came to me via a chain of custody that shall not be discussed and with the assurance that the clear liquid therein was, according to some guy who told the guy who gave it to me, a precise dilution of LSD. If the stories I'd heard were true, taking a tiny bit of it, a micro-dose, had the potential to make my workday more productive than ever. At least that's the pitch as delivered from a growing horde now using acid to boost creativity and cognitive function. I squeezed the dropper gently, putting a clear drop into a mug of water on my desk, and drank it all in a single gulp. Then I began to worry that I was about to trip balls.

The idea that illicit drugs may enhance my output at work is but one of the many tricks, counter-intuitive therapies, dietary modifications, and behavioral tweaks that have lately been seized upon by self-styled biohackers, human tinkerers eager to sharpen focus and attention, boost productivity, and improve wellness and longevity.

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Adam Tooze reviews Wolfgang Streeck's book in the London Review of Books:

‘Whatever it takes.’ These words, spoken by the president of the European Central Bank, Mario Draghi, to a crowd of investors in the City of London on 26 July 2012, have come to represent the symbolic end to the acute phase of the global financial crisis. In the political sphere, by contrast, where words are supposed to be everything, we have not yet been able to draw the line. More than four years on, we know that in 2012 the political fallout was only just beginning. It was in December 2011 that David Cameron reopened the European question by opting out of the new ‘fiscal compact’ drawn up by Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy with the aim of enforcing budget discipline across the EU. In the US in spring 2012, Mitt Romney emerged as the candidate from the Republican primaries, but the freakshow anticipated the Trump campaign to come. In Italy the ousting of Berlusconi in a backroom coup in November 2011 and the installation of the ‘unpolitical’ economist Mario Monti as prime minister set the stage for the emergence of Beppe Grillo and Five Star in the local elections of May 2012. In France as the fiscal compact began to bite, François Hollande’s presidency was dead almost before it had started.

Amid all these events, Germany can easily seem like a bastion of stability, with ‘Merkel über alles’ its anthem. But beneath the smooth surface, Merkel’s grip on the chancellorship has since she took office in 2005 been supported by three successive coalitions. And by early 2013 it was clear that her partners since 2009, the free-market, libertarian, liberal FDP, were in trouble. They were being outflanked on their right-wing by a new formation, the AfD, the Alternative für Deutschland, whose focus in 2013 was not immigration but passionate opposition to the euro. Like much of the German right the AfD was indignant not about austerity, but about the failure of Merkel to back an even harder line. The AfD didn’t break the 5 per cent threshold required to enter parliament at its first try, but it took enough votes from the FDP to drop it out of the Bundestag, leaving Merkel to form a new coalition with the Social Democratic Party (SPD).

The AfD wasn’t the only force in German politics fuelled by the belief that things could not go on as they were.

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Monya Baker in Nature:

Inside the golden-yellow spice turmeric lurks a chemical deceiver: curcumin, a molecule that is widely touted as having medicinal activity, but which also gives false signals in drug screening tests. For years, chemists have urged caution about curcumin and other compounds that can mislead naive drug hunters. Now, in an attempt to stem a continuing flow of muddled research, scientists have published the most comprehensive critical review yet of curcumin — concluding that there’s no evidence it has any specific therapeutic benefits, despite thousands of research papers and more than 120 clinical trials. The scientists hope that their report will prevent further wasted research and alert the unwary to the possibility that chemicals may often show up as ‘hits’ in drug screens, but be unlikely to yield a drug.

“Curcumin is a cautionary tale,” says Michael Walters, a medicinal chemist at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, and lead author of the review (K. M. Nelson et al. J. Med. Chem. http://dx.doi.org/10.1021/acs.jmedchem.6b00975; 2017), published on 11 January. Commonly used drug screens detect whether a chemical latches on to a binding site of a protein implicated in disease — a hint that it may be the starting point for a drug. But some molecules, such as curcumin, seem to show such specific activity when there is none. The molecules may fluoresce naturally, foiling attempts to use fluorescence as a signal of protein binding. They may disrupt cell membranes, duping assays that try to spot drugs targeting specific cell-membrane proteins. And they may surreptitiously degrade into other compounds that have different properties, or contain impurities that have their own biological activity. Chemists call these irritants PAINS (pan-assay interference compounds) — and curcumin is one of the worst. “Curcumin is a poster child for these promiscuous molecules that come up often in screens,” says James Inglese, who directs assay development and screening technology at the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences in Bethesda, Maryland. “A lot of people doing this kind of work aren’t technically aware of all the issues that this thing can cause.”

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Miranda France at Granta:

Alan Jacobs identifies World War I as the time when moves to reform the prayer book gathered pace. Chaplains returning from the Front pushed for a liturgy that soldiers could understand. Cranmer had written at a time when people’s lives were so different. Seventeenth century men and women feared the dark and the malign effect of the moon or night air. They worried with good cause that none of their children would survive infancy. Not only had ordinary life changed beyond recognition, but the language was now too arcane to be understood by many in the congregation, or no longer meant what it once had. It made no sense to use ‘thee’ and ‘thou’ in church when you didn’t use it anywhere else. It felt so much worse to call yourself a miserable offender in the twentieth century than in the sixteenth, when ‘miserable’ had simply meant ‘deserving of mercy’.

How could Cranmer be revised, though, except with writing that was equally beautiful and on which both Church and state could agree? It proved – and continues to prove – to be an impossible task. When the Church of England tried to make very small adjustments to the Book of Common Prayer, the House of Commons voted against them in 1927, and again in 1928, in chaotic scenes that made the front pages. It was another forty years before the Church found a way around the political impasse with the Alternative Service Book, so called because it made no claim to be the official prayer book and therefore did not require parliament’s approval.

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Geoff Dyer at Bookforum:

In 1960 Berger had defined his aesthetic criteria simply and confidently: "does this work help or encourage men to know and claim their social rights?" Consistent with this, his writing on photography was from the start—from the essay on Che Guevara of 1967, "Image of Imperialism"—avowedly and unavoidably political. (Which meant, in "Photographs of Agony," of 1972, he could argue that pictures of war and famine which seemed political often served to remove the suffering depicted from the political decisions that brought it about into an unchangeable and apparently permanent realm of the human condition.) Naturally, he has gravitated toward political, documentary, or "campaigning" photographers, but the range is wide and the notion of political never reducible to what the Indian photographer Raghubir Singh called "the abject as subject." In "The Suit and the Photograph" August Sander's image of three peasants going to a dance becomes the starting point for a history of the suit as an idealization of "purely sedentary power" and an illustration of Antonio Gramsci's notion of hegemony. (As with Benjamin's "Work of Art," remember that this was the 1970s, almost twenty years before Gore Vidal informed Michael Foot that "the young, even America, are reading Gramsci.") Lee Friedlander, the least theory-driven of photographers, once commented on how much stuff—how much unintended information—accidentally ended up in his pictures. "It's a generous medium, photography," he concluded drily. "The Suit and the Photograph" is an object lesson in how much information is there to be discovered and revealed even in photographs lacking the visual density of Friedlander's. It's also exemplary, reminding us that many of the best essays are also journeys, epistemological journeys that take us beyond the moment depicted, often beyond photography—and sometimes back again.

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Robert McCrum in The Guardian:

Wolfe is an accidental sleuth. Her scholar’s passion is as much for old manuscripts as for the obscurities surrounding our national poet. Project Dustbunny, for example, one of her initiatives at the Folger Shakespeare Library, has made some extraordinary discoveries based on microscopic fragments of hair and skin accumulated in the crevices and gutters of 17th-century books.

DNA forensics aside, Wolfe’s role as a curator at the Folger is to bring her expertise to bear on the tantalising mass of documents that survives from the late 16th century. And yet, despite a heap of legal, commercial and matrimonial evidence, Shakespeare the man continues to slip through scholars’ fingers. Four centuries after his death, apart from a handful of crabbed signatures, there is not one manuscript, letter or diary we can definitively attribute to the poet, sponsoring the pervasive air of mystery that surrounds his genius. Indeed, the most intimate surviving Shakespeare document remains that notorious will, in which he bequeathed his wife his “second best bed”.

Before Wolfe arrived on the scene, all that scholars could be certain about was that a man named Shaxpere, Shaxberd or Shakespear was born in Stratford in 1564, and that he was an actor whose name is printed in the collected edition of his work published in 1623. We also know that he married Anne Hathaway, and died in 1616, according to legend, on his birthday, St George’s Day. The so-called “Stratfordian” case for Shakespeare rested on these, and a few other facts, but basically, that was it.

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Lisa Zyga in Phys.org:

Physicists have performed a variation of the famous 200-year-old double-slit experiment that, for the first time, involves "exotic looped trajectories" of photons. These photons travel forward through one slit, then loop around and travel back through another slit, and then sometimes loop around again and travel forward through a third slit.

Interestingly, the contribution of these looped trajectories to the overall interference pattern leads to an apparent deviation from the usual form of the superposition principle. This apparent deviation can be understood as an incorrect application of the superposition principle—once the additional interference between looped and straight trajectories is accounted for, the superposition can be correctly applied.

The team of physicists, led by Omar S. Magaña-Loaiza and Israel De Leon, has published a paper on the new experiment in a recent issue of Nature Communications.

"Our work is the first experimental observation of looped trajectories," De Leon told Phys.org. "Looped trajectories are extremely difficult to detect because of their low probability of occurrence. Previously, researchers had suggested that these exotic trajectories could exist but failed to observe them."

To increase the probability of the occurrence of looped trajectories, the researchers designed a three-slit structure that supports surface plasmons, which the scientists describe as "strongly confined electromagnetic fields that can exist at the surface of metals." The presence of these electromagnetic fields near the three slits increases the contribution of looped trajectories to the overall interference pattern by almost two orders of magnitude.

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Kishwar Rizvi in the Washington Post:

Every year, I take the students from my Islamic architecture course to visit the Islamic art collections at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York so they can see the cultural artifacts we’ve discussed in class. In 2013, we stopped to look at an aerial photograph of the 9th-century Great Mosque of Samarra, taken by the British Royal Air Force 100 years ago. The black-and-white image shows the vast scale of the mosque, renowned for having one of the tallest minarets in the world, at approximately 170 feet.

Someone remarked, “Wasn’t this the minaret that was installed with American snipers fighting Iraqi rebels in 2005, and blown up later?” Silence dropped over the group, and we moved on.

Teaching Islamic art and architecture can feel like walking through a minefield. Long before “war on terror” was a common phrase, the sites I lecture on were contentious, the evisceration of cultural heritage already underway. In my first class, on Islam’s holiest site, the Kaaba in Mecca, I couldn’t avoid showing images of the sacred monument overshadowed by towering hotels. Old photographs and verbal descriptions have to stand in for the hundreds of Ottoman and early Islamic sites destroyed by the Saudi government to make way for ambitious commercial ventures. The hardest segment is on Iraq; some years I skip the Abbasids, as I am unable to talk about the historic city of Baghdad or the holy shrines in Najaf and Karbala, popular pilgrimage sites that have been targeted in sectarian wars, without tears in my eyes.

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Jerry Saltz at New York Magazine:

Whether, with the dramatic change in our politics, a paradigm shift is in the offing or the opposite is happening (and things are just becoming more of what they already are), we need to ask where this leaves the art world? Not artists. I trust they'll do whatever they have to do to adapt. And thrive. And make us see things we didn't know we needed to see until we see them. Instead, I address the playing field where we encounter art and artists; close to home in time and space: the galleries and museums.

A change in curatorial tactics is in order; one that might fit the present better than the one that's been in effect for a while. For the last decade or so we've been engaged in an intensive art-history rebalancing act. The post-crash years have been a period of a great looking-backwards to what was missed, passed over, undervalued, geographically shunted aside, or shunned altogether in generations before. Everyone was sifting through histories; rediscovery was the new discovery; course correction was the new staying the course.

This shouldn’t stop entirely. But by now this practice has tilted toward habit and obsession. (I've dished my share of it; harping on self-taught outsiders, calling for their integration into permanent collections.) Regardless, we're now treated to endless numbers of articles in art magazines on the art and artists of the 1960s and 1970s (often written by the same authors who wrote them the first time around).

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Kaya Genç at The New Republic:

A sparrow was sipping water from a half-filled glass in an Istanbul café Wednesday morning. Customers had their lunch outside, thanks to the warm weather, and chatted about the latest episode of Sherlock, screened hours after the terror attack on the city’s Reina nightclub on New Year’s Eve, which killed 39 people. Two cats were fed leftovers; a stray dog watched the scene from a safe distance. The terror threat level had been raised as high as it would go, not only because of the Reina attack, but also a simultaneous attack in the capital Ankara that had been foiled at the last minute, not to mention many more that had been thwarted in the past month. But this did not at all seem like a city under threat.

How do Istanbulites do it? It is a hard trick to pull, this immediate return to normality. Some consider it an expression of powerlessness, but I find wisdom in the ability to counter shock with calm. After the suicide attack at the Ataturk Airport in June, the scene was cleaned of signs of chaos in a matter of hours. The shattered glass was swept away, airport personnel reopened their desks, baristas served overpriced Caramelattes to travelers—it didn’t really feel as if 45 people had died hours earlier.

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Garrett Keizer at VQR:

I’ve asked one or two of those questions in my time, including a secular version of the psalmist’s lament about songs in strange lands. Now and then it strikes me as one of the more dubious moves of my life that I should have left the environs of Paterson, spiritual home of Allen Ginsberg and William Carlos Williams, and set out with my new bride and my callow poetic ambitions for the boonies of Vermont. The pull I felt toward the North—was it inspiration or merely nostalgia for my childhood, a nostalgia formed (this is the joke of it) in the summertime for a place of long winters, “nine months of snow and three months of poor sledding” as a local saying has it? Although I’ve wondered on occasion if my best songs were meant to be sung in New Jersey, and about New Jersey, the truth is that North Haledon was never going to be north enough for me, never close enough to the kobolds and the Vikings. And I’m not alone in my inclinations. Rilke is supposed to have claimed that the opening lines of his Duino Elegies were dictated by the north wind. Could any other wind have served?

My friend and neighbor Howard Frank Mosher may be the most passionate lover of all things north that I’ve ever met. Four of his books have some form of the word in their titles, and in one of them, a travelogue called North Country: A Personal Journey through the Borderland, he begins by dating his attraction: “Ever since my grandparents began taking me on weekend trips to the Adirondacks when I was four years old, traveling north has exhilarated me.”

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Peter Dreier in AlterNet:

Many Americans will traveling to Washington, D.C., next week to protest against Donald Trump on his Inauguration Day. Many will continue to demonstrate outside the White House after he takes office. Today’s activists can learn valuable lessons from the first protest outside the White House that took place 100 years ago, on Jan. 10, 1917. The activists were part of the National Woman’s Party, a group that was fighting for women’s suffrage. It took three more years before women won the right to vote, but the ongoing protests at the White House played a crucial role in that victory. The NWP suffragists, who to Washington from all over the country, called their protest “silent sentinels.” Woodrow Wilson, who had won his second term as president in November 1916, was not an advocate of women’s suffrage. The NWP activists carried purple, white, and gold banners with the words, “Mr. President what will you do for woman suffrage?” and “Mr. President how long must women wait for liberty?” When Wilson traveled to other cities, he was often greeted by NWP members carrying banners with the same message. The NWP was persistent. Its members protested at the White House six days a week, every week, until June 4, 1919, when Congress finally passed the 19th Amendment giving women the right to vote. During this two-and-a-half year long campaign, many of the activists were harassed and arrested, and mistreated while in prison. But their persistence and civil disobedience paid off.

Alice Paul was the leader of the NWP and the silent sentinels. After graduating from Swarthmore, Paul earned a master’s degree in sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. In 1907 she moved to England to practice social work among the poor at a Quaker-run settlement house in Birmingham. One day she heard a speech by Christabel Pankhurst, the daughter of Emmeline Pankhurst, the leader of the radical wing of England’s feminist movement. Paul was intrigued by the Pankhursts’ motto, “Deeds not words,” which they translated into direct action, including heckling, rock throwing and window smashing, to draw attention to the cause of women’s rights. Not surprisingly, the women were often arrested for such protests, which led to newspaper photos of activists being carried away in handcuffs by the police. Hesitant at first to join their militant crusade, Paul eventually overcame her fears and was arrested and jailed several times. In prison, she and other suffragettes protested their confinement with hunger strikes. Their jailers force-fed them. Paul took solace in a motto that one of her fellow activists carved into the prison wall: “Resistance to tyranny is obedience to God.”

More here. (Note: Thanks Bhaisab!)

Lesley Alderman in The New York Times:

Here’s a New Year’s challenge for the mind: Make this the year that you quiet all those negative thoughts swirling around your brain. All humans have a tendency to be a bit more like Eeyore than Tigger, to ruminate more on bad experiences than positive ones. It’s an evolutionary adaptation that helps us avoid danger and react quickly in a crisis. But constant negativity can also get in the way of happiness, add to our stress and worry level and ultimately damage our health. And some people are more prone to negative thinking than others. Thinking styles can be genetic or the result of childhood experiences, said Judith Beck, a psychologist and the president of the Beck Institute for Cognitive Behavior Therapy in Bala Cynwyd, Pa. Children may develop negative thinking habits if they have been teased or bullied, or experienced blatant trauma or abuse. Women, overall, are also more likely to ruminate than men, according to a 2013 study. “We were built to overlearn from negative experiences, but under learn from positive ones,” said Rick Hanson, a psychologist and senior fellow at the Greater Good Science Center at the University of California, Berkeley.

But with practice you can learn to disrupt and tame negative cycles.

The first step to stopping negative thoughts is a surprising one. Don’t try to stop them. If you are obsessing about a lost promotion or the results of the presidential election, whatever you do, don’t tell yourself, “I have to stop thinking about this.” “Worry and obsession get worse when you try to control your thoughts,” Dr. Beck said. Instead, notice that you are in a negative cycle and own it. Tell yourself, “I’m obsessing about my bad review.” Or “I’m obsessing about the election.” By acknowledging your negative cycle and accepting it, you are on your way to taming your negative thoughts. Acceptance is the basic premise of mindfulness meditation, a practice that helps reduce stress and reactivity. You don’t necessarily have to close your eyes and meditate every day to reap the benefits of mindfulness. You can remind yourself to notice your thoughts in a nonjudgmental manner, without trying to change or alter them right away.

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