Martin Kemp at The Times Literary Supplement:

The notion that the world embodies “beautiful ideas” might seem to imply that some entity is required “out there” to have the ideas, rather than the more orthodox view that the world embodies mathematical orders at various levels in ways that we find beautiful as responsive observers. Wilczek’s use of the term “idea” without locating it in a specific conscious entity, whether a creative deity or ourselves, serves as an agnostic tease that allows him to identify mathematical harmonies in nature as ideas “out there” that chime with ideas within us. In doing so, he knowingly slides around the central question about who or what is responsible for the organization of the world at atomic and cosmic levels.

His incantation that the world is a work of art knowingly begs the same question. He states that “Nature loves to use such equations”, with reference to Maxwell’s laws. Nature (always with a capital N) implicitly becomes a kind of purposeful agency for the generation of the ideas. Elsewhere he asks, “Is the physical world, considered as a work of art, beautiful”? His answer is emphatically yes, but in this case he seems to allow that it is we who do the considering. For a philosopher, Wilczek’s ambiguity is likely to be irritating, but it allows him a notably productive and suggestive freedom to evangelize about the sublime beauty of the world we can observe and theorize via modern physics.

Wilczek’s evaded question recalls the kind of double truths of reason and revelation expounded in some Medieval and Renaissance theology.

more here.

D.A. Barry at 3:AM Magazine:

In order to provoke a re-examination of a wide spectrum of assumptions with regard to Nietzsche’s philosophy and how that philosophy played out in his life, I’d like to revisit the ideas in a much maligned biography of Nietzsche, that was written by Lou Andreas-Salomé:Friedrich Nietzsche, The Man in His Works (1894).

The first time that I encountered Lou Salomé by name and image was in a cinema in Rome in 1984. I’d been invited to see the movie by a woman-friend who was an admirer of Liliana Cavani. Cavani’s film Al di lá del Bene e del Male (Beyond Good and Evil) is a fictional depiction of Salomé’s relationship with Friedrich Nietzsche and the Positivist philosopher Paul Rée. The story is loosely based on the time that the threesome spent together over eight months in 1882. It was easy for my friend and I to fall in love with the ‘idea’ of Lou Salomé: a liberated intellectual woman, a feminist of sorts — although she wouldn’t have claimed so — who lived across the cusp of previous centuries, who intrigued both of these men so much that they proposed to her. Salomé was a novelist and a poet. Nietzsche set one of her poems to music. She was a literary critic. Her first published work in 1892 was called Henrik Ibsen’s Female Characters. She was a theorist of the erotic; and finally she became a psychologist after studying with Sigmund Freud. Her biography of Nietzsche is really a psychological portrait though it reveals a deep engagement with his philosophical writings.

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David Shultz in Science:

The way you navigate a virtual maze may predict your chances of getting Alzheimer’s. That’s the conclusion of a new study, which finds that people at risk for Alzheimer’s have lower activity in a newly-discovered network of navigational brain cells known as “grid cells.” The finding could lead to new ways to diagnose this debilitating disorder. The discovery of the grid cell network won the Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology last year. The neurons that make up the “grid” are arranged in a triangular lattice in the entorhinal cortex—a region of the brain used in memory and navigation. The “grid” activates in different patterns based on how individuals move, keeping track of our location in the coordinate plane.

Researchers think the cells help create mental maps and allow us to navigate through space even in the absence of visual cues. “If you close your eyes and walk ten feet forward and turn right and walk three feet forward, the grid cells are believed to [track your position],” says neuroscientist Joshua Jacobs at Columbia University. Intriguingly, people withthe so-called e4 variant of a gene known as APOE—the largest genetic risk factor for developing Alzheimer’s later in life—are at a higher risk for developing abnormalities in their entorhinal cortex. Because the grid cells are found in the same region, scientists wondered if the reason Alzheimer’s patients are more likely to get lost and have difficulty navigating could be explained by damage to the network.

More here.

.
The Aunts

They always went out together every afternoon,
The went to cafes, department stores—everything around them was a bird cage—

At other times they had tea on the patio
and they talked, they always talked with a slight uneasiness:
the memory of a difficult choice, still doubtful.
They talked. Of themselves always, always themselves, voracious, delicate.

Their eyes slid over appearances,
over the masks of things (enchantment or illusion?)
They’d remain sitting there, gifted with a false brilliance,
a lifeless freshness, for hours, entire afternoon talking about things,
about feelings, love, life.
That was their domain.
And they talked and talked, always repeating themselves, turning the same things over,

ceaselessly running through their fingers the stuff
extracted from their lives, kneading it, stretching it
until they formed between their fingers a lump, a little gray ball.

by Alfonso Quijada Urias
from Poetry Like Bread
Curbstone Press,1994
translation: Darwin J. Flakoll

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Nell Porter Brown in Harvard Magazine:

Only the Animals, by Ceridwen Dovey ’03, is a beautifully wrought, disconcerting collection of stories told by the souls of dead animals. A cat is picked off by a sniper on the Western Front; a blue mussel drowns in Pearl Harbor; a courageous tortoise is launched into Soviet-era space; and a self-mutilating parrot is abandoned in Beirut amid the 2006 Israeli air strikes. Yet Dovey lightens and layers these tales with humor, imagination, and an ingenious literary construct. Most of the animals are connected to writers—Colette, Jack Kerouac, and Gustave Flaubert, among others—who have featured animals in their own fiction, and can emulate their literary voices. (The Kerouacian mussel saying good-bye to a friend: “We didn’t understand but we let him go, hurting, as the flames of a hot red morning played upon the masts of fishing smacks and danced in the blue wavelets beneath the barnacled docks.”) Thus, what Dovey says began as “an experiment” in retelling historic incidents of mass suffering through voiceless, vulnerable beings “to shock readers into radical empathy” became, instead, “this weird mix of short story, literary biography, and essay—with lots of details that are true to life—and then also a sort of love-letter tribute to these authors who fascinate me.”

Published last year in Australia (Dovey lives in Sydney), Only the Animals elicited a helpful blurb from J.M. Coetzee, along with several awards; it was due out in the United Kingdom in August and Farrar, Straus and Giroux will release the American edition on September 15. Some of the book’s themes—conflict, abuse of power, and the amorphous origins of cruelty, inspiration, and empathy—also surface in Dovey’s very different debut novel, Blood Kin (2007). Set in a nameless country during a military coup, the slim, edgy book mines the complexities of collusion, with an undercurrent of danger and eroticism, through the first-person accounts of the ex-president’s barber, cook, and portraitist, all of whom are imprisoned at a remote country estate.

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Michael Hardy in Texas Monthly:

In 2000, 43 years after going totally blind at the age of three in a freak accident, a California man named Mike May had his sight restored in one eye by a pioneering stem cell procedure, coupled with a cornea transplant. A camera was on hand to record him seeing for the first time in his adult life, but the result was disappointing—despite a fully functional eye, all May could see was a blur of shapes and colors.

David Eagleman, a neuroscientist at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, recounts May’s story in his new, six-part television series The Brain, which premieres this evening on PBS. According to Eagleman, May’s brain had never learned to interpret the visual signals that are usually sent by our eyes; when those signals suddenly resumed, the data seemed random and meaningless. Blind, May was an expert downhill skier; sighted, he couldn’t tell his children apart. The lesson is that reality isn’t something we passively observe but rather something that our brain continually fabricates out of the myriad signals streaming in from our sensory organs. As Eagleman puts it, “What we experience isn’t what’s really out there, but a beautifully rendered simulation.”

The Brain is Eagleman’s attempt to unravel one of science’s greatest mysteries: how consciousness emerges from the three-pound lump of pink tissue inside our skulls. Rather than organize the documentary according to the parts of the brain—a division that makes little sense, Eagleman said, because nearly all parts are involved in nearly every brain function—Eagleman devotes each episode to a philosophical query like “What is Reality?” or “What Makes Me?”

More here.

This is the latest in a series of interviews about philosophy of race that I am conducting for The Stone. This week’s conversation is with David Haekwon Kim, an associate professor of philosophy and the director of the Global Humanities initiative at the University of San Francisco and the author of several essays on Asian-American identity. — George Yancy

George Yancy and David Haekwon Kim in the New York Times:

George Yancy: A great deal of philosophical work on race begins with the white/black binary. As a Korean-American, in what ways does race mediate or impact your philosophical identity?

David Haekwon Kim: In doing philosophy, I often approach normative issues with concerns about lived experience, cultural difference, political subordination, and social movements changing conditions of agency. I think these sensibilities are due in large part to my experience of growing up bicultural, raced, and gendered in the U.S., a country that has never really faced up to its exclusionary and often violent anti-Asian practices. In fact, I am sometimes amazed that I have left so many tense racialized encounters with both my life and all my teeth. In other contexts, life and limb were not at issue, but I did not emerge with my self-respect intact.

These sensibilities have also been formed by learning a history of Asian-Americans that is more complex than the conventional watered-down immigrant narrative. This more discerning, haunting, and occasionally beautiful history includes reference to institutional anti-Asian racism, a cultural legacy of sexualized racism, a colonial U.S. presence in East Asia and the Pacific Islands, and some truly inspiring social struggles by Asians, Asian-Americans, and other communities of color.

More here.

Adrian Kent in Aeon:

In 1909, Ernest Rutherford, Hans Geiger and Ernest Marsden took a piece of radium and used it to fire charged particles at a sheet of gold foil. They wanted to test the then-dominant theory that atoms were simply clusters of electrons floating in little seas of positive electrical charge (the so-called ‘plum pudding’ model). What came next, said Rutherford, was ‘the most incredible event that has ever happened to me in my life’.

Despite the airy thinness of the foil, a small fraction of the particles bounced straight back at the source – a result, Rutherford noted, ‘as incredible as if you fired a 15-inch shell at a piece of tissue paper and it came back and hit you’. Instead of whooshing straight through the thin soup of electrons that should have been all that hovered in their path, the particles had encountered something solid enough to push back. Something was wrong with matter. Somewhere, reality had departed from the best available model. But where?

The first big insight came from Rutherford himself. He realised that, if the structure of the atom were to permit collisions of the magnitude that his team had observed, its mass must be concentrated in a central nucleus, with electrons whirling around it. Could such a structure be stable? Why didn’t the electrons just spiral into the centre, leaking electromagnetic radiation as they fell?

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Daniel Swift at Harper's Magazine:

There’s glamour to an unmanned plane, perfect and ominous: the drones are a symbol of American might and also American wickedness, and all who praise them, or who find them troubling, concur that they represent something new. Two years ago, in The New Yorker, Jane Mayer wrote of “a radically new and geographically unbounded use of state-sanctioned lethal force.” “We’ve seen the future, and it’s unmanned,” panted the cover of Esquire. “Every so often in human history,” went the opening, “something profound happens that changes warfare forever.” Last March, Peter Singer of the Brookings Institution—author of Wired for War, a slightly histrionic book about robot technology and the future of warfare—met with the House Subcommittee on National Security and Foreign Affairs. “The point here,” he noted, “is that every so often in history, the emergence of a new technology changes our world.” Drone talk had acquired its own vocabulary.

The Predator drone’s past is as long as the history of flight. “Even before World War I,” writes the pilot and military historian Kenneth Werrell, “the idea of an unmanned, automatically controlled ‘flying bomb’ or ‘aerial torpedo’ circulated in a number of countries.” In September 1916 the U.S. Navy tested a remote-controlled seaplane. The Army built the Liberty Eagle, a pilotless plane wrapped in muslin and brown paper, and on October 4, 1918, it flew in circles for forty-five minutes and crashed in a field in Ohio.

more here.

A.S. Hamrah at Bookforum:

It’s been difficult to get beyond the mocking portrayals of Welles in part because so many critics and pop film historians have adopted Hollywood’s conformist notions of success. Welles’s story of uncompromising ambition and lack of concern for studio approval has functioned as a cautionary tale: a lesson in how not to succeed in show business. Writers of the early ’70s, such as Charles Higham and Pauline Kael, worked hard to knock Welles off a pedestal Hollywood had already smashed. Other writers have scraped away at the great man’s self-image, marring it the way scratches on film tear into the emulsion and make it harder to see. Some continue to punish Welles. For a recent example, check Peter Biskind’s introduction to the book My Lunches with Orson, a series of transcripts from tape-recorded conversations the filmmaker Henry Jaglom had with Welles in the LA restaurant Ma Maison between 1983 and 1985, the year Welles died. Biskind can’t resist reveling in Welles’s last days, when Welles “had ballooned to the size of a baby elephant” and survived by appearing in “B movies produced by fly-by-night producers in no-name countries” and “odds and ends like soaps, game shows, and TV commercials.”

But this year, the Welles centennial, an appreciation for Welles—even the late, bloated, talk-show-guest Welles—is gathering force. Karp’s book, along with Patrick McGilligan’s remarkable, eye-opening biography Young Orson and A. Brad Schwartz’s Broadcast Hysteria, provide a deep, nuanced portrait of the director at the start and finish of his career.

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William Boyd at The New Statesman:

It must be difficult to write the life of a man who is still very much with us, and in the public eye, no matter how much liberty the biographer has been given to tell the story, warts and all. Sisman – a very fine and astute biographer – has done an excellent, not to say exemplary, job under the circumstances. Only rarely is one aware of a veil of discretion being drawn, of names not being named, yet it is impossible to imagine this Life being bettered – though le Carré’s own memoir, to be published in 2016, may add some gloss.

In considering this biography, a comparison comes to mind: there is something almost absurdly Dickensian about le Carré’s early life. He was abandoned by his mother as an infant; trusted to a corrupt, rackety and wilful father who was frequently bankrupted and imprisoned (as Dickens’s father was); tormented by feelings of class insecurity but eventually found fame and glory as a published writer under a pseudonym; and, in not-so-serene but well-heeled old age, recognised as a great English man of letters. Even his later so-called polemical novels have a whiff of the outraged Dickensian apostrophe about them, addressing the reader and pointedly making them aware of the injustice at large in the world.

more here.

Damon Tweedy in Salon:

“Of all the forms of inequality,” Martin Luther King Jr. told a gathering of the Medical Committee for Human Rights in 1966, “injustice in health is the most shocking and the most inhumane.”

At the time of his remarks, the United States had begun to take several formal steps to end its century-long practice of state-sponsored segregation that had followed the end of slavery. In medicine, this meant that black people could begin to receive treatment side by side with whites rather than being relegated to separate and unequal facilities or sectioned off in run-down areas of white hospitals. Such practices had undoubtedly contributed to their poorer health, especially in the Deep South of Dr. King’s time, where black people on average had a life expectancy nearly nine years less than whites. While the civil rights movement ultimately stirred remarkable racial progress in various areas of American life, many of King’s concerns about health and health care remain valid to this day.

From cradle to grave, these health differences, often called health disparities, are found virtually anywhere one might choose to look. Whether it is premature birth, infant mortality, homicide, childhood obesity, or HIV infection, black children and young adults disproportionately bear the brunt of these medical and social ills. By middle age, heart disease, diabetes, stroke, kidney failure, and cancer have a suffocating grip on the health of black people and maintain this stranglehold on them well into their senior years. Thus, it is no surprise that the life expectancy among black people, despite real progress over the last twenty-five years, still significantly lags behind whites. In suffering a crippling stroke at age thirty-nine, Jim had become another casualty of inequality, a fresh case that Dr. Wilson could use to illustrate the health burden of being black.

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From Eurozine:

Decades after first encountering Anglo-Saxon perspectives on democracy in occupied postwar Germany, Jürgen Habermas still stands by his commitment to a critical social theory that advances the cause of human emancipation. This follows a lifetime of philosophical dialogue.

Michaël Foessel: It has become commonplace to link your work to the enterprise that the Frankfurt School initiated in the 1930s: the elaboration of a critical theory of society capable of breathing new life into the project of emancipation in a world shaped by technocapitalism. When you began your university studies after World War II, a different image of philosophy was prevalent in Germany: the less heroic image of an impotent philosophy compromised by National Socialism. What motivated you to choose this discipline? Did the pessimistic judgement on reason expressed in Horkheimer and Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment play a role in your initial choices in philosophy (the study of Schelling)?

Jürgen Habermas: No, that's not how it happened. I didn't go to Frankfurt until 1956, two years after the completion in Bonn of my doctoral thesis on Schelling. In order to explain how I came across critical theory, I'll have to go into a bit more detail. At German universities between 1949 and 1954 it was in general only possible to study with professors who had either been Nazis themselves or had conformed. From a political and moral standpoint, German universities were corrupted. There was, therefore, an odd divide between my philosophy studies and the left-wing convictions that had developed in discussions night after night about contemporary literature, the important theatrical productions, and film, which was dominated at that time above all by France and Italy. As early as my last years at the gymnasium, however, I'd obtained the works of Marx and Engels and addressed the subject of historical materialism. In view of these interests, the obvious choice of study would have been sociology, but this subject was not yet taught at my universities in Göttingen and Bonn. After my studies, I was granted a scholarship for an examination of the “concept of ideology”.

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Alexander Cooley and Daniel H. Nexon in Foreign Affairs:

When it comes to foreign policy, U.S. President Obama’s critics have long accused him of being weak, indecisive, and naive. “Restoring resolve” to the Oval Office was a Republican theme in 2012, and it remains one among the 2016 GOP contenders. This narrative has now spread beyond Obama’s partisan opponents: many accuse Washington of responding with insufficient strength to Moscow’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 and its support of the insurgency in eastern Ukraine. Russian President Vladimir Putin’s military intervention in Syria, which seeks to support Russia’s longtime ally Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, leaves the United States looking flatfooted. To some, it also highlights Washington’s waning power.

In short, Obama’s apparent restraint appears irresolute, whereas Putin comes across as a strong, decisive master strategist who exploits Obama’s weakness and keeps Washington off balance. The Economist declares that “Putin dares, Obama dithers,” and wishes that “Mr. Obama had a bit more of Mr. Putin’s taste for daring.” The former U.S. State Department official Jeffrey A. Stacey writes in Foreign Affairs that “when Putin stared down the West and the West blinked, the West lost its credibility and, with it, its ability to deter further Russian bad behavior.” TheTelegraph columnist Matt K. Lewis notes, “Today, it looks like [Obama’s] allowing Russia to push America around, and dictate the terms of our being pushed around.”

These interpretations dangerously misread contemporary geopolitics, however.

More here.

From Phys.org:

Biochemists at Oregon State University have made a fundamental discovery about protein structure that sheds new light on how proteins fold, which is one of the most basic processes of life.

The findings, announced today in Science Advances, will help scientists better understand some important changes that proteins undergo. It had previously been thought to be impossible to characterize these changes, in part because the transitions are so incredibly small and fleeting.

The changes relate to how proteins convert from one observable shape to another—and they happen in less than one trillionth of a second, in molecules that are less than one millionth of an inch in size. It had been known that these changes must happen and they have been simulated by computers, but prior to this no one had ever observed how they happen.

Now they have, in part by recognizing the value of certain data collected by many researchers over the last two decades.

“Actual evidence of these transitions was hiding in plain sight all this time,” said Andrew Brereton, an OSU doctoral student and lead author on this study. “We just didn't know what to look for, and didn't understand how significant it was.”

All proteins start as linear chains of building blocks and then quickly fold to their proper shape, going through many high-energy transitions along the way. Proper folding is essential to the biological function of proteins, and when it doesn't happen correctly, protein folding diseases can be one result—such as Alzheimer's disease, Lou Gehrig's disease, amyloidosis and others.

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Donna Murch in the Boston Review:

The images inspired by Michael Javen Fortner’s new book, Black Silent Majority, are revealing. A New Yorker review featured a graphic rendering of somber black men clad in orange jumpsuits imprisoned behind a fence made from the bodies of neatly dressed black men and women. Strikingly, the impediments are faceless, with only an occasional wisp of pink lip or sculpted facial hair, but the period-piece A-line skirts, peg leg suits, and skinny ties speak for themselves. The respectable classes of Fortner’s “black silent majority” form a literal wall of black human bondage. Through the magic of design, the book’s thesis is rendered in a deeply visceral way: African Americans themselves, not white backlash against black advancement, mobilized the phalanx behind mass incarceration.

Black Silent Majority is an ambitious and provocative book by a young African American political scientist, who argues that “working- and middle-class African Americans are partially responsible for the mass incarceration of black sons, brothers, husbands, and fathers and the misery that they endured while committed to penal institutions in New York.” Fortner takes aim at a whole body of scholarship, journalistic writings, and activist wisdom stressing the centrality of anti-black racism to the war on drugs and, by implication, mass incarceration. He directs particular ire at Michelle Alexander’s bestseller, The New Jim Crow (2010), which forcefully demonstrates how the drug war and the criminal justice system more broadly have become the biggest obstacle to black equality since legalized segregation.

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Jon Baskin in The Nation:

It’s been almost two decades since Jonathan Franzen confessed in print to his “despair about the American novel.” In “Perchance to Dream,” the long, almost perversely ambitious essay that appeared in the April 1996 issue ofHarper’s Magazine, Franzen explored a variety of issues: the fate of fiction in an age of distraction; the anthropology of readers and writers; the depressive tendencies of Jonathan Franzen. But the question of how Franzen might overcome his despair rested on something else, which was whether he could resolve the conflict he felt between his inclination to write aesthetically and politically challenging fiction in the mold of Thomas Pynchon or Don DeLillo, and his desire to “lose” himself in the intimate lives of his characters, in the manner of Jane Smiley or John Irving.

At the time, Franzen was the author of two “culturally engaged” novels that the culture had, in his opinion, politely declined to engage. The enormous popular and critical success of Franzen’s two mid-career novels The Corrections (2001) andFreedom (2010), which lifted their author out of relative obscurity and onto the cover of Time, has often been attributed to his having managed to write the kind of “big social novel” that had seemed on the brink of extinction. By his own admission, Franzen has fussed less over his prose style since publishing The Corrections, a decision whose consequences are evident in the long stretches of graceless writing in Freedom and his new novel, Purity. But a shortage of aesthetic gratification is a small price to pay if you believe, as do the writer’s fans, that Franzen has succeeded in combining the entertaining domestic realism of the great Victorian novelists with an accessible political commentary that captures some portion of the “agony,” as the critic Mark Greif said in regard to Freedom, of being a liberal in our time.

More here.