by Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse

Kellyanne Conway's January 22 appearance on Meet the Press (transcript) has already attracted a good deal of attention, given her use of the seemingly Orwellian expression ‘alternative facts.' The idiom serves to confirm the view many take of the Trump administration's approach to honest deliberation. In light of the fake news and post-truth politics issues and the fact that the Trump administration has required many agencies to close down their communications with the public, Conway's line is an easy fit with a broad and disconcerting narrative of willful irrationalism and bold abuse of power. In many ways, we are sympathetic with this interpretation of Conway's term; as she deployed it, it indeed sounded as the Orwellian assertion our-say-so-trumps-is-so. However, there is an interpretation of Conway's turn of phrase and her broader point that, though still disappointing, is considerably less Orwellian. And it occasions a crucial lesson about the place of liberal education in a democratic society.

First, consider the more charitable interpretation of Conway's term. In both cases where Conway uses the expression alternative facts, she is talking about how the evidence relevant for settling a question is often more complicated than it may at first seem. In the two cases where she appeals to ‘alternative facts,' the point at issue is whether Sean Spicer's claim at his January 21 Press Conference, "That was the largest audience to witness an inauguration, period," was accurate. Chuck Todd's challenge was that Spicer's claim flew in the face of widespread photographic evidence that showed clearly that the crowd at Trump's inauguration was smaller than the crowd at Obama's '09 inauguration. Yet Spicer claimed that the size of the crowd at the mall belied a number of things about how the crowd was handled for the inauguration; moreover, his statement precisely was that the event was witnessed by more people – which included television and live-streaming. So, as the reasoning went, the photographic evidence doesn't seal the deal, because none of those folks watching Fox News or streaming the event on Breitbart were in the frame.

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by Amanda Beth Peery

"Spend five minutes looking at some beautiful scene. Realize you do not have to buy beauty to possess it." So wrote author and actress Margery Wilson in her popular 1942 self-help book for women. This is startling advice, coming up as #5 on her list of suggestions, after "Keep your voice soft, lilting, and uncomplaining." It's startling because it says something simple and real. And, I think, it teaches us something important about the mind.

I like to think of my mind as a room I live in. I can walk around all day, moving from corner to corner. I can peer out the windows or place an object on the table for examination. Life in the room is illuminated by light coming in through the windows—direct impressions of the outside world—but it is also tinted by the tone of the wallpaper. This wallpaper is made up of the images and sounds in the background of my thoughts, the things that are stuck in my head. We all have mental wallpaper, and this half-conscious backdrop drastically colors our experience of the world. Especially now, when we're bombarded with lies and prejudice, ugliness can linger there. But we can change the paper. We can shape what happens in the background of our minds.

When I was in college, I took a poetry seminar with a kindly professor who thumped his foot rhythmically on the floor all through class. One day, the professor thumped his foot and told us about mental wallpaper. It was my first introduction to the idea: as you pass through life, visions and sounds are plastered up against your mind's walls. Sometimes a song gets stuck in your head, sometimes an image from the news plays back all day, and sometimes it can be a sentence or a headline. But these sounds and images are quiet, humming behind your noisy thoughts, and you can go through your day or your whole life barely noticing them.

I knew what he meant. I hadn't started thinking of my mind as a room yet, but I knew how the things I watched, read, and saw could become the background of my mind, looming behind my passing thoughts.

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by Ahmed Humayun

As an American – as a Muslim American – I want our country to be safe. I also want our country to live up to its values. A sweeping ban on the entry of Muslims into our country does not make us secure, and contradicts the abiding aspirations of our republic.

Of course, America should be kept safe from terrorism. I grew up in Karachi: I have directly witnessed the destruction inflicted by terrorists who justify their actions in the name of Islam. I know the innocents they have assassinated, including friends of mine, the families wrecked. I have seen the progress of an entire society hampered by a tiny but organized, violent, and fanatical minority.

But though we need vigorous policies to counter Islamist terrorists, these policies should not target the entire populations of entire countries. Such policies are not only ineffective, they are counterproductive and feed the falsehoods that terrorists peddle. Terrorists claim that Islam and the West are inherently at odds, and that there can be no peace between Muslims and non-Muslims. Peaceful and prosperous Muslim communities in the West are the clearest refutation of this false propaganda.

Yet the strongest reason to be critical of the Muslim Ban is not because it plays into the hands of the terrorists. The fact is that such policies are contrary to the best ideals of our American republic. Terrorists cannot destroy our republic, but they won't need to if we diverge from our principles. We do not impose religious tests in the United States of America. We do not discriminate against people on the basis of their background, their national origin, their ethnicity, their sexual orientation, their gender, or anything else. We do not subscribe to the notion of collective guilt: we do not punish innocent individuals for the sins or crimes of others. We judge individuals on their merits, and afford all the opportunity to pursue their dreams.

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Great outdoor action from Amsterdam. This shadow art was made for World Refugee Day on June 20, 2013, and was shown at various locations in the city.

The idea behind the campaign is about invisibility of refugees. We don’t know their faces and their background. What we do know is that they need help.

The copy that was placed next to the visual: “There are over 40 million lives hidden today, living as shadows suppressed by war and violence. We often don’t know about them. But they deserve to be seen. And helped. Support another family through Stichting Vluchteling – The Dutch Refugee Foundation”.

More here, and here.

Of course, Azra Raza is also my older sister! Rebecca Robbins in Stat:

During a week when President Trump’s efforts to ban immigrants from seven predominantly Muslim nations touched off alarms among scientists worldwide, his former rival was sending a very different message.

Hillary Clinton spent Wednesday evening at a star-studded fundraiser supporting the cancer research of two top scientists at Columbia University — both of whom happen to be immigrants.

One of the event’s beneficiaries was Dr. Azra Raza, who last summer wrote an opinion piece for STAT under the headline: “I’m an immigrant and a Muslim. And I’m here to cure cancer.” Raza, who researches early-stage leukemia, grew up in Pakistan. She said Clinton repeatedly thanked her for her work.

The fundraiser also raised money to support the work of Dr. Siddhartha Mukherjee, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of the book “The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer.” Mukherjee, who studies blood cancers, was born in India.

More here. And a picture slide-show of the event here in the New York Times.

Katherine Burton at Bloomberg:

Sixty miles east of Wall Street, a spit of land shaped like a whale’s tail separates Long Island Sound and Conscience Bay. The mansions here, with their long, gated driveways and million-dollar views, are part of a hamlet called Old Field. Locals have another name for these moneyed lanes: the Renaissance Riviera.

That’s because the area’s wealthiest residents, scientists all, work for the quantitative hedge fund Renaissance Technologies, based in nearby East Setauket. They are the creators and overseers of the Medallion Fund—perhaps the world’s greatest moneymaking machine. Medallion is open only to Renaissance’s roughly 300 employees, about 90 of whom are Ph.D.s, as well as a select few individuals with deep-rooted connections to the firm.

The fabled fund, known for its intense secrecy, has produced about $55 billion in profit over the last 28 years, according to data compiled by Bloomberg, making it about $10 billion more profitable than funds run by billionaires Ray Dalio and George Soros. What’s more, it did so in a shorter time and with fewer assets under management. The fund almost never loses money. Its biggest drawdown in one five-year period was half a percent.

More here.

Philip Ball in Quanta:

What’s the difference between physics and biology? Take a golf ball and a cannonball and drop them off the Tower of Pisa. The laws of physics allow you to predict their trajectories pretty much as accurately as you could wish for.

Now do the same experiment again, but replace the cannonball with a pigeon.

Biological systems don’t defy physical laws, of course — but neither do they seem to be predicted by them. In contrast, they are goal-directed: survive and reproduce. We can say that they have a purpose — or what philosophers have traditionally called a teleology — that guides their behavior.

By the same token, physics now lets us predict, starting from the state of the universe a billionth of a second after the Big Bang, what it looks like today. But no one imagines that the appearance of the first primitive cells on Earth led predictably to the human race. Laws do not, it seems, dictate the course of evolution.

The teleology and historical contingency of biology, said the evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr, make it unique among the sciences. Both of these features stem from perhaps biology’s only general guiding principle: evolution. It depends on chance and randomness, but natural selection gives it the appearance of intention and purpose. Animals are drawn to water not by some magnetic attraction, but because of their instinct, their intention, to survive. Legs serve the purpose of, among other things, taking us to the water.

Mayr claimed that these features make biology exceptional — a law unto itself. But recent developments in nonequilibrium physics, complex systems science and information theory are challenging that view.

More here.

Sheila Weller in Vanity Fair:

On a steamy hot September day in 1955, in a racially segregated courtroom in Sumner, Mississippi, two white men, J.W. Milam and his half-brother Roy Bryant—a country-store owner—were acquitted of the murder of a 14-year-old black Chicago boy. His name was Emmett Till. And in August of that year, while visiting a Deep South that he didn’t understand, Till had entered a store to buy two cents worth of bubble gum. Shortly after exiting, he likely whistled at Bryant’s 21-year-old wife, Carolyn. Enraged, Bryant and Milam took matters into their own hands. They would later admit to local authorities that they’d abducted Till three nights later. And when they finished with him, his body was so hideously disfigured from having been bludgeoned and shot that its horrifying depiction—in a photo in Jet magazine—would help to propel the American civil rights movement.

Milam and Bryant were arrested, and, with the aid of NAACP Mississippi field secretary Medgar Evers and other black activists in seeking out witnesses, the prosecution produced compelling evidence. Even so, it wasn’t a surprise when the all-white, all-male jury voted “not guilty,” in little over an hour. Mississippi, after all, had had very few convictions for white-on-black murders. And the state led the nation in lynchings. (Four months after their irreversible acquittal, Milam and Bryant admitted their guilt to Look magazine, receiving a fee of some $3,000 for their story.) But the most explosive testimony, which certainly influenced the local white public’s perception of the motive for the murder, were the incendiary words of Carolyn Bryant, who was working in the store that night. On the stand, she had asserted that Till had grabbed her and verbally threatened her. She said that while she was unable to utter the “unprintable” word he had used (as one of the defense lawyers put it), “he said [he had]’”—done something – “with white women before.’” Then she added, “I was just scared to death.” A version of her damning allegation was also made by the defendant’s lawyers to reporters. (The jury did not hear Carolyn’s words because the judge had dismissed them from the courtroom while she spoke, ruling that her testimony was not relevant to the actual murder. But the court spectators heard her, and her testimony was put on the record because the defense wanted her words as evidence in a possible appeal in the event that the defendants were convicted.)

More here.

More here.

Sanjay Reddy in Reddytoread:

In the months before Donald Trump’s despicable executive order peremptorily banning entrants to the United States from select majority Muslim countries and placing a temporary stop on all refugee admissions, among other measures, was promulgated, many commentators have attempted to find the words to capture the smallness of mind and of moral vision of the new President. Roger Cohen is among those who have done so recently, in a powerful piece in the New York Times, published just before Trump’s latest execrable order, noting that “A rough translation of ‘America First’ is Muslims last.” That this pitiable notion of “America First”, although in a tradition, is not in keeping with other American traditions, such as for instance that of the Quakers, is the least point. Although it wraps itself in pragmatic claims of protection against terrorism it in fact represents the rejection of the idea of liberal democracy itself, understood as grounded in conceptions of equal treatment of persons (even if this idea was to be applied differently to citizen insiders and non-citizen outsiders).

Considerations of human dignity arising from what the philosopher John Rawls understood as a ‘broadly Kantian’ background to the shared public culture of liberal democracy played a crucial role in upholding their institutions, and underpinning such ideas as ‘public reason’ bringing together the idea that justification in a democracy must require reasons and that these must be of a kind that could be accepted by others, having different ‘comprehensive conceptions of the good’, such as followers of different religions or none at all. Another American philosopher, Richard Rorty, referred to a “human rights culture” underpinning liberal democracies, and crystalized in facts such as the abhorrence of torture, in retrospect a a precisely and presciently chosen example. However he worried, and controversially argued, that this had no ultimate philosophical or political support except itself.

More here.

Adam Jentleson in The Washington Post:

Senate Democrats have a powerful tool at their disposal, if they choose to use it, for resisting a president who has no mandate and cannot claim to embody the popular will. That tool lies in the simple but fitting act of withholding consent. An organized effort to do so on the Senate floor can bring the body to its knees and block or severely slow down the agenda of a president who does not represent the majority of Americans.

The procedure for withholding consent is straightforward, but deploying it is tricky. For the Senate to move in a timely fashion on any order of business, it must obtain unanimous support from its members. But if a single senator objects to a consent agreement, McConnell, now majority leader, will be forced to resort to time-consuming procedural steps through the cloture process, which takes four days to confirm nominees and seven days to advance any piece of legislation — and that’s without amendment votes, each of which can be subjected to a several-day cloture process as well. McConnell can ask for consent at any time, and if no objection is heard, the Senate assumes that consent is granted. So the 48 senators in the Democratic caucus must work together — along with any Republicans who aren’t afraid of being targeted by an angry tweet — to ensure that there is always a senator on the floor to withhold consent.

More here.

Beverly Gage at the New York Times:

Her main interest is in what plural marriage meant for Mormon women in the 19th century, forced to adapt on the fly to a situation they could never have anticipated. This is in some ways a personal question for Ulrich, herself a mother of five and a practicing Mormon as well as a Harvard history professor. All eight of her great-grandparents settled in Utah before the Civil War, members of the faith’s pioneer generation. To ask what it was like for the women who made that journey is also to ask how the modern Mormon Church developed its tight-knit social world, and to think about who mattered within it.

Despite Ulrich’s emphasis on women’s voices and ideas, “A House Full of Females” centers its narrative in part on a man named Wilford Woodruff. An apostle of the church and one of Mormonism’s early converts, Woodruff played a significant role in Mormon history. But his most important quality, from Ulrich’s perspective, is that he kept a detailed diary. That diary paid attention to women, noting on one occasion that the local ward meeting house “was full of females quilting sewing etc.” (thus providing Ulrich with her title). Woodruff married his wife Phebe Carter in 1837 and by all accounts loved her deeply, despite long sojourns apart for missionary work and the difficult deaths of several children. In the mid-1840s, he nonetheless “sealed” himself to two teenage girls, the beginning of a decades-long adventure in polygamy.

more here.

Bronwyn Averett at The Quarterly Conversation:

For those familiar with canonical texts of Haitian literature, the translation of Marie Vieux-Chauvet’s 1957 novel La Danse sur le volcan into English is a long time coming. Vieux-Chauvet is a key figure of Caribbean literature, known for interlacing charged subjects such as slavery, colonialism, erotic desire, racial injustice, and the influence of Vodou in Haiti, and it is surprising that, until now, only her famous trilogy of novellas Amour, colère et folie—originally published by Gallimard in 1968 with the support of Simone de Beauvoir—has been translated. From a writer whose most frequent subject is the psyche of Haitian women during violent and politically charged moments of Haiti’s history—she herself fled the Duvalier régime after the publication of her trilogy—Dance on the Volcano is an intimate rendering of the Haitian Revolution and a nuanced portrayal of the brutality that resonated across all realms of society in the colony of Saint Domingue at the turn of the 19th century. Kaiama L. Glover’s translation is fluid, remaining faithful to the elegance of Vieux-Chauvet’s prose while navigating the stylistic concerns inherent to recreating a work written in the 1950s and about the colonial life of the 1790s, for a 21st-century audience.

The novel follows the story of Minette, a “free woman of color” (gens de couleur or “people of color” being the term for free men and women, usually of both African and European heritage, living in the colony before the Revolution) who becomes a beloved star of the Comédie de Port-au-Prince. Much of the plot revolves around Minette’s slow and tortuous disillusionment as she comes to realize that she is not nearly as “free” as she believes, even after reaching unprecedented social heights and gaining wide recognition for her talent. Beloved by the public, and cared for in private by a close group of white Créole artists of the theatre, she remains unpaid and has severely limited professional agency.

more here.

Sam Dresser in Aeon:

They were an odd pair. Albert Camus was French Algerian, a pied-noir born into poverty who effortlessly charmed with his Bogart-esque features. Jean-Paul Sartre, from the upper reaches of French society, was never mistaken for a handsome man. They met in Paris during the Occupation and grew closer after the Second World War. In those days, when the lights of the city were slowly turning back on, Camus was Sartre’s closest friend. ‘How we loved you then,’ Sartre later wrote.

They were gleaming icons of the era. Newspapers reported on their daily movements: Sartre holed up at Les Deux Magots, Camus the peripatetic of Paris. As the city began to rebuild, Sartre and Camus gave voice to the mood of the day. Europe had been immolated, but the ashes left by war created the space to imagine a new world. Readers looked to Sartre and Camus to articulate what that new world might look like. ‘We were,’ remembered the fellow philosopher Simone de Beauvoir, ‘to provide the postwar era with its ideology.’

It came in the form of existentialism. Sartre, Camus and their intellectual companions rejected religion, staged new and unnerving plays, challenged readers to live authentically, and wrote about the absurdity of the world – a world without purpose and without value. ‘[There are] only stones, flesh, stars, and those truths the hand can touch,’ Camus wrote. We must choose to live in this world and to project our own meaning and value onto it in order to make sense of it. This means that people are free and burdened by it, since with freedom there is a terrible, even debilitating, responsibility to live and act authentically.

More here.