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Craig Mod in Aeon:

From 2009 to 2013, every book I read, I read on a screen. And then I stopped. You could call my four years of devout screen‑reading an experiment. I felt a duty – not to anyone or anything specifically, but more vaguely to the idea of ‘books’. I wanted to understand how their boundaries were changing and being affected by technology. Committing myself to the screen felt like the best way to do it.

By 2009, it was impossible to ignore the Kindle. Released in 2007, its first version was a curiosity. It was unwieldy, with a split keyboard and an asymmetrical layout that favoured only the right hand. It was a strange and strangely compelling object. Its ad-hoc angles and bland beige colour conjured a 1960s sci-fi futurism. It looked exactly like its patent drawing. (Patent drawings are often abstractions of the final product.) It felt like it had arrived both by time machine and worm hole; not of our era but composed of our technology.

And it felt that way for good reason: you could trace elements of that first Kindle – its shape, design, philosophy – back 70 years. It evoked the Memex machine that the American inventor Vannevar Bush wrote about in ‘As We May Think’ (1945), a path-breaking essay for The Atlantic. It went some way toward vindicating Marshall McLuhan’s prediction that ‘all the books in the world can be put on a single desktop.’ It was a near‑direct copy of a device called the Dynabook that the early computer pioneer Alan Kay sketched and cardboard‑prototyped in 1968. It was a cultural descendant of the infinitely paged Book of Sand from a short story of the same name by Jorge Luis Borges published in 1975. And it was something of a free-standing version of the ideas of intertwingularity and hypertext that Ted Nelson first posited in 1974 and Tim Berners-Lee championed in the 1990s.

The Kindle was all of that and more. Neatly bundled up. I was in love.

More here.

Oliver Morton in More Intelligent Life:

As a gadget to plug into a USB port, the “MinION” recently unveiled by Oxford Nanopore lacks the touch-me buy-me pizazz of Jonathan Ive’s designs. And since it’s a prototype that no one outside the company and a few partner organisations has yet been able to see in action, it is hard to say how well it actually works. But as an embodiment of technological cool it strikes me as pretty much beyond compare. Inside the MinION is a little chip with 512 holes in it. Put some DNA into the MinION, and it will pull individual DNA molecules through those pores. DNA molecules carry genetic information in the form of four different chemical bases, like slightly different knots on a piece of string. As a DNA molecule goes through one of the MinION’s pores, the different knots on it are sensed electronically; the signals produced this way are processed inside the MinION and sent through the USB port to your computer, where the string of bases is reassembled as a genome sequence. How long are the pieces of string? The system can read individual strings tens of thousands of bases long—far longer than most sequencing technologies. A MinION should be able to read about a billion bases before its pores run out. That’s a third the length of a human genome. All in a device the size of a matchbox.

There’s no good way of putting a cost on the production of the first human genome sequence in the early 2000s, but the number people tend to quote is $3 billion. The technology in the MinION will apparently do it for well under $3,000. Getting a million times cheaper in ten years is quite a feat even by the standards of…well, by any standards at all. As a byword for head-spinning progress, we’re accustomed to thinking of Moore’s Law, which says (more or less) that the computing power available for a given price doubles every two years. But that gives you only a thousandfold improvement every 20 years. A millionfold in just ten really is something else.

More here.

Freddie deBoer in Full Stop:

Did you hear? Google has dreams! And they’re really trippy. You’ve got to check it out.

Since Google’s “Deep Dream” project landed with great fanfare onto our collective Twitter feeds, it’s prompted a mountain of online aggregation, analysis, and sharing. And there’s little wonder why. With beautiful/disturbing/uncanny visuals, references to the impressive-sounding “artificial neural networks,” and origins in one of the most fascinating companies in the world, the story is a click farmer’s dream. It’s no surprise that so many publishers rushed to fill the stream with takes on the technology.

Unfortunately, much of the actual information sharing of these pieces – you know, thejournalism – has been counterproductive. With click-begging headlines, useless metaphors, vague discussion of essential information, and the general ambient woowoo that chokes our tech media, stories about Deep Dream have demonstrated the capacity for aggregation-style internet journalism to mislead. Faced with an interesting but limited project, one which utilizes complex technologies that require nuance and care to talk about meaningfully, our professional technology writers have fallen down, hard, on the job.

More here.

Spencer Jordan in The Wire:

In Middle Passage (1962), V S Naipaul’s account of revisiting the Caribbean, the author is swept up by the voices of its inhabitants. As one taxi driver tells him: “Is only when you live here as long as me that you know the sort of animal it is.” Understanding exactly what sort of “animal” Jamaica is also lies at the heart of Marlon James’s Booker-winning novel A Brief History of Seven Killings.

Like Middle Passage, James’s book is a whirlwind of different voices, intertwining and separating as the novel proceeds. Yet unlike Middle Passage there is no artful attempt to spare the darkness of what was once the heart of the slave trade. As one of James’s characters says when talking about Naipaul’s travelogue, “the beauty of how him write that sentence still lie to you as to how ugly [West Kingston] is”.

Ostensibly A Brief History of Seven Killings is about the failed assassination of Bob Marley, immediately before a peace concert organised by the socialist People’s National Party (PNP) in 1976. Marley was wounded but went on to play the concert. He left straight afterwards and did not return to Jamaica for two years. The gunmen were never brought to justice and their identities remain a mystery.

The fog of uncertainty surrounding these events has elevated them to mythical status. James takes the few facts that are known and runs with them…

More here.

Michael M. Phillips in the Wall Street Journal:

There was nobody in Jimmy Lee Dykes’s life to take the edge off his anger.

He had long ago lost touch with an ex-wife and two daughters. His older girl recalled his fondness of firearms and a hatred of authorities; how he smelled of spearmint, coffee and cigarettes; how he beat her mother.

Mr. Dykes, a Vietnam veteran, worked as a land surveyor and a truck driver. He was fired from his last hauling job after a dispute with his boss and at age 65 ended up living on the edge of a peanut field in a town of 2,400 in southeastern Alabama, growing vegetables and collecting grievances.

Metal cattle gates opened to his acre-and-a-half property, located at the crest of a rutted, red-dirt road. He landscaped with cinder block and laid out a pond and garden. Mostly, though, his land resembled a scrub-covered parking lot for his maroon-and-silver Econoline van, a 40-foot shipping container and, up on blocks, his home, a scruffy trailer left over from a federal disaster-relief program.

In jeans and a T-shirt, with lightning-strike white hair, Mr. Dykes roamed his property shooting grasshoppers with a pellet gun. He talked about putting out bowls of antifreeze to poison neighborhood dogs that soiled his property.

In early 2012, Mr. Dykes drove his next-door neighbor, Michael Creel, to the Wal-Mart and spent the ride fuming over a new gun law. On the return trip, Mr. Dykes mused about taking people hostage in a church some Sunday until a reporter broadcast his views against the law.

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Neil Swidey in the Boston Globe:

Before we get into it, let me make one thing clear. This intervention is not aimed at those with life-threatening food allergies or similarly grave medical conditions. I would never question people whose faces will balloon if they ingest trace amounts of shellfish. Or people who risk going into anaphylactic shock with a whiff of peanut dust. Or people whose ingestion of a smidge of gluten will send their bodies on an autoimmune witch hunt that over time will eat away at the lining of their small intestines and potentially lead to everything from infertility to cancer. Those problems are very real, and everyone who is afflicted with one or more of them has my sympathy.

I’m talking about the rest of you. Those of you who don’t eat garlic because you detest its smell or avoid cauliflower because it makes you fart or have gone gluten-free because you heard it worked wonders for Jennifer Aniston or Lady Gaga or Dave, your toned instructor from spin class.

When you settle into your seat at a restaurant, don’t be shy about telling your server your food preferences. By all means, ask if your dish can be prepared garlic-free or cauliflower-free or gluten-free. You’re paying good money, so you should get the meal that you want, not one that leaves you riding home in a foul mood and a plume of fetid air. The days of the imperious no-substitutions chef, telling you to take it or leave it, now seem as dated as a rerun of that Seinfeld “Soup Nazi” episode from 20 years ago.

But for the love of Julia Child and the sake of every other soul in the restaurant, particularly the underpaid line cooks sweating their way through another Saturday night shift, please, please stop describing your food preferences as an allergy.

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Nigel Wilson in Al Jazeera:

As the student cafeteria at Birzeit University empties after the lunchtime rush, Ehab Iwidat leans back on his chair and sips from a bottle of mineral water. The wiry, 20-year-old business and French student is suffering from a cold, but that has not stopped him from attending some of the recent demonstrations in the West Bank. “It's the first time in a long time that we've seen this,” he says. “I've seen young people, old people, females, males, protesting in the streets together. You can see rich people alongside poor people too.” Like many in the so-called Oslo generation of Palestinians, who have little or no memory of previous Intifadas in Palestine, Iwidat only knows life under occupation as a second-class citizen. He believes that Israeli restrictions on Palestinian freedom and rights in the West Bank, harassment from Israeli settlers, and the bleak prospects for a peace deal between the Israeli and Palestinian leaders have pushed Palestinians into the streets in recent weeks. “It's coming from the actions of settlers, who represent Israeli government policy. From burning people alive, humiliating people on a daily basis and restricting Palestinians' freedom movement, to the disrespectful actions at al-Aqsa Mosque.” The protests that have swept Jerusalem, Gaza and the West Bank this month have seen tens of thousands of Palestinians take to the streets. Men and women of all ages have joined the movement. In some cases, these massive demonstrations have passed peacefully, as protesters massed to chant slogans in unity, demanding solidarity to fight the Israeli military occupation. Other gatherings have turned violent, as the Israeli military used tear gas, rubber-coated steel bullets and live fire against Palestinian demonstrators throwing rocks and firebombs at Israeli soldiers.

The movement has even given traction to the idea that Palestinians could be on the verge of a new Intifada, or that one may have already begun.

More here.

This Neruda Earth

Sitting against a treetrunk in Dolores Park
amid the Chilean solidarity gathering.
my eyes beheld three tiny daisies
in the grass, their little pollen hearts
attacked by flies. Nearby, yellowjackets
were flying over a jungle of blades
of grass and brilliantly green-backed
horseflies were making merry on
a flute of dogshit. I had lowered
my eyes from the speeches, and even
the Peoples Tribune was stacked at
my side. So much movement
in nature. A butterfly alighted on
the front page and walked along
the headline as if reading it. The
flies went on eating the hearts out.
The horseflies were absolutely drunken
on the excrement. The yellowjackets
were strafing and landing and
taking off again. It was the guerrilla
war, it was mir, it was peace. So much
movement, so much space in an inch. This
Neruda earth.

by Jack Hirschman
from Poetry Like Bread

Hal Hlavinka at The Quarterly Review:

In the Czech Republic, Hrabal is a mythic figure. The website for his favorite pub, U Zlatého tygra, has six tabs: Home, Beer/Cheese, Menu, Bohumil Hrabal, History, and Contacts. His 1994 meeting with ambassador Madeleine Albright and then presidents Havel and Clinton has been archived as both legend and link. The man and his work are preservations of Czech history, connecting old Prague, the “glory and downfall of the cultural boom of the ’60s” (to quote the Tygra’s website), and the city’s globalization under capitalism. Hrabal has come to represent a kind of nostalgia for a lost Czech time, somewhere back in the post-Soviet ’80s, or the pre-crackdown ’60s, or maybe even the democratic ’20s—anytime but now. In his intro to The Little Town Where Time Stood Still, Joshua Cohen identifies this nostalgia as Bohemian in general and Hrabalian in particular: “To feel born too late for a true life (whatever that is), and to feel that as a failure and that failure as ennobling, are very Czech emotions.” This complex blend of feeling—a yearning for the past that invigorates the presence of the present—courses through Hrabal’s best work, and is on full display in The Little Town Where Time Stood Still and Mr. Kafka and Other Tales from the Time of the Cult.

Originally translated in 1993 by the late James Naughton and newly reprinted by NYRB Classics, The Little Town Where Time Stood Still brings together two of Hrabal’s most iconic works. The first part, Cutting It Short (1976), takes the perspective of the author’s mother, Maryška, a restless, energetic woman constantly pushing the boundaries of acceptable behavior. Hers is the story of how these boundaries change with the passage of time, marked by the introduction of the wireless telephone to the little town of Nymburk.

more here.

David L. Ulin at the LA Times:

Partway though Elvis Costello's baggy, often brilliant and wholly idiosyncratic memoir, “Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink,” there's a moment that echoes like a master metaphor. It's 1995 and our hero is about to accept “an Ivor Novello Award in the company of Van Morrison, Lonnie Donegan, and Don Black,” when a BBC exec sidles up to him and says, “Of course, you'd have had a lot more hits if you'd just taken out all the seventh and the minor chords.”

That this isn't the best line here is testament, I suppose, to how many good lines “Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink” contains. The implication is that Costello should have gone a more predictable route, given the programmers what they wanted — which is antithetical to the ethos of his career.

New wave rocker, country crooner, balladeer, collaborator and showman: Costello has been all of this and more in the course of what is now a 40-year run. Of all the first-generation punkers, he remains (with Patti Smith and possibly David Byrne) among the few who can claim the longevity and diversity of, say, Bob Dylan or Joni Mitchell, both of whom appear in this book. Like minds, perhaps, or water seeking its level. Either way, this is the company to which Costello belongs.

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Laila Lalami in The New York Times:

Fifty years ago, the Arab world was seized by a new hope. Whether in Cairo or Casablanca, Damascus or Tripoli, the hope was the same — that through higher education, young people would lift their developing nations into an era of peace and modernity. One of these young people was a Syrian scholarship student named Abdel-Razak Sattouf, a firm believer in Pan-Arabism and its promise of a unified, prosperous region. His journey from cheerful liberal to quiet authoritarian is the subject of “The Arab of the Future,” a graphic memoir by his son, the comic artist and filmmaker Riad Sattouf.Shortly after arriving in Paris to complete a doctorate in history at the Sorbonne, Abdel-Razak falls in love with a Frenchwoman, Clémentine, and with the country itself. (“France is wonderful! ­People can do whatever they want here! They even pay you to be a student!”) When he’s not studying, he spends his time listening to Radio Monte Carlo, from which he receives news of the Arab defeat in the 1973 war against Israel. In one of many such contradictions, Abdel-Razak seethes with frustration at the failures of the Arab forces, even though he himself has avoided conscription into the Syrian Army by choosing to study abroad.

Abdel-Razak successfully defends his doctoral dissertation, and Clémentine, now his wife, gives birth to Riad. This should be a happy time for the young scholar, but instead he complains that he has received only a cum laude and that offers of employment arrive in the form of letters misspelling his name. Therein lies Abdel-Razak’s fatal flaw: He is unable to cope with the fact that his self-perception doesn’t match the way others perceive him. This, at least in part, explains why he leaps at the offer of a teaching post in Libya.

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Jessica L. Nielson, Sean Carroll, Fredrick Barrett, George Musser, Karl Friston, Rich Oglesby, and Brad Burge offer answers in Hopes and Fears. George Musser:

The holographic principle doesn’t mean the universe isn't real. It just means that the universe around us, existing within spacetime, is ​CONSTRUCTED​ out of more fundamental building blocks. “Real” is sometimes taken to mean “fundamental”, but that's a very limited sense of the term. Life isn't fundamental, since living things are made from particles, but that doesn’t make it any less real. It’s a higher-level phenomenon. So is spacetime, if the holographic principle is right. I talk about the holographic principle at length in my book, and I discuss the distinction between fundamental and higher-level phenomena in a recent blog post.

The closest we come in science to “real” or “objective” is intersubjective agreement. If a large number of people agree that something is real, we can assume that it is. In physics, we say that something is an objective feature of nature if all observers will agree on it – in other words, if that thing doesn’t depend on our arbitrary labels or the vagaries of a given vantage point (“frame-independent” or “gauge-invariant”, in the jargon). For instance, I'm ​not entitled to say that my kitchen has a left side and a right side, since the labels “left” and “right” depend on my vantage point; they are words that describe me more than the kitchen. This kind of reasoning is the heart of Einstein's theory of relativity and the theories it inspired.

Could we all be fooled? Yes, of course. But there's a practical argument for taking intersubjective agreement as the basis of reality. Even if everyone is being fooled, we still need to explain our impressions.

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Mike Konczal in The Nation:

In a 1937 radio address, the economist John Maynard Keynes said that “the boom, not the slump, is the right time for austerity at the Treasury.” The time to pay down debt isn’t when the economy is weak, since the necessary spending cuts and tax increases would exacerbate a recession, but instead when times are good.

But what if good times aren’t right for austerity either? What if we should just service our debt—i.e., pay the minimum—and chill? This piece of advice is coming from an institution that, for many on the left, is synonymous with austerity: the International Monetary Fund. The IMF’s retiring research chief, Olivier Blanchard, is an MIT-trained New Keynesian, and the research team he oversaw during the Great Recession pushed the discussion into brand-new territory. A recent paper by IMF economists Jonathan Ostry, Atish Ghosh, and Raphael Espinoza is titled “When Should Public Debt Be Reduced?”, and their surprising answer is, for a country like the United States, not in the near future.

As background, the national debt did increase as a result of the Great Recession. As the economy weakened, the government took in less in taxes and paid out more in support. These “automatic stabilizers” put a floor under demand and helped keep the Great Recession from turning into the next Great Depression.

The government deficit increased throughout the worst of the recession, before falling and leveling off at a low rate. Now the deficit is just 2.4 percent of the GDP—lower than the average over the past 50 years. But the total amount of government debt has plateaued at a higher level. In 2007, the ratio of debt held by the public to GDP was about 35 percent; now it’s 74 percent.

To understand the IMF’s analysis, we must remember that the debt is what economists call a “sunk cost,” since the money has already been spent. We are left to consider the benefits and costs of this spending decision: Would our economy benefit most from throwing money at the debt, or investing it in something else?

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Elizabeth Bruenig in TNR:

The economic boom of the late '90s masked the disasterwelfare reform would eventually reveal itself to be for a time, and perhaps this is why Bill Clinton enjoys a reputation as a fantastic president with an almost lovable scoundrel side. But since the collapse of the dot-com bubble, his reckless gutting of welfare has plunged millions of families into deep poverty.

The point of welfare reform was, in Hillary’s words, to “transition from dependency to dignity”—that is, to transition desperately poor families from welfare to work within a definite period of time. Although Clinton has refused to comment on whether or not she still considers welfare reform a success, she has since stuck to the theme of keeping benefits means-tested, with the goal of limiting benefits to the most destitute. Thus her interest, one presumes, in preventing Donald Trump’s kids from attending college without paying tuition, as Norway’s Princess Märtha Louise didn’t when she attended one of Norway’s many state colleges. Quelle horreur.

Clinton’s approach is one way to think about benefits: as tightly limited programs of last resort for people in extreme circumstances. This is mostly the way we talk about benefits now, in the parlance of a “safety net” for the precariously balanced and fallen. In this vein of thought, it makes sense to limit benefits to the extremely needy and to impose terms even upon those benefits, so as to prevent dependency—since the point is, after all, eventually ending one’s use of benefits.

Then there is the other way of looking at benefits: the social-democratic way. In his 1990 book Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism, Danish sociologist Gøsta Esping-Andersen described firstly the “‘liberal’ welfare state, in which means-tested assistance, modest universal transfers, or modest social-insurance plans predominate,” and “benefits cater mainly to a clientele of low-income, usually working-class, state dependents.” Then there is the social-democratic world, which consists of “a welfare state that would promote an equality of the highest standards, not an equality of minimal needs,” thus promising “that equality be furnished by guaranteeing workers full participation in the quality of rights enjoyed by the better-off.”

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Julian Baggini in The Philosophers' Magazine:

The free will debate is one of the oldest in philosophy and considered by many to still be one of the most intractable. Hume thought he knew why. He believed that whenever a dispute persists for very long without resolution, “we may presume that there is some ambiguity in the expression, and that the disputants affix different ideas to the terms employed in the controversy.” And so he thought by resolving the ambiguity all people of good sense would see they had nothing to disagree about.

Two hundred years later, when P F Strawson had his stab at the problem, the disagreements were as wide as ever, and unlike Hume, Strawson was under no illusion that he would resolve them. “This lecture is intended as a move towards reconciliation,” he said at the beginning of his classic 1962 essay “Freedom and Resentment,” “so it is likely to seem wrongheaded to everyone.”

There's a lot still be said for Hume's diagnosis of the problem, and his solution. Hume argued that there was no contradiction between accepting that human beings are fully part of nature, their actions subject to the same laws of cause and effect as anything else, and believing that we have free will. Free will is not some magical power to escape the necessity of nature but a capacity to make choices free from coercion.

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