Mohammed Hanif in the New York Times:

I worry about Muslims. Islam teaches me to care about all human beings, and animals too, but life is short and I can’t even find enough time to worry about all the Muslims.

I don’t worry too much about the Muslims who face racial slurs in Europe and America, the ones who are suspected of harboring murderous thoughts at their workplaces or those who are picked out of immigration queues and asked awkward questions about their luggage and their ancestors. I tell myself that at the end of their humiliating journeys they can expect privileges like running water, electricity and tainted promises of equality.

I do worry about the Muslims who face extinction at the hands of other Muslims in their own homelands, usually in places where they are in a huge majority. My friend Sabeen Mahmud was murdered earlier this year, probably for not being a good enough Muslim, and it happened in this country, a country so Muslim that you can live your entire life here without shaking hands with a non-Muslim.

But mostly I worry about my kind of Muslims, those who are expected to explain to the world what real Islam is like. We so-called moderate Muslims are urged to take control of the narrative and wrest it away from the radicals — as though we were MFA students in a creative writing class struggling with midterm submissions, rather than 1.6 billion people of maddening diversity.

More here.

String theory, the multiverse and other ideas of modern physics are potentially untestable. At a historic meeting in Munich, scientists and philosophers asked: should we trust them anyway?

Natalie Wolchover in Quanta:

Physicists typically think they “need philosophers and historians of science like birds need ornithologists,” the Nobel laureate David Gross told a roomful of philosophers, historians and physicists last week in Munich, Germany, paraphrasing Richard Feynman.

But desperate times call for desperate measures.

Fundamental physics faces a problem, Gross explained — one dire enough to call for outsiders’ perspectives. “I’m not sure that we don’t need each other at this point in time,” he said.

It was the opening session of a three-day workshop, held in a Romanesque-style lecture hall at Ludwig Maximilian University (LMU Munich) one year after George Ellis and Joe Silk, two white-haired physicists now sitting in the front row, called for such a conference in an incendiary opinion piece in Nature. One hundred attendees had descended on a land with a celebrated tradition in both physics and the philosophy of science to wage what Ellis and Silk declared a “battle for the heart and soul of physics.”

The crisis, as Ellis and Silk tell it, is the wildly speculative nature of modern physics theories, which they say reflects a dangerous departure from the scientific method. Many of today’s theorists — chief among them the proponents of string theory and the multiverse hypothesis — appear convinced of their ideas on the grounds that they are beautiful or logically compelling, despite the impossibility of testing them.

More here.

Kenan Malik in Pandaemonium:

This is an essay I have written for Foreign Affairs. It draws upon, and interweaves, the themes of my lecture at the University of Michigan on ‘The Making of European Jihadis’, which provides an extended critique of the radicalisation thesis, and my previous essay for Foreign Affairs on ‘The Failure of Multiculturalism’, which explored at length the problems of both multicultural and assimilationist social policies. That essay is now in the 2015 anthology of the best articles in Foreign Affairs. This new essay was originally published under the headline ‘Europe’s Dangerous Multiculturalism’.

* * *

What it is that draws thousands of young Europeans to jihadism and violence? What is it that has led 4000 to travel to Syria to fight for the so-called Islamic State? And what is it that leads European citizens to engage in such barbarous carnage such as that we witnessed last month in Paris?

The conventional answer is that they have become ‘radicalized’, a process through which vulnerable Muslims are groomed for extremist violence by those who champion hate. The radicalization argument consists of four broad elements. The first is the claim that people become terrorists because they acquire certain, usually religiously informed, extremist ideas. The second is that these ideas are acquired in a different way to that in which people acquire other extremist or oppositional ideas. The third is that there is a conveyor belt that leads from grievance, to religiosity, to the adoption of radical beliefs, to terrorism. And the fourth is the insistence that what makes people vulnerable to acquiring such ideas is that they are poorly integrated into society.

The trouble is that these assumptions, which underlie much of Europe’s domestic counterterrorism policy, are wrong.

More here.

…… When their minister
Alice Ling, brought communion to the house
…… or the hospital bed
or when they held hands as Alice prayed,
…… grace was evident
but not the comfort of mercy or reprieve.
…… The embodied figure
on the cross still twisted under the sun.
.

by Donald Hall
from Without
Mariner Books, 1999

Giovanna Dunmall in More Intelligent Life:

When Madonna descended from the heavens in an illuminated cage at the start of her Rebel Heart show at London’s O2 arena last week, it was the start of a dazzling spectacle. She performed for two hours, changed her costume every ten minutes, and sashayed over every inch of the stage and a 100ft-long catwalk, thrust like an arrow into the audience in the shape of a cross tipped with a heart. There were warriors in kimonos, nuns on stripper poles, mechanics in a body shop and a “Last Supper” scene played out on a long carved table that, true to the star’s proclivities, was more orgy than re-enactment. And all that was in the first half hour. “A Madonna show is very complex; one of the most complex,” explains Ric Lipson of Stufish Entertainment Architects, the London-based practice that designed the sets and staging for this show. And he would know. Stufish has designed tours for the likes of the Rolling Stones, U2, Lady Gaga and Pink Floyd as well as the closing ceremony for the Beijing Olympics in 2008. “Not only is Madonna one of the biggest acts, if not the biggest act, in the world,” he continues, “she also has a band, 20 dancers, a 130-strong crew and an attention to detail that is meticulous.” It’s big business, too. Lipson says constructing the Rebel Heart sets and staging cost at least $10m.

The design process started at the beginning of January. Over two to three months, while talking with Madonna’s artistic director daily and sending out 3D models almost weekly, dozens of ideas and stage formations were produced, explored and abandoned. Ideas ranged from having a bridge linking two stages, to video panels attached to robot arms that doubled up as pieces of stage. Some didn’t fit the artistic vision, others were too expensive or simply impossible to build and rehearse in time. However, elements of many of them came to fruition and Tait Towers in Pennsylvania began fabricating the set and staging. The catwalk was based on a sketch produced by Madonna of an infinity symbol and a heart – or the “head of the penis”, as she referred to it lasciviously during the show. There is a staggering amount of stuff to contend with: lighting and sound equipment, giant video screens, cables and cumbersome props, costumes, staging and even lifts to carry people on and off stage. “This show takes 24 trucks to move around. That’s a bit more than three 747s when we have to fly it,” explains Lipson. Everything has to be designed so that it can be disassembled into smaller chunks – no bigger than a 2.4m cube – and reassembled again. “Everything looks very solid but it is all designed to clip, hook or lock into place,” he says, pulling up a piece of the band’s stage to make his point.

More here.

Darren Curnoe in Science:

It's been an exciting year for human evolution with several discoveries dramatically rewriting major episodes of our ancient past. Some of this progress stems from major advances in fields like ancient genomics, while much has resulted from new fossil and archaeological discoveries made in Africa and China. What's interested me the most has been the discovery of archaic humans living in northern China until perhaps 70,000 years ago and the oldest anatomically modern humans in the region appearing at least 80,000 years ago. This is because they fall squarely within my own area of research: human evolution over the past few hundred thousand years in East Asia and Australasia.

Unlike anything else

In 2012, we announced the discovery of the 'Red Deer Cave people' in Southwest China, a mysterious human group we identified from cranial and jaw bones and teeth from two cave sites located in Southwest China. Today, a team I co-lead with Professor Ji Xueping of the Yunnan Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology, and involving colleagues from a range of institutions in China and Australia, announced the discovery of yet another highly unusual bone from the Red Deer Cave people. And it seems to confirm they were a mysterious group of pre-modern humans. Our previous work showed that the features of their bones and teeth possess a remarkable number of similarities to archaic humans. This is despite them having lived only between about 14,000 and 11,000 years ago from radiocarbon dating of charcoal. Their anatomy was nothing like we'd seen before in modern humans, whether they lived 200,000 or 200 years ago: they were truly unique and a real mystery to us and many of our colleagues. We suggested they could represent either a very early modern human population, perhaps one that settled the region more than 100,000 years ago and became isolated. Or, they could be a late surviving archaic species, akin to a population of Neanderthals surviving in isolation until the end of the Ice Age in Southwest China.

More here.

Samanth Subramanian at The New Yorker:

Dhaka, conversations about the killings inevitably circle back to 1971, when Bangladesh broke away from Pakistan, whose strict Islamic pieties and Urdu culture encroached on Bengali liberalism. The Ekushey Book Fair occupies a sprawling park called Suhrawardy Udyan, where, in March, 1971, a politician named Mujibur Rahman urged an audience of two million to embrace civil disobedience and turn East Pakistan into an independent Bangladesh. The speech, an electric moment in Bangladesh’s history, is depicted in posters that still hang in many living rooms in Dhaka.

The ensuing “liberation war,” as Bangladeshis call it, is commemorated in a museum in the park, a half-buried, brutalist gallery whose raw-concrete shell staves off Dhaka’s soggy heat. Photographs of corpses, alone or in great piles, often charred, run along one wall. Some estimates suggest that Pakistan’s armed forces killed half a million people in the nine-month war, but most Bangladeshis—in particular, those from the Awami League, the political party that Rahman once led—say that the toll was closer to three million; they also call it a genocide. Early in December, 1971, the Indian Army intervened, hastening Pakistan’s defeat. Two weeks later, in Suhrawardy Udyan, the commander of Pakistan’s occupying forces surrendered, granting Bangladesh its independence. The war’s violence and the actions of Bengalis who collaborated with Pakistani forces remain the source of many of Bangladesh’s political questions. The word razakar, or “volunteer,” once used to describe members of pro-Pakistan militias, has entered colloquial Bengali as a scathing pejorative.

more here.

Andrew J. Bacevich at The Baffler:

For its first anthology drawn from the Macdonald oeuvre, the Library of America has repackaged four Lew Archer tales written during this period of Millar’s life: The Way Some People Die (1951); The Barbarous Coast (1956); The Doomsters (1958); and The Galton Case (1959). All are set in California, and all adhere to an identifiable formula. All revolve around Archer’s efforts to find a missing person. No sooner does the detective initiate his inquiries than he bumps into several other seemingly unrelated mysteries. Over the course of thirty-or-so compact chapters, while enduring or committing a certain amount of mayhem, Archer discovers that everything connects: rather than several parallel mysteries, there is but one. Crucially, that one mystery has its point of origin in parental failure and the ruinous consequences of depriving children of the care and protection they deserve.

Archer himself remains an elusive figure, with only sketchy biographical details emerging from the first-person narrative. We learn that he grew up in Oakland, where he clashed with a violent father and got into his fair share of trouble. “I’d been a street boy in my time, gang-fighter, thief, pool-room lawyer,” he recalls in a rare moment of reflection. “It was a fact that I didn’t like to remember.” During the war, Archer served as an intelligence officer. He was once a cop in Long Beach, but quit or was fired because he couldn’t stomach the rampant corruption. Now he lives alone in a five-room bungalow located somewhere between Hollywood and downtown Los Angeles. “The house and the mortgage on it were mementos of my one and only marriage,” a failure that still gnaws.

more here.

Dustin Illingworth in 3:AM Magazine:

As a literary mode, the feuilleton—that sui generis first-person form that served as a kind of catch-all for cultural criticism, foreign reportage, and belletristic trifles—has fallen on hard times. Once a staple of 20th-century newspapers, it would seem the topical force of the feuilleton has since been absorbed into the immediacy of forms governed by the hurdy-gurdy of digital dissemination: the inescapable think piece, the confessional blog, Twitter’s claustrophobic echo-chamber. And while these avenues have each democratized opinion in compelling ways, something of the moral breadth and reflexive dynamism of the original seems to me irrevocably lost. It is fair to say, I think, that the literary merit of the feuilleton was indissolubly bound to its elastic capacity, as that malleability allowed for a range of tonal registers and discursive intents from high seriousness to absurdist gesture, from vicious parody to a gorgeous cosmopolitan poetics. In borrowing the strengths of the essay, the travelogue, the news report, and the polemic, the feuilleton became a vehicle for a new kind of hybridized subjectivity within contemporary discourse. If it was sometimes accused of superficiality or dismissed as trite ephemera, the masters of the form—say, Heinrich Heine or Alfred Polgar—challenged such short-sightedness. They knew intuitively that, far from a mere literary bauble, the feuilleton was a potent platform for the celebration, interrogation, and production of an emergent mass culture.

Joseph Roth—journalist, novelist, arch-humanist, exiled Jew, inveterate alcoholic—proved uniquely, dazzlingly suited to the form, becoming perhaps its greatest practitioner in a prolifically productive, if tragically truncated, career. Born in 1894, in the Austro-Hungarian city of Brody, Roth came of age between the two great wars; given this tumultuous milieu, it is perhaps unsurprising that his lasting subjects became the abattoir of Europe’s recent past and, often with uncanny prescience, the life of the nightmare to come. The sixty-four pieces gathered in The Hotel Years therefore comprise both a lasting testament to Roth’s journalistic acumen as well as a compelling snapshot of a vanished Europe in which the specter of Hapsburgian ethnic diversity looms as a kind of comparative ideal in the face of Europe’s burgeoning xenophobic nationalism. But as much as these vignettes sketch the composite features of an age, they also constitute a rich and fascinating portrait of the paradoxical man behind the writing: tragedian and clown, misanthrope and philanthropist, reporter and poet. Typically self-deprecating, Roth described his work as “saying true things on half a page”; after devouring The Hotel Years, it seems to me more accurate to say that in these lushly concentrated pieces the 20th century zeitgeist is mapped, challenged, and, finally, illuminated.

More here.

From KurzweilAI:

Young adults who have greater aerobic fitness also have greater volume of their entorhinal cortex, an area of the brain responsible for memory, Boston University School of medicine (BUSM) researchers have found. While aerobic fitness is not directly associated with performance on a recognition memory task, the participants with a larger entorhinal cortex also performed better on a recognition memory task. The entorhinal cortex is a brain area known to show early pathology in Alzheimer’s disease, which is characterized by profound memory impairment.

The researchers recruited healthy young adults (ages 18-35 years) who underwent a treadmill test to measure aerobic capacity. During this test, the amount of oxygen and carbon dioxide in the participants’ breath as they walked or ran on a treadmill was measured. Participants then underwent magnetic resonance imaging and performed a recognition memory task. Entorhinal and hippocampal volume was determined using a method known as voxel-based morphometry and then regression analysis to examine whether recognition memory and aerobic fitness predicted brain volumes. “Our results suggest that aerobic exercise may have a positive effect on the medial temporal lobe memory system (which includes the entorhinal cortex) in healthy young adults. This suggests that exercise training, when designed to increase aerobic fitness, might have a positive effect on the brain in healthy young adults,” explained corresponding author and principal investigator Karin Schon, PhD, BUSM assistant professor of anatomy and neurobiology.

More here.

Gerald Dworkin in the New York Times:

Most of us believe that lying is wrong. We teach our children that it is wrong, and hope or expect that value judgment is shared by our friends and family. In public, we decry politicians and public officials when they lie, which we have frequent occasion to do these days. But the truth about lying is more complicated.

We tell lies to one another every day. But when we commit other acts that are generally believed to be immoral, like cruelty and theft, we do not seek to justify them. We either deny that the acts we committed are appropriately described by these terms, or we feel guilt or remorse. But many of us are prepared to defend our lies: indeed, to advocate their general use. Of course the Nazi at the door inquiring about Jews within ought to be lied to.

But perhaps this example only shows that there is not an absolute prohibition on lying. Such cases are rare, the harm to the innocent clear, the wickedness of the aggressor obvious. I want to argue that the number and types of permissible lies are much wider than one might have thought.

I am not arguing for the view that lying is morally neutral. I accept the fact that there ought to be a strong presumption in favor of honesty. But it is a presumption that not only can be, but ought to be, overridden in many more cases than we assume.

More here.

Lawrence Osborne in Lapham's Quarterly:

In his introduction to Kim Philby’s My Silent War, published in 1968, Graham Greene laid out the case for betrayal as an understandably human problem that needed, in the end, to be forgiven. Philby, the aristocratic son of the orientalist and Islamic convert H. St. John Philby, served as a high-ranking British intelligence officer and Soviet double agent until his defection to the Soviet Union in 1963. “The end, of course, in his eyes,” Greene wrote of the luckless traitor (who died in Moscow in 1988),

is held to justify the means, but this is a view taken, perhaps less openly, by most men involved in politics, if we are to judge them by their actions, whether the politician be a Disraeli or a Wilson. ‘He betrayed his country’—yes, perhaps he did, but who among us has not committed treason to something or someone more important than a country?

It’s a well-known passage that has been used many times to cast a baleful eye on Greene’s own love affair with communism. Philby, he goes on to observe, possessed the same “chilling certainty” as the Catholics who worked for the Spanish under Elizabeth I. It was the “logical fanaticism of a man who, having once found a faith, is not going to lose it because of the injustices or cruelties inflicted by erring human instruments.” Communism or Catholicism: faiths not easily discarded for simple reasons of decency. It was, one might conjecture, faith itself that made Philby attractive to Greene over and beyond the allure of a considerable personal charm.

The two first met and became friends while employed as operatives in MI6. Recruited into the agency in 1941 by his own sister and posted to Sierra Leone, Greene remained involved in espionage for years thereafter, though the details are somewhat murky.

More here.

Mark Greenberg in the London Review of Books:

John Leslie comes to tell us that the end of the world is closer than we think. His book is no ordinary millennial manifesto, however. Leslie is a sophisticated philosopher of science, and the source of his message is not divine revelation, apocalyptic fantasy or anxiety about the year-2000 computer problem, but ‘the Doomsday Argument’ – an a priori argument that seeks support in probability theory. In fact, the most interesting questions The End of the World raises are not, despite its subtitle, about our eventual demise. Rather, they concern our susceptibility, when thinking about risk, uncertainty and probability, to a kind of cognitive illusion. The Doomsday Argument is a case-study in ‘probabilistic illusion’, for it rests on a web of insidious intuitions, hidden assumptions and seductive but imprecise analogies.

The Argument claims that the observation that we are alive now increases the probability that Homo sapiens will become extinct in the relatively near future. It does not predict Doom at a specific time or with a specific probability. Its conclusion is more abstract and puzzling: whatever our best estimate would be (based on all available evidence, including the latest scientific, historical or other research) of the probability that our species is relatively close to extinction, it must be revised upwards. In reaching this conclusion, the Argument does not rely on evidence in the ordinary sense or, indeed, on anything peculiar to our present situation; it would yield the same conclusion at any point in human history.

It may seem preposterous that such a conclusion could be reached by armchair reasoning from the mere fact of our being alive now. Yet it would be wrong to rush to judgment. The counter-intuitive nature of probability is itself a reason for caution; moreover, the Doomsday Argument involves issues about time and existence, which are themselves notoriously resistant to intuition.

More here.

A Translator’s Reflections on the Story of Two Teenage Murderers Separated by Almost Two Centuries.

John Washington in The Believer:

“He donned his holiday clothes, had his sister sing a canticle beginning ‘O happy day! holy joy!” and, his mind wholly deranged, his weapon, an ax, in hand, he executed his mother, his sister, and his young brother.”

So one Dr. Vastel describes Pierre Rivière’s parricide-fratricide of June 3, 1835 in the rural French village of Faucterie. The description comes from the book, edited by Michel Foucault, I, Pierre Rivière, Having Slaughtered My Mother, My Sister, and My Brother. The astonishing volume includes the seventy-page memoir (“of remarkable eloquence,” according to presiding judge M. Daigrement) written by the nineteen-year-old murderer, Pierre, in which he candidly describes the particulars of his difficult family life and the details before, during, and after he murders his mother, his sister, and his brother, in that order.

Pierre writes of his youth: “I crucified frogs and birds, I had also invented another torture to put them to death. It was to attach them to a tree with three sharp nails through the belly. I called that enceepherating them, I took the children with me to do it and sometimes I did it all by myself.”

More here.

Scott Beauchamp at The Atlantic:

Closing Guantanamo should be an issue that finds easy bipartisan agreement. There’s something about the existence of the prison to offend everyone. For the left, there are the human-rights concerns. For the right, wasteful, expensive big-government overreach. And surely everyone would agree that a program that strengthens the enemy is bad for national defense. Yet, when the Senate passed a version of the National Defense Authorization Act that would end funding for any attempts to transport Guantanamo prisoners to U.S. soil, the vote reflected a bipartisan consensus to keep the prison open, passing 91 to three. The House rallied around the bill in a similarly cohesive fashion, passing it 370 to 58.

The simple explanation for members of Congress rallying to keep the prison open is public approval. Support for closing the prison has been steadily falling since its 2009 high of 51 percent, dropping to 39 percent in 2010 and 27 percent last year. To judge from the public statements of people defending Guantanamo, the explanation is plain: fear. In 2009, the Republican Senator John Thune argued, “The American people don’t want these detainees held at military bases, or federal prisons, or in their backyard, either.” More recently, when it was announced earlier in the year that potential transfer sites for Guantanamo prisoners included locations in Colorado, South Carolina, and Kansas, Cory Gardner, a Republican senator from Colorado, signed a letter, along with 40 sheriffs, claiming that it is “dangerously naïve not to recognize that a civilian prison with an untold number of enemy combatant inmates in our state, would provide a very tempting target for anyone wishing to either free these detainees or simply wishing to make a political statement.”

more here.

Philip Ball at Prospect Magazine:

The role of the magic tradition in the inception of science is complex but to present the two as antithetical is wrong. They were in many respects mutually supportive and even hard to distinguish. Magic as an intellectual endeavour can be seen as largely sober and systematic. Even the tricksier “popular” magic of the showman or mountebank was closely allied to practical technologies and mechanical skill. And if it had a tendency to patch together ad hoc explanations for puzzling phenomena, magic wasn’t doing much more than modern science continues to do; what has changed is the rigour with which such “explanations” are now scrutinised.

As historian William Eamon has argued, Renaissance “natural magic” was “the science that attempted to give rational, naturalistic explanations” for why things happened, and natural magicians, like modern scientists, believed that “nature teemed with hidden forces and powers that could be imitated, improved on, and exploited for human gain.” To its advocates, this art was the most potent means of dispensing with the supernatural intervention of demons and God in the day-to-day operation of nature.

Yet until the 15th century, anyone interested in magic risked accusations of heresy. Pliny the Elder condemned it as wicked (he noted that Nero was obsessed with it), but it was in early Christian thought that magic became dangerous. This was partly xenophobia: the word “magic” was an adjective applied to the pagan beliefs of the Persian “magi.” But it was also an assertion of authority over who owned such powers.

more here.

Leo Carey at The New York Review of Books:

After Adorno’s essay, Mahler’s overreaching maximalism and his fondness for banal melodies stopped being an embarrassment and became instead his core achievement. He emerged as a far more sophisticated artist: the works, tuneful enough to please the average concertgoer, were now also difficult and ambiguous enough to absorb the cognoscenti.

Mahler advocates before Adorno had to adopt a proselytizing tone. A recently republished volume contains two works of this kind: a reverent appreciation from 1936 by the conductor Bruno Walter, an acolyte of Mahler’s, who premiered the symphonic song cycle Das Lied von der Erde and the Ninth Symphony after his death; and an essay from 1941 by the composer Ernst Křenek. Křenek was briefly married to Mahler’s daughter Anna, and worked on completing two movements from Mahler’s Tenth Symphony, left unfinished at his death. His essay is brilliantly perceptive and anticipates Adorno. Mahler’s symphonic edifices are old-fashioned, he writes, but “the cracks in the structure herald the future.”

Today Mahler is no longer a cause and critics must seek out unexplored aspects of a composer who has become a fixture of the musical landscape. Two recent academic studies, by Thomas Peattie and Seth Monahan, are complementary opposites: Peattie focuses on evocative moments of orchestral writing, Monahan on the long-range narratives created by Mahler’s use of sonata form.

more here.