Laurel Thatcher Ulrich in Harvard Magazine:

Every object tells a story, and most objects tell many stories. Some can help us transcend boundaries between people, cultures, and academic disciplines to discover crosscurrents in history. Allow me to make that argument by examining a common object, an “orphaned” sewing machine. Several years ago, my colleague Ivan Gaskell and I decided it would be interesting to have students look at one of the landmark inventions of the nineteenth century—a sewing machine. The first sewing machines were patented about 1845. By 1900 they were as common as a cell phone might be today—and just as much a model of innovation and social transformation. When we couldn’t find a sewing machine in any of Harvard’s museums, I called a curator who had been cataloguing Harvard’s so-called “ephemeral collections,” things kept in offices, dormitories, or classroom buildings. She said Harvard did not have a sewing machine, but she did and she would be happy to let me use it.

…According to one scholar, the Singer sewing machine emerged from a collaboration “between a mechanical genius, Isaac Merrit Singer (Image 4), and a lawyer, Edward Clark.” Singer may or may not have been a mechanical genius, but he was a genius at keeping his own name in view: it appears at least five times on our sewing machine (Image 5). It is an appealing name: a sewing machine may not sing, but it certainly hums. Lawyer Edward Clark (Image 6) played another role. As historian Nira Wickramasinghe explains, “The early history of the company…can be read as a maze of patent grabbing by a number of inventors….and subsequent litigation. No owner of a single patent could make a sewing maching without infringing on patents of others. Clark was instrumental in the creation of the Albany patent pool, where the holders of these key patents agreed to forgo litigation and to license their technology to one another.” Some sense of the importance of patents is seen on our sewing machine, which lists those from the 1880s to 1892.

More here.

Steven Weinberg in the New York Review of Books:

The development of quantum mechanics in the first decades of the twentieth century came as a shock to many physicists. Today, despite the great successes of quantum mechanics, arguments continue about its meaning, and its future.

The first shock came as a challenge to the clear categories to which physicists by 1900 had become accustomed. There were particles—atoms, and then electrons and atomic nuclei—and there were fields—conditions of space that pervade regions in which electric, magnetic, and gravitational forces are exerted. Light waves were clearly recognized as self-sustaining oscillations of electric and magnetic fields. But in order to understand the light emitted by heated bodies, Albert Einstein in 1905 found it necessary to describe light waves as streams of massless particles, later called photons.

Then in the 1920s, according to theories of Louis de Broglie and Erwin Schrödinger, it appeared that electrons, which had always been recognized as particles, under some circumstances behaved as waves. In order to account for the energies of the stable states of atoms, physicists had to give up the notion that electrons in atoms are little Newtonian planets in orbit around the atomic nucleus. Electrons in atoms are better described as waves, fitting around the nucleus like sound waves fitting into an organ pipe.¹ The world’s categories had become all muddled.

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Shuja Haider in Jacobin:

If you had read in early 2016 about a National Policy Institute conference on the theme of “Identity Politics,” you might have assumed it was an innocent gathering of progressives. If you had attended, you would have been in for an unpleasant surprise. The National Policy Institute is an organization of white nationalists, overseen by neo-Nazi media darling Richard Spencer.

Spencer, who popularized the now common euphemism “alt-right,” is fond of describing his platform as “identity politics for white people.” He takes pains to correct those who refer to him as a white supremacist, insisting that he is merely a “nationalist,” or a “traditionalist,” or, better yet, an “identitarian.” He wants to bring about what he calls a “white ethno-state,” a place where the population is determined by heritability. In a knowing inversion of social justice vocabulary, he describes it as “a safe space for Europeans.”

Spencer has an advanced degree in humanities, spent time in the famously left-wing graduate program at Duke University, and wrote an antisemitic interpretation of Theodor Adorno’s music criticism for his master’s thesis. His political mentor, Paul Gottfried, was a student of Herbert Marcuse. Spencer is clearly intimately acquainted with both academic left philosophy and campus social justice activism.

It was only a matter of time before the right identified liberal and leftist strategies that they themselves could adopt, as a conservative Christian Duke freshman portended in 2015. Amid widespread debate over trigger warnings, he refused to read Alison Bechdel’s graphic novel Fun Home, a memoir that included depictions of lesbian sex.

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Wendy Lesser at Threepenny Review:

Dance is the least predictable of art forms. Even when done by a choreographer you love, with superb music and excellent dancers, a new piece may disappoint—and, conversely, something about which you had low expectations may delight and move you. Last spring I saw, in quick succession, two relatively new evening-length ballets on either side of the Atlantic. Christopher Wheeldon’s The Winter’s Tale had been around since 2014, in performances by both the Royal Ballet and the National Ballet of Canada, but I only caught up with it in May at Covent Garden. Alexei Ratmansky’s version of The Golden Cockerel (a work which has an old Russian history, going back to Fokine and earlier) opened in Copenhagen in 2012 but did not have its American premiere until this past June in New York. In each case, the performances I saw surprised me.

Wheeldon is not one of my favorite choreographers, and I’ve especially disliked the way he’s sometimes used women in his work, which did not bode well for Hermione, Paulina, and Perdita. Worse yet, thisWinter’s Tale had a newly commissioned score by an unknown-to-me Englishman, Joby Talbot—a worrisome fact, given my long history of attending British Shakespeare productions burdened by trashily new music. Moreover, the lead dancer in the May performance, Edward Watson, had recently been criticized by a major Anglo-American dance critic for, among other things, having red hair and pale skin: flaws that I forgive, since I have them both myself, but still… So I was nervous about the Covent Garden evening. I warned my non-ballet-fan companions (dragged along at great expense) that the only thing in the dance’s favor was that a San Francisco friend had raved about the Toronto performance she had seen, saying it was one of her favorite new ballets ever.

more here.

Andrew Scull at the Times Literary Supplement:

On November 19, 1948, the two most enthusiastic and prolific lobotomists in the Western world faced off against each other in the operating theatre at the Institute of Living in Hartford, Connecticut. They performed before an audience of more than two dozen neurosurgeons, neurologists and psychiatrists. Each had developed a different technique for mutilating the brains of the patients they operated on, and each man had his turn on the stage.

William Beecher Scoville, Professor of Neurosurgery at Yale, went first. His patient was conscious. The administration of a local anaesthetic allowed the surgeon to slice through the scalp and peel down the skin from the patient’s forehead, exposing her skull. Quick work with a drill opened two holes, one over each eye. Now Scoville could see her frontal lobes. He levered each side up with a flat blade so that he could perform what he called “orbital undercutting”. What followed was not quite cutting: instead Scoville inserted a suction catheter – a small electrical vacuum cleaner – and sucked out a portion of the patient’s frontal lobes.

Rozina Ali in The New Yorker:

A couple of years ago, when Coldplay’s Chris Martin was going through a divorce from the actress Gwyneth Paltrow and feeling down, a friend gave him a book to lift his spirits. It was a collection of poetry by Jalaluddin Rumi, the thirteenth-century Persian poet, translated by Coleman Barks. “It kind of changed my life,” Martin said later, in an interview. A track from Coldplay’s most recent album features Barks reciting one of the poems: “This being human is a guest house / Every morning a new arrival / A joy, a depression, a meanness, / some momentary awareness comes / as an unexpected visitor.”

Rumi has helped the spiritual journeys of other celebrities—Madonna, Tilda Swinton—some of whom similarly incorporated his work into theirs. Aphorisms attributed to Rumi circulate daily on social media, offering motivation. “If you are irritated by every rub, how will you ever get polished,” one of them goes. Or, “Every moment I shape my destiny with a chisel. I am a carpenter of my own soul.” Barks’s translations, in particular, are shared widely on the Internet; they are also the ones that line American bookstore shelves and are recited at weddings. Rumi is often described as the best-selling poet in the United States. He is typically referred to as a mystic, a saint, a Sufi, an enlightened man. Curiously, however, although he was a lifelong scholar of the Koran and Islam, he is less frequently described as a Muslim.

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Mark Strauss in National Geographic:

Every day, thousands of enigmatic objects in space produce bursts of radio waves that flash for just a few milliseconds yet are capable of generating as much energy as 500 million suns.

Astronomers didn’t even know these fast radio bursts existed until a decade ago. In the years since, they’ve been scouring the cosmos, hoping that by pinpointing their locations, they might be able to figure out what—or perhaps who—is producing them.

Today, a team of astronomers announced that they have finally found their quarry. Relying on a global network of powerful telescopes, they managed to capture a fast radio burst that is broadcasting from a dwarf galaxy some three billion light-years away.

The discovery—described in multiple papers in Nature and the Astrophysical Journal Letters—could have profound implications. It may provide astronomers with a new window into the early universe, while also offering vital clues to a mystery that continues to challenge our perceptions of the cosmos.

More here. [Thanks to Farrukh Azfar.]

Ken Roth in Foreign Policy:

As Donald Trump prepares to take office, many fear a new hostility to human rights on the part of the United States. From his divisive rhetoric about minorities to his embrace of autocrats abroad, there is plenty to worry about.

Trump presents a stark contrast with President Barack Obama, whose tone was strikingly different. In a 2011 speech at the State Department, for example, Obama said U.S. support for universal rights “is not a secondary interest” but a “top priority that must be translated into concrete actions, and supported by all of the diplomatic, economic and strategic tools at [the U.S. government’s] disposal.” During his eight years in office, his administration did sometimes live up to that rhetoric, and it never stooped to the kind of open disdain of human rights concerns that is feared from Trump.

But the truth is, a careful review of Obama’s major human rights decisions shows a mixed record. In fact, he has often treated human rights as a secondary interest — nice to support when the cost was not too high, but nothing like a top priority he championed.

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James Hamblin in The Atlantic:

Speaking of packing entire books into one paragraph: Large-scale animal agriculture has become a primary driver of climate change. We are eating and producing much more meat than ever before. The human population is on pace to hit 10 billion by the middle of the century; that’s 10 times as many people as there were in 1800. When we find a way to grow delicious red meat in petri dishes, then we can discuss exactly how much is healthy to eat. For now, the only way forward for our species seems to be to consider meat as something closer to a delicacy.

Forgetting Fiber

Of all the “probiotics” on the market, one of the few with actual evidence that it serves our microbes well is plant fiber. Fiber is the carbohydrate that humans can’t digest, yet we’ve long known that people who eat high-fiber diets tend to be healthier. Among multiple studies with similar results, one with 40,000 subjects found that a high-fiber diet came with a 40-percent lower than average risk of heart disease. Fiber also seems to protect against metabolic syndrome. One of the mechanisms behind these benefits appears to be that fiber essentially feeds the microbes in our guts, encouraging diverse populations. Those microbes are implicated in a vast array of illnesses and wellbeing. A diet heavy on meat and dairy is necessarily lower on fiber. In that light, the idea of “Paleo-veganism” is an interesting one. Loosely defined, it could mean eating minimally processed, plant-heavy diets. If a flaw in veganism is that some people think they can drink juice and eat white bread all day and be healthy, that might be sustainable for the planet but not good for you. Paleo-veganism (again, loosely defined lest we descend into madness trying to discern the plant varieties this would include) might work as a rule of thumb that generally keeps us focused on the sorts of foods that promote health.

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Susan Schneider in KurzweilAI:

Humans are probably not the greatest intelligences in the universe. Earth is a relatively young planet and the oldest civilizations could be billions of years older than us. But even on Earth, Homo sapiens may not be the most intelligent species for that much longer. The world Go, chess, and Jeopardy champions are now all AIs. AI is projected to outmode many human professions within the next few decades. And given the rapid pace of its development, AI may soon advance to artificial general intelligence—intelligence that, like human intelligence, can combine insights from different topic areas and display flexibility and common sense. From there it is a short leap to superintelligent AI, which is smarter than humans in every respect, even those that now seem firmly in the human domain, such as scientific reasoning and social skills. Each of us alive today may be one of the last rungs on the evolutionary ladder that leads from the first living cell to synthetic intelligence.

What we are only beginning to realize is that these two forms of superhuman intelligence—alien and artificial—may not be so distinct. The technological developments we are witnessing today may have all happened before, elsewhere in the universe. The transition from biological to synthetic intelligence may be a general pattern, instantiated over and over, throughout the cosmos. The universe’s greatest intelligences may be postbiological, having grown out of civilizations that were once biological. (This is a view I share with Paul Davies, Steven Dick, Martin Rees, and Seth Shostak, among others.) To judge from the human experience—the only example we have—the transition from biological to postbiological may take only a few hundred years. I prefer the term “postbiological” to “artificial” because the contrast between biological and synthetic is not very sharp. Consider a biological mind that achieves superintelligence through purely biological enhancements, such as nanotechnologically enhanced neural minicolumns. This creature would be postbiological, although perhaps many wouldn’t call it an “AI.” Or consider a computronium that is built out of purely biological materials, like the Cylon Raider in the reimagined Battlestar Galactica TV series.

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John Waters at Lapham's Quarterly:

If you play that game where you pick your porn-star moniker by using the name of the street of your first childhood home as your first name and your real middle name as your last, I’d be Clark Samuels. John S. Waters Jr., 1401 Clark Avenue, Lutherville, Maryland. My first house. My first arena. My launching pad to creative filth.

Does anyone ever forget the first room you were allowed to make your own? As a kid, I was lucky enough to have my own bedroom far enough away from my parents or brother and sisters that spying on me was nearly impossible. All I ever wanted to be was the rock-and-roll king. When I first saw Elvis on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1957, twitching and moaning “Heartbreak Hotel,” I was almost eleven but immediately knew I was gay. Then the decorator gene kicked in. Down from my walls came the family’s tasteful Audubon prints and up went glossy head shots of the Everly Brothers, Tab Hunter, and the Platters (one of whom sported a pencil mustache). I nagged my mom and dad into buying me a reel-to-reel tape recorder so I could be an early pirate and tape all the hits off the radio without having to wait to buy them. Then I’d play these rockabilly and rhythm-and-blues numbers over and over as I danced around my room lip-synching, gyrating, and talking to myself. Finally I had a think tank.

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J. Hoberman at Artforum:

WITH HIS NEW FILM, Neruda, Chile’s master of the political gothic, Pablo Larraín, exhumes a sacred monster: namely, his nation’s 1971 Nobel Laureate, the poet Pablo Neruda. Hardly a biopic, Nerudafocuses on a brief, if dramatic, period in its subject’s life—a fifteen-month period from January 1948 through March 1949 during which the poet, an elected senator and an outspoken member of the banned Chilean Communist Party, went underground, finally escaping over the Andes to Argentina.

Neruda devotes only a dozen pages to the topic in his memoirs, half of them concerning the exciting last stage of his getaway. The writing is routinely self-aggrandizing: “Even the stones of Chile” knew his voice, he brags, only partially in jest. The movie, written by Guillermo Calderón, is wryly admiring of Neruda’s imperturbable chutzpah.

Embodied with dour, deadpan magnificence by Luis Gnecco (who played a leftist organizer in No [2012], the third installment of Larraín’s anti-Pinochet trilogy), Neruda is introduced running a gauntlet of flashbulbs as he enters the senatorial washroom to denounce the nation’s sellout president, Gabriel González Videla. The tumult continues as leftists party in masquerade. Neruda, dressed in a burnoose as Lawrence of Arabia, thrills comrades and admirers with his poet’s voice, as his indulgent second wife (charmingly portrayed by the Argentinean actress Mercedes Morán) calls it, sonorously reciting, not for the last time, the youthful love poem that begins, “Tonight I can write the saddest lines. . . .”

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Juliet Barker at Literary Review:

English medieval embroidery might seem an odd subject for a book, but this is no ordinary volume. Published to accompany a major exhibition at the V&A (which runs until 5 February 2017), it is not only a catalogue and scholarly monograph but also a visual feast, with magnificent colour plates on virtually every page, bursting at the seams with titbits of fascinating information. It’s the sort of book that makes you want to hug yourself with glee: revelatory and as exquisitely produced as the medieval embroidery it celebrates.

The stereotypical embroiderer, medieval or otherwise, is always female and usually noble-born. Charles Henry Hartshorne, writing in 1845, summed it up neatly in one of the earliest studies on the subject: embroidery ‘served to occupy the leisure of the English gentlewoman when there were but few other modes in which her talents could be employed’; immured within a castle chamber or convent, ‘the needle alone supplied an unceasing source of amusement’. What English Medieval Embroidery demonstrates is that embroidery in England was first and foremost a business, employing both male and female workers whose professional skill was renowned throughout Europe. In the 13th and 14th centuries their work was in demand everywhere from Scandinavia to Portugal and from Riga to Patras, with the Church hierarchy and the papal curia, in particular, proving insatiable in their appetite for what was known outside England as opus anglicanum.

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Bruce Robbins in n+1:

A FEW MONTHS AGO, while watching the lush and loving Tilda Swinton and Colin MacCabe documentary The Seasons in Quincy: Four Portraits of John Berger, I found myself thinking what an endless series of portraits this man has given rise to, and will keep giving rise to. The beauty of the film’s montage—much of it of Berger’s Alpine home—is a self-conscious tribute to the beauty Berger teaches us to see in the world, in art and outside it.

Berger’s decision in the early ’70s to spend what turned out to be five decades of his life in a small village in the French Alps is easy to misunderstand. He wasn’t seeking a refuge from the world, but the right kind of contact with the world. The film overflows with his charm and energy as a friend and neighbor; there’s none of the solitary artist pose. Peasants were a major reason he came; his son became one. And peasants became essential to his politics.

Lyrical about the man, the film skimps on his politics—something that often happens with efforts to sell a political or philosophical outsider to a mainstream audience. The weird thing is of course that one of the best exemplars of transporting seemingly taboo perspectives into the family living room was Berger himself. In 1972, his BBC show Ways of Seeing suddenly made it clear to viewers and to TV executives alike that it could be tremendously enjoyable to look at art through Marxist eyes. The series spent a still-startling amount of time on landscape as property, and on the sexism of nudes.

No matter what he was looking at, Berger never stopped asking uncomfortable and therefore stimulating questions.

More here.

Siddhartha Mukherjee in Nautilus:

Anyone who doubts that genes can specify identity might well have arrived from another planet and failed to notice that the humans come in two fundamental variants: male and female. Cultural critics, queer theorists, fashion photographers, and Lady Gaga have reminded us— accurately—that these categories are not as fundamental as they might seem, and that unsettling ambiguities frequently lurk in their borderlands. But it is hard to dispute three essential facts: that males and females are anatomically and physiologically different; that these anatomical and physiological differences are specified by genes; and that these differences, interposed against cultural and social constructions of the self, have a potent influence on specifying our identities as individuals.

That genes have anything to do with the determination of sex, gender, and gender identity is a relatively new idea in our history. The distinction between the three words is relevant to this discussion. By sex, I mean the anatomic and physiological aspects of male versus female bodies. By gender, I am referring to a more complex idea: the psychic, social, and cultural roles that an individual assumes. By gender identity, I mean an individual’s sense of self (as female versus male, as neither, or as something in between).

For millennia, the basis of the anatomical dissimilarities between men and women—the “anatomical dimorphism” of sex—was poorly understood. At the beginning of the third century, Galen, the most influential anatomist in the ancient world, performed elaborate dissections to try to prove that male and female reproductive organs were analogs of each other, with the male organs turned inside out and the female’s turned outside in. The ovaries, Galen argued, were just internalized testicles retained inside the female body because females lacked some “vital heat” that could extrude the organs. “Turn outward the woman’s [organs] and double the man’s, and you will find the same,” he wrote. Galen’s students and followers stretched this analogy, quite literally, to its absurd point, reasoning that the uterus was the scrotum ballooning inward, and that the fallopian tubes were the seminal vesicles blown up and expanded.

More here.

Cody Delistraty in Aeon:

The drugs chosen to pattern our culture over the past century have simultaneously helped to define what each generation has most desired and found most lacking in itself. The drugs du jour thus point towards a cultural question that needs an answer, whether that’s a thirst for spiritual transcendence, or for productivity, fun, exceptionalism or freedom. In this way, the drugs we take act as a reflection of our deepest desires and our inadequacies, the very feelings that create the cultures in which we live.

To be clear, this historical investigation predominately concerns psychoactive drugs. It accounts for a large family of drugs embracing LSD, cocaine, heroin, ecstasy, barbiturates, anti-anxiety medications, opiates, Adderall and the like, but not anti-inflammatories such as ibuprofen (Advil) or pain relievers such as acetaminophen (Tylenol). These pharmaceuticals are not drugs that alter one’s state of mind and are consequently of little use when making sociocultural analyses.

The drugs up for discussion also cut across boundaries of law (just because a drug is illegal does not preclude it from being central to a cultural moment) and class (a drug used by the lower class is no less culturally relevant than drugs favoured by the upper class, although the latter tend to be better recorded and retrospectively viewed as of ‘greater cultural importance’). Finally, the category of drugs under scrutiny cuts across therapeutic, medical and recreational usage.

To understand the way we create and popularise drugs to match the culture we have, consider cocaine. Readily available at the turn of the 20th century, cocaine was outlawed in 1920 with the passing of The Dangerous Drugs Act in the United Kingdom (and in 1922 in the United States under the Narcotic Drugs Import and Export Act). Cocaine’s initial popularity in the late-19th-century was in large part due to ‘its potent euphoric effects’, according to Stuart Walton, an ‘intoxication theorist’ and author of Out of It: A Cultural History of Intoxication (2001). Cocaine, Walton told me, ‘helped potentiate a culture of resistance to Victorian norms, the abandonment of rigorous civility in favour of an emergent “anything goes” social libertarianism in the era of the Jugendstil, and the rise of social-democratic politics’.

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Virginia Gewin in Nature:

Veerabhadran Ramanathan has modelled greenhouse-gas dynamics and quantified the chlorofluorocarbon (CFC) contribution to Earth's global warming. His work at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California, shows that CFC-replacing hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) also have a potent climate-warming effect. This finding led in October to HFCs being added to the Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer. He has engaged for a decade with religious leaders to act on climate change.

When did you realize that science alone might not galvanize climate-change action?

Many of my colleagues and I could see that, by mid-century, we'd shoot past 2-degrees warming, yet there was no public support for the drastic actions needed to steer us away from the cliff. I was discouraged and depressed. Then I got an e-mail telling me I'd been elected to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences in Vatican City, a body of only 80 members, one-third of whom are Nobel laureates.

How did your early contact with the Vatican affect your outlook?

I initially thought the e-mail was spam. Before I got involved with the Vatican, I didn't have the foggiest notion that religion could help to combat climate change. I've since gone on record to say that global warming has to be taught in every church, synagogue, mosque and temple before we are likely to take the sort of drastic actions necessary to head it off.

Where did your involvement lead?

At a meeting hosted by the Vatican in 2011, I teamed up with Dutch Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen to focus on glaciers. That opened my eyes to the power of the Church. In the meeting's scientific report, we included a prayer to protect humanity. There was tremendous opposition, but I stood behind its inclusion. We saw the potential of mobilizing religion to help, and proposed a Vatican-hosted meeting on sustainability. This took place in 2014 under Pope Francis.

What happened after that meeting?

In a Science paper that followed, we pointed out that we need a moral revolution: solving climate change requires a fundamental shift in humanity's attitude towards each other and nature (P. Dasgupta and V. Ramanathan Science 345, 1457–1458; 2014). Faith leaders can make such a revolution happen. After the sustainability meeting, I had two minutes to give a summary to the Pope in the car park. I showed him that 50–60% of climate-warming pollution comes from the wealthiest people on the planet. The bottom 3 billion contribute just 5%, but will experience the worst effects of climate change. That appealed to the Pope. He asked what to do. I told him to ask people to be better stewards of the planet.

More here.