Jane Kramer in The New Yorker:

Steinem has a mantra that she says she lives by. She calls it “Ask the Turtle,” because it involves a turtle she rescued—or thought she had—on a geology-class field trip to the Connecticut River Valley in the spring of her freshman year at Smith. “I found a mud turtle on the riverbank, up by the asphalt road,” she told me. “A big snapping turtle, more than a foot long, but I picked it up—carefully—and lugged it down to the river and slipped it in. The professor saw me just as the turtle disappeared in the water. He said that the turtle had been making its way to dry land for a reason—in order to lay its eggs—and that now it was going to take that turtle months more to lay them. It was a lesson I learned to apply to people a few years later, in India—though I didn’t realize it then—when I was going from village to village with Gandhian women organizers, listening to them ask, ‘Tell us your stories. You’ve lived them, you’re the experts.’ ”

…Steinem married for the first time in her mid-sixties, inherited three stepchildren (among them the actor Christian Bale), and was widowed three years later, when her husband, David Bale, died of brain cancer, at the age of sixty-two. Bale was a South African-born British businessman and environmentalist. They met when he walked up to her at a Los Angeles Voters for Choice benefit. It was a happy marriage, “a green-card marriage, because we would have been together anyway,” Steinem told me. She says that caring for him that last year, when he was ill and “needed someone to help him out of life, and I needed someone to force me to live in the present,” had actually helped her “expiate the pain of my old terrors”—the terrors of caring for her mother when she was too young to understand or cope. Steinem has compared marriage to slavery law in this country. As a young woman, she fled one brief, ill-advised engagement. And, in her early forties, she amiably dissolved a second, to Robert Benton, who went on to write and direct “Kramer vs. Kramer.” “Neither of us was really sure we wanted to marry, so we took it in steps. The first was to do the blood tests and get the license. We did. The second was for him to buy the new suit. He did. The third was for me to buy the dress. I never got to the dress, I just couldn’t do it, and the marriage license expired.”

Four years after David Bale died, a reporter from Pakistan asked Steinem why she had changed her mind about marriage. “I didn’t change,” she told him. “Marriage changed. We spent thirty years in the United States changing the marriage laws. If I had married when I was supposed to get married, I would have lost my name, my legal residence, my credit rating, many of my civil rights. That’s not true anymore. It’s possible to make an equal marriage.”

More here. (Note: Thanks to dear friend Sindy Kohuth)

Editorial in Nature:

Izabella Kaminska in the FT's Alphaville provides a transcript of a NYC Comic Con panel featuring Paul Krugman and Brad Delong, Annalee Newitz (i09), Chris Black (Enterprise writer), Felix Salmon and Manu Saadiaon post-scarcity economics of the sort enabled by Star Trek matter replicators:

MANU: The project for the book, it started out drinking beer with Chris. We were discussing about whether there is a book about Star Trek economics because there is a book about everything to do with Star Trek.

In the book I’ve tried to step out of that mindset, and tried to actually describe how it works. And I’ve discovered some very surprising things.

The biggest thing, I believe, that I got out of researching the book and writing it, is that the post scarcity in Star Trek is not driven by technology but a policy choice. And this is where having such a stellar economic panel to discuss this comes in.

FELIX: What is post scarcity?

BRAD: Well 400 years ago, in almost all human societies being rich relative to your neighbours mattered a lot. If you were poor, especially poor and female, chances were you weren’t getting the calories you needed to reliably ovulate, and chances were your children weren’t getting the nutrients that they needed for their immune systems to be protected against the common cold. 400 years ago the great bulk of humanity lived lives that were nasty, brutish, short and they were hungry pretty much all the time. And when they weren’t hungry they were wet, because the roof leaked, and when they weren’t wet they were probably cold because damp proofing hadn’t been invented.

Now we, here, in the prosperous middle class in the North Atlantic are moving into another society and Gene Roddenberry tried to paint our future by saying wait a minute what’s going to happen in three centuries? In three centuries we are going to have replicators. Anything material, gastronomic that we want indeed anything experiential with the holo-deck we we want we are going to have. What kinds of people will we be then and how will we live? And indeed, we are quite ahead on that transition already.

More here.

Suzanne Schneider in The LA Review of Books's Marginalia:

Before engaging Walzer’s argument in depth, it is worth noting that some might raise an eyebrow at the inclusion of Israel alongside India and Algeria as an instance of national liberation. In his review of the piece, Richard Falk notes that “India and Algeria were genuine liberation movements waged by indigenous nations to rid from the entire territorial space of their respective countries a deeply resented, exploitative, and domineering foreign presence.” Placing Israel in this category, while mostly ignoring the expulsion of Palestinian Arabs that its state formation entailed, “seems dubious, indeed polemical.” While I largely agree that Walzer’s personal support for Israel often overrides his own logic (more on that below), one of the peculiarities of Zionism is that, in the words of Ella Shohat, it constituted “a redemptive nationalist narrative vis-à-vis Europe and anti-Semitism and a colonialist narrative vis-à-vis the Arab people who ‘happened’ to reside in the place designated the Jewish homeland.” In my view, it is difficult to understand the internal reasoning of Israel without being attentive to the Janus-faced nature of Zionism, including the striking parallels between its political maneuvers and cultural production and those rooted in anti-colonial national struggles like India. None of this renders the nakba somehow inconsequential, but it does suggest that if we want to understand why Israel does the things it does, it is helpful to maintain a sense of historical simultaneity that either/or paradigms cannot quite accommodate. Within this context, Wazler’s comparison is not as misguided as it might initially seem.

With this in mind, let’s turn to the substance of the Walzer’s argument. Though it seems deceptively simple, the nuance of Walzer’s interpretation is best arrived at by understanding what he does not argue, as the general contours of his position might seem familiar at first glance. As he sees it, scholars have forwarded two prominent explanations to explain the salience, and indeed resurgence, of religious politics in post-colonial settings. The Marxist one, which he deems “more usefully wrong,” views nationalism as yet another form of false consciousness that shields the masses from recognizing their true material interests. Accordingly, “whatever the pretended opposition of nationalism and religious revival, these two reinforce each other, and they make for a narrow, parochial, and chauvinist politics.” The other explanation to gain credence in recent years is the post-colonial stance that regards fundamentalist religion as both a byproduct of colonial rule and the “dark twin” of national liberation.

More here.

Barack Obama interviews Marilynne Robinson in The New York Review of Books:

The President: Well, now there’s been that strain in our democracy and in American politics for a long time. And it pops up every so often. I think the argument right now would be that because people are feeling the stresses of globalization and rapid change, and we went through one of the worst financial crises since the Great Depression, and the political system seems gridlocked, that people may be particularly receptive to that brand of politics.

Robinson: But having looked at one another with optimism and tried to facilitate education and all these other things—which we’ve done more than most countries have done, given all our faults—that’s what made it a viable democracy. And I think that we have created this incredibly inappropriate sort of in-group mentality when we really are from every end of the earth, just dealing with each other in good faith. And that’s just a terrible darkening of the national outlook, I think.

The President: We’ve talked about this, though. I’m always trying to push a little more optimism. Sometimes you get—I think you get discouraged by it, and I tell you, well, we go through these moments.

Robinson: But when you say that to me, I say to you, you’re a better person than I am.

The President: Well, but I want to pick up on the point you made about us coming from everywhere. You’re a novelist but you’re also—can I call you a theologian? Does that sound, like, too stuffy? You care a lot about Christian thought.

Robinson: I do, indeed.

The President: And that’s part of the foundation of your writings, fiction and nonfiction. And one of the points that you’ve made in one of your most recent essays is that there was a time in which at least reformed Christianity in Europe was very much “the other.” And part of our system of government was based on us rejecting an exclusive, inclusive—or an exclusive and tightly controlled sense of who is part of the community and who is not, in favor of a more expansive one.

Tell me a little bit about how your interest in Christianity converges with your concerns about democracy.

Robinson: Well, I believe that people are images of God. There’s no alternative that is theologically respectable to treating people in terms of that understanding. What can I say? It seems to me as if democracy is the logical, the inevitable consequence of this kind of religious humanism at its highest level. And it [applies] to everyone. It’s the human image. It’s not any loyalty or tradition or anything else; it’s being human that enlists the respect, the love of God being implied in it.

More here.

John McWhorter in The Atlantic:

Is there anything inherently “doggy” about the word “dog”? Obviously not—to the French, a dog is a chien, to Russians a sobaka, to Mandarin Chinese-speakers a gǒu. These words have nothing in common, and none seem any more connected to the canine essence than any other. One runs up against that wall with pretty much any word.

Except some. The word for “mother” seems often either to be mama or have a nasal sound similar to m, like nana. The word for “father” seems often either to be papa or have a sound similar to p, like b, in it—such that you get something likebaba. The word for “dad” may also have either d or t, which is a variation on saying d, just as p is on b. People say mama or nana, and then papa, baba, dada, ortata, worldwide.

Anyone who happens to know their way around a lot of languages can barely help noticing this eerie similarity. But when it comes to European languages closely related to English, like the Romance and Germanic ones, this isn’t so surprising. After all, these languages are children of what was once one language, which linguists call Proto-Indo-European and was likely spoken on the steppes of what is now Ukraine several millennia ago. So if French has maman and papa, and Italian has mamma and babbo, and Norwegian hasmamma and papa, then maybe that’s just a family matter.

More here.

Adil Najam in LinkedIn Pulse:

I was delighted when I heard that the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences had decided to award The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel for 2015 to Prof. Angus Deaton – Scottish born, Cambridge University educated, Professor at Princeton Univeristy. They announced that it was “for his analysis of consumption, poverty, and welfare”.

Indeed. As the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences pointed out in their citation: “More than anyone else, Angus Deaton has enhanced [our understanding of individual consumption choices]. By linking detailed individual choices and aggregate outcomes, his research has helped transform the fields of microeconomics, macroeconomics, and development economics.”

This is very true. His main contributions to economics have been improving the data and the analysis, especially at the microeconomic (household) level, that shape our understanding of poverty and of inequality. But what endears him even more to someone like me is the optimism that he derives from this empiricity. Specially, since so many empiricists derive anything but that. This is best captured and represented in his magisterial tome, The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality (Princeton Univeristy Press, 2013).

More here.

Andrew Meier at The Nation:

A prominent Belarussian writer and journalist, Alexievich is doubtless well aware of what her title has lost in translation. She sees herself not as prophet (in the old Soviet writer’s extracurricular tradition) but as a guide intent on repairing her country’s fractured sense of community. What she longs for issobornost, that sense of belonging and shared ideals sacrificed long ago to Bolshevik unanimity. Throughout her work, she has sought to bring to light the hidden stories of the Soviet era. One of her first books, U voiny—ne zhenskoe litso(“War’s Unwomanly Face”), an oral history of Soviet soldiers in World War II, which broke with the heroic narratives of official history, was suppressed for two years before Gorbachev allowed it to be published in 1985. That book and its follow-up, Poslednie svideteli (1985), a collection of 100 “children’s stories” of war, sold millions of copies in the former Soviet Union and made Alexievich aglasnost celebrity. Her career hit its peak with Zinky Boys (1992), an unflinching look at the Soviet war in Afghanistan (“zinky” alludes to the zinc coffins in which more than 15,000 Soviet soldiers returned home).

As voiceless narrator and hidden editor, Alexievich is aware—too much so, her critics contend—of her singular pursuit. “For me people are like the black boxes found in the debris of airplane crashes,” she told me a few years ago in her small apartment in Minsk, Belarus’s capital. “Someone has to open them.”

more here.

Maddy Crowell at Harper's Magazine:

For centuries, writers have romanticized the Jammu and Kashmir region, an eighty-five-mile basin that today encompasses the disputed border between India and Pakistan. From the window of my plane, I could see why: the Pir Panjal Range met the Greater Himalayas like a wrinkled white curtain, exposing a fertile hotbed of saffron fields, forested hills, almond and walnut groves, apple trees, apricot orchards, and rice paddies. At the airport, I was greeted with signs that read “Paradise on Earth”—a strange slogan for a valley that has seen three full-blown wars and hundreds of thousands of deaths since the Partition of India and Pakistan in 1947.

I hailed a cab to Dal Lake—a destination for tourists and the hub of Kashmir’s flailing economy. On the way, we drove through Srinagar, the capital that lies at the heart of many conflicts in India-controlled Kashmir. It was early May, and there were no traces of the protests that had broken out a week prior; only long-collapsed houses and red-dust-stained windowsills. The roads were flanked with ten-foot walls bearing water stains from last September’s severe flooding, which left around 300 dead.

more here.

Philip Oltermann at The Guardian:

If you want to get up close to the most remote work of art in Britain, you’ll need to make a 2 ½-hour train journey from Glasgow to the Highlands, drive 1km into the heart of a mountain and climb a flight of slippery steps on to a viewing platform before you can catch a glimpse: a 48ft x 12ft mural made of wood, plastic and gold leaf, sparkling away at the centre of a vast cave like some fairytale treasure. In terms of accessibility, it’s not the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square: even the artist behind the work has never made the trek to see it in situ.

What may sound like some postmodern joke on modern art’s elitism is, in fact, the opposite: a period piece that tells a story of a very different Britain, a country in which artists enjoyed a more intimate relationship with the world of industry than that of entertainment. For years, the work and its creator, Elizabeth Falconer, were forgotten. A new radio play by the art writer Maria Fusco, co-commissioned by Radio 4 and Artangel, now rediscovers its significance.

Fifty years ago, Ben Cruachan in Argyll and Bute was the equivalent of London’s Silicon roundabout – a place of technological innovation on which an entire nation was pinning its hopes for the future.

more here.

From Outlook India:

Booker Prize winning author Salman Rushdie today joined the growing chorus of protests by leading writers against spread of “communal poison” and “rising intolerance” in the country even as seven more authors decided to return their Sahitya Akademi awards.

“I support Nayantara Sahgal and the many other writers protesting to the Sahitya Akademi. Alarming times for free expression in India,” he tweeted.

88-year-old Sahgal, niece of Jawaharlal Nehru, was among the first to lodge her protest against the Akademi's silence over repeated attacks on writers and rationalists who were raising their voice of dissent.

Kashmiri writer Ghulam Nabi Khayal, Urdu novelist Rahman Abbas and Kannada writer- translator Srinath D N said they were handing back their Sahitya awards.

Khayal and Srinath were joined by Hindi writers Mangalesh Dabral and Rajesh Joshi who backed the spiralling protest by litterateurs against “communal” atmosphere following rationalist M M Kalburgi's killing.

Punjabi author Waryam Sandhu and Kannada translator G N Ranganatha Rao said they have intimated to the Akademi their decision to give back their awards.

With this, at least 16 authors have announced their decision to return their awards with some warning that minorities in the country today feel “unsafe and threatened”.

More here.

John Schwarz in The Intercept:

Today, October 12, is Columbus Day. Every year it’s officially the second Monday in October; this year it falls on the exact anniversary of the Niña, Pinta and Santa María’s arrival in the Bahamas 523 years ago.

So to mark today, I’ve made a list. I’m sure to almost all Americans it would seem like a meaningless jumble of things with no connection to each other. But in fact it tells one story, the story of why October 12, 1492, is the most important date in human history — and demonstrates that you have to understand that in order for anything happening on Earth now to make sense:

• $ (i.e., the dollar sign) — and Cerro Rico, Bolivia’s “Mountain That Eats Men”
• the movies War of the Worlds and Avatar — and the movies Apocalypse Nowand Day of the Jackal
• the original seal of the Massachusetts Bay Colony— and the “generous offer” made by Israel to the Palestinian Authority in 2000
• Cinco de Mayo — and the investor-state dispute settlement section of the Trans-Pacific Partnership
• an abortive 2003 attempt to bring Nelson Mandela to the United Nations to oppose the invasion of Iraq — and South Koreans protesting the 2010 Israeli attack on the first Gaza flotilla
• Hitler’s October 17, 1941, discussion of the invasion of the Soviet Union — and the Washington Redskins

Confused? Here’s the explanation…

More here.

Robin Morgan in Women's Media Center:

Robin: It’s a time for great celebration because My Life on the Road, by Gloria Steinem, is finally out. Tell us about it.

Gloria: About twenty years ago I realized that I was writing least about what I was doing most, which was traveling and organizing on the road. So I began this book—I would work on it one month in the summer and then not for the other eleven months. My hope for it is that it conveys some of the seduction of the road. I noticed that when I say I’m going to another country, people say, “Oh, how interesting,” and when I say I’m traveling here, they say, “Oh, it must be so tiring.”

So I think there is a great lack that should be filled by, I don’t know, rules that every elected politician needs to spend at least two years [on the road] before they run, and have booster shots of a few weeks every few years …

Robin: What different politicians that would make!

Gloria: I think the road is my form of meditation. It forces you to live in the present—you really have no choice. And it is so unexpected; the country is so much more diverse and interesting and exciting and full of energy than the generalizations on television or on the Web about “the American People,” as if we were one lump. And especially now, because it is profoundly shifting in many ways—we are about to become a majority country of people of color, not European Americans.

More here.

Carl Zimmer in The New York Times:

In 1977, a University of Oxford statistician named Richard Peto pointed out a simple yet puzzling biological fact: We humans should have a lot more cancer than mice, but we don’t. Dr. Peto’s argument was beguilingly simple. Every time a cell divides, there’s a small chance it will gain a mutation that speeds its growth. Cells that accumulate several of these mutations may become cancerous. The bigger an animal is, the more cells it has, and the longer an animal lives, the more times its cells divide. We humans undergo about 10,000 times as many cell divisions as mice — and thus should be far more likely to get cancer. Yet humans and mice have roughly the same lifetime risk of cancer, a circumstance that has come to be known as Peto’s paradox.

…“Every baby elephant should be dropping dead of colon cancer at age 3,” said Dr. Joshua D. Schiffman, a pediatric oncologist at the Huntsman Cancer Institute at the University of Utah.

…Dr. Schiffman and his colleagues found that elephants had evolved new copies of the p53 gene. While humans have only one pair of p53 genes, the scientists identified 20 pairs in elephants. Dr. Lynch and his colleagues also found these extra genes. To trace their evolution, the researchers made a large-scale comparison of elephants to other mammal species — including extinct relatives like woolly mammoths and mastodons whose DNA remains in their fossils. The small ancestors of elephants, Dr. Lynch and his colleagues found, had only one pair of functional p53, like other mammals. But as they evolved to bigger sizes, they steadily evolved extra copies of p53. “Whatever’s going on is special to the elephant lineage,” Dr. Lynch said. To see whether these extra copies of p53 made a difference in fighting cancer, both teams ran experiments on elephant cells. Dr. Schiffman and his colleagues bombarded elephant cells with radiation and DNA-damaging chemicals, while Dr. Lynch’s team used chemicals and ultraviolet rays. In all these cases, the elephant cells responded in the same way: Instead of trying to repair the damage, they simply committed suicide.

More here. (Note: Ga, between elephants and p53, we have a chance to collaborate)

Adrian Villar Rojas. The Most Beautiful of All Mothers. Istanbul Biennial, 2015.

More here, here, and here.

Also watch for: Mr.Rojas and Asad Raza's collaborative art project in New York in November, 2015.

Jennifer M. Morton over at The Philosophers' Magazine Online:

Picture yourself as a young mother with two children. You enrol in university to obtain a bachelor’s degree, hoping to give yourself a better chance at a job that pays a living wage. Maybe you receive government loans to pay for tuition, and rely on your family’s help, but you still don’t have enough to pay for living expenses and childcare. So, you continue working at a job that pays slightly above minimum wage while taking a full load of courses. Every day you wake up early to get the children ready for school and commute an hour or more to university. After class, you pick up your children from school. If you’re lucky, you can drop them off with a relative while you go to work. By the time you return home in the evening, you are tired, but still have many pages to read and assignments to complete. This is your gruelling daily routine. Now, ask yourself: what could philosophy do for you?

I teach philosophy at the City College of New York, an institution which, since its founding in 1847, has attracted a student body as diverse as the city it serves. Many of my students come from minority, low-income, or immigrant communities; some all three. They are strivers – seeking an education in order to become health professionals, teachers, engineers, or lawyers while holding onto jobs and taking care of families. Most of them are more fortunate than our imagined protagonist, but for many of them going to university involves great personal and financial sacrifices. Given that few of my students will ultimately find their way into the academy and that, within that already small cohort, only a fraction will choose to do so in the field of philosophy, the question of why study philosophy has a particular resonance for them, and for me as their teacher.

One answer to this question is pragmatic – philosophy teaches you to think and write logically and clearly. This, we tell our students, will be of use to them no matter what path they pursue. We advertise philosophy, then, as a broadly useful means to a variety of ends. There is a lot of truth to this dispassionate answer, but it is also rather disappointing. It sells philosophy short. A different sort of answer dives into profundity – philosophy aims to discover fundamental truths. Many disciplines aim at knowledge but philosophers, we solemnly tell our students, go deeper – we seek Knowledge with a capital K. This is undeniably the goal of many philosophers, but it can alienate some students (in particular, those who are not interested in pursuing an academic career). Why, these students might ask, is the knowledge that philosophy aims at any deeper than that of more practical fields such as medicine, science, or the law? And why should they care about this kind of knowledge? Even if most professional philosophers aim at the deepest kind of knowledge, this does not show that it is a valuable enterprise for all students, especially for those who are already overcoming significant hurdles to attend university.

More here.

Giulia Bertoluzzi over at Scroll.in:

Founded by the Prophet Zoroaster around 3,500 years ago, the religion claims around 190,000 followers. The official religion in Iran for 1,000 years, its adherents are now a dwindling minority within the Islamic Republic.

Middle East Eye paid a visit to their fire temple (or Agiary), the site of daily services led by Zorastrian priests. The visit coincided with the third Gambahar, one of the six annual festivals designed to celebrate the creation of the Earth.

Mobediar Sarvar Talapolevara enters the temple dressed in a long white dress on top of which a white veil is pinned, and sits close to the small but vigorous fire that crackles in the middle of the temple.

Talapolevara’s immaculate threads are transcendentally laundered, flawless white throughout. Her one accessory is the traditional koshti, a long belt which represents the Zoroastrian basic principles of “good thoughts, good words and good actions”.

“My father was a Parsi, that is a Zoroastrian from India,” she says. “I recall him fastening his belt every day before breakfast and telling us about his childhood in India, where Zoroastrians cling to conservative traditions and kids must wear the koshti from the age of eight.”

“It was my father who encouraged me the most. At first Indian Parsis opposed the idea of the female priests,” Mobed Talapolevara said. “That’s why I was pleasantly surprised upon my initiation as a priest four years ago to receive messages of support from those same Indian Parsis. They even published articles in Indian newspapers and at the International Congress of Zoroastrians.”

More here.

Over at Rationally Speaking:

Parents in the United States are spending more time and energy than ever to ensure that their children turn out happy, healthy, and successful. But what does the evidence suggest about the impact of their efforts? Economist Bryan Caplan (and the author of “Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids”) argues that, despite our intuition that parenting choices affect children's life outcomes, there's strong evidence to the contrary. Bryan and Julia discuss his case, and explore what that means for how people should parent and how many kids they should have.