Nassim Nicholas Taleb in Medium:

The best example I know that gives insights into the functioning of a complex system is with the following situation. It suffices for an intransigent minority –a certain type of intransigent minorities –to reach a minutely small level, say three or four percent of the total population, for the entire population to have to submit to their preferences. Further, an optical illusion comes with the dominance of the minority: a naive observer would be under the impression that the choices and preferences are those of the majority. If it seems absurd, it is because our scientific intuitions aren’t calibrated for that (fughedabout scientific and academic intuitions and snap judgments; they don’t work and your standard intellectualization fails with complex systems, though not your grandmothers’ wisdom).

The main idea behind complex systems is that the ensemble behaves in way not predicted by the components. The interactions matter more than the nature of the units. Studying individual ants will never (one can safely say never for most such situations), never give us an idea on how the ant colony operates. For that, one needs to understand an ant colony as an ant colony, no less, no more, not a collection of ants. This is called an “emergent” property of the whole, by which parts and whole differ because what matters is the interactions between such parts. And interactions can obey very simple rules. The rule we discuss in this chapter is the minority rule.

The minority rule will show us how it all it takes is a small number of intolerant virtuous people with skin in the game, in the form of courage, for society to function properly.

More here.

Mihal Greener in Salon Books:

Alex Macpherson in New Huumanist:

The gay icon in pop music is a curious phenomenon. It’s hard to pin down any underlying reasons for the bond between gay audiences and straight female divas without falling back on reductive clichés. And while the stereotype may well be supported by the empirical evidence at any Madonna or Beyoncé concert, it has often been used to dismiss entire genres of music based on the perceived shallowness of their fans (see also those other famed consumers of pop, teenage girls). But it’s nonetheless odd that such intense identification is largely reserved for those divas. The pop genre has rarely provided much in the way of out gay male pop stars – and even fewer whose music specifically reflects what it’s like to be gay and young. In recent years, there has been a place for the mature gay singer-songwriter, from George Michael to Will Young, but for all their talents, the middle-of-the-road respectability of their music isn’t going to capture any newly-out 20-year-old’s emotions. The latest iteration of this type is the bafflingly popular Sam Smith, a child of privilege whose ignorance of gay history seems to be matched by his disapproval of anything “overly” gay, from hook-up apps to using male pronouns in his love songs. There were always the Pet Shop Boys, of course. But as finely as Neil Tennant conveyed guilt, emotional nuance and power dynamics in songs such as “Rent” and “It’s a Sin”, his songwriting and vocal performances were defined by poise and self-possession. This air of detachment was often worn as armour and more brittle than I’d noticed at the time – but listening to them as a teenager always felt aspirational in a way that listening to Tori Amos or Madonna did not.

In my experience, the connection between a gay fan and a beloved artist is as complex and personal as any other, but a common thread is that air of indirectness. It’s no less real but it’s not about hearing our own experiences sung back to us so much as hearing the spirit of what we’re feeling. Often it’s a different experience entirely that is being sung about, although the occasional song, such as Taylor Swift’s “You Belong with Me”, sounds like it would make more sense with a gay protagonist than a female one. More often, the confessions lie not in the precise words but in the margins and subtext, in the intonation of a phrase or words left unspoken. (It is telling that making the connection to their gay audience too explicit is often a misstep for divas. Lady Gaga’s career has yet to recover from the patronising “Born This Way”, for example.) In retrospect, as a 14-year-old for whom secrecy was paramount, I found not having the exact words to hand, on some level, a relief.

More here.

The Lights Going on in the Rooms Strung Out
Back Through the Years
.

the way
the blue moon
(remembered)
lights up

as you turn to
….be held
and to hold me

your
.. beholder
.

by Anselm Hollo
from Poetry Magazine
.

Nick Ripatrazone in The Millions:

In their new book Dead People, Morgan Meis and Stefany Anne Golberg complicate our understanding of the public action of eulogy. They offer eulogies for a unique cast, includingChinua Achebe, Osama bin Laden, Susan Sontag, and Kurt Cobain. Although the origin of the word “eulogy” is “to speak well,” Golberg and Meis interrogate that idea, and instead see how the “death of a fellow human being can be the opportunity to enter into that person’s life.” The traditional Aristotelian method of eulogy is to step back and consider someone’s life from a distance. Instead, the authors of Dead People dig in: “We’ve chosen to wear our bias on our sleeve. We’ve chosen to take these lives personally.”

Golberg and Meis pen alternating eulogies, some of which were published previously as standalone essays. The result is a book that is very much an anthology. Dead People is not a single narrative, thesis-driven work of non-fiction. In fact, the writers’ introduction to the work is their only action of framing, which results in the book having many different entry points. You don’t need to read Dead People front to back; its value lies within its stylish and substantive reconsideration of an ancient form.

A few entries can example how Meis and Golberg use eulogies as part prose-poems, part historical reconsiderations, and part philosophical treatises. The result is an intellectually entertaining and flexible book. Meis first considers the life of Christopher Hitchens, and consistent with his plan for the book, interrogates the man for his unflinching support of the Iraq war: “Hitch could never say it. There was something greater at stake for him. There was something that he valued more deeply, in this case, than he valued the truth.” It’s a clever way to craft a portraiture of Hitchens, as a man whose morality could exist on some other plane.

More here.

Stephanie DeGooyer in the LA Review of Books:

A PHONE RINGS in Hannah Arendt’s home study. Her husband, the poet and philosopher Heinrich Blücher, answers. It’s William Shawn, Arendt’s editor at The New Yorker. Arendt signals that she is not home — her report on the Eichmann trial is overdue — and occupies herself at the typewriter. Blücher moves to the hallway where Arendt unexpectedly emerges to playfully chastise him for not kissing her goodbye. Blücher avers: “Never disturb a great philosopher when they are thinking.” Arendt, embracing him, replies, “but they cannot think without kisses.”

This is a scene from Hannah Arendt, the 2012 biopic from director Margarethe von Trotta and distributed by Zeitgeist Films about the political thinker’s personal life after the publication of Eichmann in Jerusalem, her notoriously misunderstood book about the trial of Adolf Eichmann. We watch as Arendt weathers the hostility over her phrase the “banality of evil,” which seemingly made Eichmann’s crimes unexceptional and implicated Jewish council leaders in the extermination of millions of Jews. The American novelist Mary McCarthy features prominently as Arendt’s witty and faithful friend, while Blücher sustains her with kisses and wise counsel. In one odd moment, Arendt appears to draw courage for her own public ostracism by reflecting on a prior conversation with Martin Heidegger about his Nazism. (Heidegger joined the Nazi party in 1933 and stayed a member until it was dismantled in 1945. The nature of his involvement with and the degree of his belief in the Nazi program remains a subject of controversy.)

Hannah Arendt makes academic life alluring, almost sexy. Richard Brody, in his review for The New Yorker, calls the film “soft-core philosophical porn.” Von Trotta, he says, “titillates the craving for the so-called intellectual life while actually offering little intellectual substance.” Indeed, Arendt’s immaculately stylized Riverside Drive apartment is arguably the star of the film, even though no academic today, much less a refugee such as Arendt, could even dream of such an address. But beyond the film’s window-dressed intellectualism is a more important ethical question about how the life of a philosopher, particularly a female philosopher, should be portrayed. In presenting Arendt as a philosopher who cannot think without kisses does von Trotta suggest that Hannah Arendt — the theorist and champion of active, public, political life — can only be viewed meaningfully in her private habitat? Are the thoughts of the female philosopher only as good as the kisses that interrupt and sustain them?

More here.

Monica Uszerowicz in Hyperallergic:

In Italo Calvino’s novel Invisible Cities, Marco Polo regales Kublai Khan with tales of his travels, musing about the strange poetry of each city and their intersections with memory and selfhood. These cities, in actuality, are not quite real, and whether we are to suspend our disbelief is not clear. As Marco Polo would have it, it’s the space between fantasy and reality from which one gleans the most insight. Regarding the city of Penthesilea, he asks, “Outside of Penthesilea, does an outside exist? Or, no matter how far you go from the city, will you only pass from one limbo to another, never managing to leave it?”

The artist Cao Fei has cited Invisible Cities as a reference point for her short film, “La Town,” which surveys a mysterious city in the throes of post-apocalyptic destitution. La Town is an amalgamation of many places, with its German grocery store, bombed-out McDonalds, and supernatural creatures: a giant octopus appears to have made its way through a window; Santa’s reindeer lay prone on a set of train tracks. The city is built of tiny plastic toys and models, scuffed and bloodied until they lose the inherent charm of being miniature. Two invisible narrators argue back and forth — in French — about the reality of experience, recalling the dialogue between the protagonists of the Alain Resnais 1959 film, Hiroshima Mon Amour, whose memories may or may not be founded in truth. “The illusion, quite simply, is so, so perfect,” says a woman’s voice in Cao’s film. “You saw nothing in La Town,” a man’s voice replies. “Nothing.”

In viewing Cao’s first stateside museum retrospective at MOMA PS1, I found myself continually returning to “La Town.” Its decisive fiction feels allusive of the aftershocks of rapid globalization or, maybe, the singularity. Cao is 37, and the show acts as a chronological timeline of her career, leading visitors from the experimental work of her time at the Guangzhou Art Academy to her recent video, “Rumba II: Nomad,” in which Roomba vacuum cleaners, unleashed at the site of demolished buildings, explore and absorb the urban sprawl like alien creatures.

More here.

Zoë Heller reviews Nancy Jo Sales's American Girls: Social Media and the Secret Lives of Teenagers and Peggy Orenstein's Girls and Sex: Navigating the Complicated New Landscape in the NYRB:

History has taught us to be wary of middle-aged people complaining about the mores of the young. The parents of every era tend to be appalled by the sexual manners of their children (regardless of how hectic and disorderly their own sex lives once were, or still are). There were some in the 1950s who were pretty sure that the decadent new practice of “going steady” augured moral disaster. Both Sales and Orenstein have undoubtedly grim and arresting information to impart about the lives of American girls. And neither of them can be dismissed as a sexual puritan. (They are not troubled about teenagers leading active sex lives, they assure us, only about the severely limited forms in which female sexuality is currently allowed to express itself; they are not even against casual sex per se, just eager to ensure that there should be, as Orenstein puts it, “reciprocity, respect, and agency regardless of the context of a sexual encounter.”) Even so, neither of their books entirely avoids the exaggerations, the simplifications, the whiff of manufactured crisis that we have come to associate with this genre.

Both writers make rather invidious comparisons between the frenzied, romance-free social lives of today’s young women and their own halcyon youths. Sales recalls walking back from school with her ninth-grade boyfriend to do homework together at her house. “The point of being together was not to have sex, necessarily. It was to become intimate,” she writes. Orenstein observes that her college experience was not about binge-drinking and hook-ups, but “late-night talks with friends, exposure to alternative music and film, finding my passions, falling in love.”

To use these sun-dappled recollections of life before the iPhone as a way of pointing up the misery of girls’ present conditions is a little misleading. To be sure, certain kinds of sexism have been amplified—or perhaps transmitted more efficiently—in the Internet era, and girls are now under pressure to present themselves as pliable sexual creatures at a much earlier age than they have been in the past. But even in the far-off 1970s and 1980s, young women experienced their share of exploitation, abuse, and unsatisfactory sex.

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Claudia Rankine at The New York Times:

Teju Cole’s captivating and lauded novels, “Open City” and “Every Day Is for the Thief,” reflect his identity as a writer with a global perspective — born in the United States and raised in Nigeria. His international access as an author, art historian and photographer — one who also teaches and is a photography critic for The New York Times Magazine — shapes not only his obsessions but, in a chicken-and-egg sense, determines his gaze. He takes in news from African countries and American cities; but also, by necessity and interest, Asian, European and Latin American culture and history. In short, the world belongs to Cole and is thornily and gloriously allied with his curiosity and his personhood. “Known and Strange Things,” his first collection of nonfiction, journeys through all the landscapes he has access to: international, personal, cultural, technological and emotional. When he feels homesick, he informs us in this book, he “visits” his parents in Nigeria through Google maps — a sweet if distant form of connection.

In “The Anxiety of Influence,” the renowned critic Harold Bloom argued that poets, especially those in the Western tradition since the Renaissance, necessarily negotiate the work of their predecessors as they write. “The precursors flood us,” Bloom wrote, “and our imaginations can die by drowning in them, but no imaginative life is possible if such inundation is wholly evaded.” Cole shares Bloom’s interest in the fraught and burdened relationship writers and artists have to our ancestors, and he seeks to answer yet another question: How does the imagination cross and recross racial and filial boundaries, and what does this crossing mean?

more here.

Carolyn Kellogg at The LA Times:

They came not to bury punk but to praise it. 20 years ago, Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain published “Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk” with Grove Press. The format was ingenious — no single person could lay claim to know the whole of the sprawling, anarchically creative, drug-riddled scene.

Not even McNeil, Punk Magazine’s “resident punk” from its founding in 1976 through its 1979 end, who couldn’t bring himself to write a memoir. “I thought, how boring,” he says. “My story?” It took the help of McCain, a friend, fellow lover of oral histories and patient co-conspirator, to make the project come together.

“Please Kill Me,” five years in the making, was important not just because it made visible the genealogy of an underground music scene (the Velvet Underground to the New York Dolls to the Stooges to Television, Blondie and the Ramones) but because it showed how brilliantly an oral history could capture culture. Previously, histories like it had been rare — McNeil and McCain were primarily inspired by “Edie” by Jean Stein, edited by George Plimpton — but now they’re everywhere, with “Freaks and Geeks,” the March on Washington and lobster rolls getting the oral history treatment.

more here.

Kevin Stevens at The Dublin Review of Books:

The emotional and rhetorical weight of Zero K is comparable to the intensity of three novels published in the eighties that established DeLillo’s reputation and which form the core of his oeuvre: White Noise, The Names, and Libra. Along with his 1997 masterpiece Underworld, these fictions are the finest work of a great artist who stands on the edge of American culture yet identifies and explores as well as anyone the forces of power and influence that define mainstream American life and undermine our persistent assumption of the autonomy of the individual. This exploration is both contemporary and prescient.

“Haven’t you felt it?” a character asks in Zero K.

The sense of being virtualized. The devices you use, the ones you carry everywhere, room to room, minute to minute, inescapably. Do you ever feel unfleshed? All the coded impulses you depend on to guide you. All the sensors in the room that are watching you, listening to you, tracking your habits, measuring your capabilities. All the linked data designed to incorporate you into the megadata. Is there something that makes you uneasy? Do you think about the technovirus, all systems down, global implosion? Or is it more personal? Do you feel steeped in some horrific digital panic that’s everywhere and nowhere?

This description of powerlessness, with its hints of apocalypse, captures perfectly the paranoia implicit in the invasive reach of twenty-first-century technologies.

more here.

Anthony Gottlieb in New Statesman:

Pierre Bayle, a French thinker who died in Rotterdam in 1706, is the ­forgotten hero of the Enlightenment. His name sometimes rings a bell for historians of philosophy, but apart from them I cannot remember when I last met anyone who had heard of him. In the 18th century, however, Bayle’s admirers included Frederick the Great, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin and Voltaire. They revered him for his defence of religious liberty and his genius for undermining conventional ideas. Voltaire said that the “immortal” Bayle was the greatest reasoner who ever set pen to paper.

Immortality, it seems, does not always last. One reason for Bayle’s eclipse is that his ideas no longer seem novel or shocking; moreover, his writings digress uncontrollably. This is not a winning combination. His Historical and Critical Dictionary – once among the commonest books in northern European homes – is a jumble of more than six million words, most of which come in rambling footnotes. Published between 1697 and 1702, it was a unique source of ­information and argument at that time. Now we have Wikipedia. Bayle’s pioneering tract on religious freedom is titled A Philosophical Commentary on These Words of the Gospel, Luke 14:23, “Compel Them to Come In, That My House May Be Full”. If you think the title is unwieldy, you should see the book.

More here.

Jacob Silverman at Full Stop:

Recently a friend related an eminently contemporary problem. Browsing Facebook one day, he received a notification. Facebook’s facial recognition algorithm had recognized someone he knew in a photo and wanted him to approve the suggested tag. Three issues immediately presented themselves: the photo was of his newborn child, he hadn’t uploaded the photo, and he didn’t want to contribute to his infant’s data trail. Yet it seemed that Facebook already “knew” who his daughter was, both in name and face.

There was a social component to this, too. Would he have to start telling friends not to post photos of his kid? What novel matters of propriety did new parents now have to negotiate? Was he giving into an uninformed, instinctual revulsion at the latest digital technology?

These questions weren’t easily dismissed, but something more complicated was at work — overlapping concerns about visibility, identity, a parent’s responsibility, the commoditization of everyday communications, and how difficult it can be to articulate the kind of harm being done here. In his dilemma, we can also see how privacy is no longer, as one popular definition has it, the ability to control what other people know about us. Instead, in recent years privacy has split along two lines: what humans know about us and what machines know about us.

More here.

Men With Heads of Eagles

Men with the heads of eagles
no longer interest me
or pig-men, or those who can fly
with the aid of wax and feathers

or those who take off their clothes
to reveal other clothes
or those with skins of blue leather

or those golden and flat as a coat of arms
or those with claws, the stuffed ones
with glass eyes; or those
hierarchic as greaves and steam engines

All these I could create, manufacture,
or find easily: they swoop and thunder
around this island, common as flies,
sparks flashing, bumping into each other,

on hot days you can watch them
as they melt, come apart,
fall into the ocean
like sick gulls, dethronements, plane crashes.

I search instead for the others,
the ones left over,
the ones who have escaped from these
mythologies with barely their lives;
they have real faces and hands, they think
of themselves as
wrong somehow, they would rather be trees.
.

by Margaret Atwood
from Margaret Atwood Selected Poems
Simon & Schuster, 1976
.

Max Ehrenfreund and Jeff Guo in The Washington Post:

According to this new analysis, those who view Trump favorably have not been disproportionately affected by foreign trade or immigration, compared with people with unfavorable views of the Republican presidential nominee. The results suggest that his supporters, on average, do not have lower incomes than other Americans, nor are they more likely to be unemployed.

Yet while Trump's supporters might be comparatively well off themselves, they come from places where their neighbors endure other forms of hardship. In their communities, white residents are dying younger, and it is harder for young people who grow up poor to get ahead.

The Gallup analysis is the most comprehensive statistical profile of Trump's supporters so far. Jonathan Rothwell, the economist at Gallup who conducted the analysis, sorted the respondents by their Zip code and then compared those findings with a host of other data from a variety of sources. After statistically controlling factors such as education, age and gender, Rothwell was able to determine which traits distinguished those who favored Trump from those who did not, even among people who appeared to be similar in other respects.

Rothwell conducted this kind of analysis not only among the broad group of Americans polled by Gallup. He was also able to focus specifically on white respondents, and even just on white Republicans. In general, his results were the same regardless of the group analyzed.

Rothwell's research includes far more data than past statistical studies of Trump. It also provides a detailed view not only of the people who support him but also of the places where they live. Academics and other analysts will continue to study the Trump phenomenon in months and years to come, and may, of course, reach different explanations.

This research leaves some mysteries unsolved. Something is afflicting the places where Trump's supporters live, but Trump's supporters do not exhibit more severe economic distress than do those who view him unfavorably. Perhaps, Rothwell suggests, Trump's supporters are concerned less about themselves than about how the community's children are faring. Whatever it is, competition from migrant labor or the decline of factory work appear to be inadequate explanations.

More here.

Rufi Thorpe in LA Review of Books:

I FIRST HEARD a Czesław Miłosz poem in a lecture hall in Vilnius, Lithuania. The room was long and a little too warm; dust motes were swimming in the shafts of light let in by arched Gothic windows, but otherwise the room was dim. I was deeply and profoundly hungover. The speaker that day was Ed Hirsch, a poet who manages to exude a frank, earthy kindness. I don’t know if Hirsch really said this or if I have confabulated it over the years, but I remember him stopping suddenly and declaring, “I am a very stupid man.” There was a laugh from the audience, but he went on, serious. “No,” he said, “I mean that. I struggle with my stupidity.” There was a feeling in the room that he was playing a game with us — we all knew he wasn’t stupid; he was and is, in fact, quite brilliant. I felt, though, I knew what he meant.

I was in Vilnius as part of a writing program at a time when I could barely see straight. I was 26. I had completed my MFA, but failed to get anything published, which felt like a failure. I had recently lost about 40 pounds and was exercising with the fervor of a religious convert. I had body dysmorphia — I couldn’t tell whether I was skinny or fat anymore (I was a size four). I couldn’t tell whether I had any talent as a writer. I couldn’t tell what I should be doing with my life. When I tried to look at things, they swayed and buckled. Nothing in the world was clear to me.

And there I was, in Vilnius, with its Baroque churches like fantastical wedding cakes and its narrow winding streets; Vilnius, with its multiple histories, erased, rewritten, statues erected and taken down, as the city became first part of one country and then the next; Vilnius, with its many tongues, Polish, Lithuanian, Russian, and English spoken on the streets; Vilnius, with its tragedies, with its buried bodies, its KGB torture rooms, its Jewish ghettos. No place but Vilnius could possibly have impressed on me more quickly how stupid I was.

More here.