Federico Winer. Drigge, Pomerania, Germany.

Photograph, part of the series Ultradistancia: Monsters.

“… a sub serie from the acclaimed ULTRADISTANCIA series. From the precise eye of google earth imaginary emerges geographic shapes and geometries that transform cities, peninsulas, neighborhoods and ports into animals and monsters.”

More here, and here.

A transcript of Amy Goodman and Juan González's interview with Edwidge Dandicat, over at truth-out:

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about the significance of what’s happening right now in the Dominican Republic, the other half of the island, Hispaniola, from where you were born, in Haiti.

EDWIDGE DANTICAT: Well, I think this—we’ve often had deportations from the Dominican Republic to Haiti, but this is the first time that they will be done with a law behind them that actually, since the law—this constitutional court decided to strip citizenship from that large number of people, has really made life much harder for Dominicans of Haitian descent, but also migrants who are on the island. So, this law not only now gives the Dominican government the power to deport mass amounts of people, but also creates an environment, a civil environment, that’s really hard for people, because, you know, others might feel now that we’ve had an increase of violence against Haitians and Dominicans of Haitian descent, because it seems like a state-sponsored open season on people who are not only—who are considered Haitians by the way they look, primarily, or by their Haitian-sounding name.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And most people here in the United States are not aware of this long, troubled history between the Dominican Republic and Haiti, occupying the same island. There are ultranationalists and conservatives among the Dominican Republic who still—who talk about, hearken back to what they claim was the Haitian occupation of their country, and they see a line running through historically on this issue. Could you fill us in on some of that history that’s led to what we are facing today?

EDWIDGE DANTICAT: Well, Hispaniola is shared by—the island—by Haiti and the Dominican Republic. And we share a history of colonialism and occupations, and at some point it was split between the French and the Spanish. And after the Haitian independence, there was a shift, where Haiti—and there was a—the whole island was under one rule, post-independence. And then, Dominican Republic, in 1822, there was a separation. But there are all these historical scars, where, you know, we, on the Haitian side, remember the massacre of Haitian cane workers in 1937. And then these things are brought up. But there’s also, for Americans, a common occupation of both Haiti and the Dominican Republic at the turn of the century, and both sides of the island have been marred, really, by the corporate—this other kind of occupation of the sugar industry that goes back to the beginning of the 20th century.

More here.

Mark Dery in The Daily Beast:

“Be clear.” “Omit needless words.” “Do not overwrite.” “Avoid fancy words.” “Use the active voice.” Who can argue with such common sense commandments, especially when they’re delivered with Voice-of-God authority? Certainly not the generations of students, secretaries, working writers, and wannabe Hemingways who’ve feared and revered Strunk and White’s Elements of Style as the Bible of “plain English style,” as E.B. White calls it in his introduction. (Since 1959, when White revised and substantially expanded the brief guide to prose style self-published in 1918 by William Strunk Jr., a professor of English literature at Cornell, Strunk & White, as most of us know it, has sold more than 10 million copies.)

Can it really be coincidence that, smack on the first page, in a note about exceptions to one of his Elementary Rules Of Usage (“Form the possessive singular of nouns by adding ‘s…, whatever the final consonant”), Strunk gives as an example, “Moses’ laws”? The Elements of Style, more than another book, has set in stone American ideas about proper usage and, more profoundly, good style. Professor Strunk wrote his little tract as a stout defense of “the rules of usage and principles of composition most commonly violated,” the red-flag word in that sentence being “violated.”

Usage absolutists are the Scalia-esque Originalists of the language-maven set. Their emphasis on “timeless” grammatical truths, in opposition to most linguists’ view of language as a living, changing thing, is at heart conservative; their fulminations about the grammatical violations perpetrated by the masses mask deeper anxieties about moral relativism and social turbulence.

More here.

Veronique Greenwood in Aeon:

First, there is nothing. From all appearances, the fast ferry, whipping through the water in the early morning sun, is headed out into the cold wastes of the Atlantic. But then a shimmering line appears on the horizon. As minutes and miles pass, it grows no taller but, eventually, the black profile of a row of loblolly pines, tossed by the wind, comes into focus.

There is land out here after all; flat, low land, its highest point only 28 feet above the waves. This fragment of coral shelf is the northernmost of the British Virgin Islands, the last before the open ocean, and it has a completely different character from its gaggle of southern sisters. While they are steep green mountains rising from the sea, this place is so low that its Spanish name, Anegada, means ‘covered in water’ or ‘shipwrecked’. The other islands tend to be home to thousands of people and are serviced by commercial flights and ferries. Anegada has a boat every two days or so, and a scant few hundred inhabitants, most of them in the lone settlement called The Settlement.

Looking around at the other people on the ferry, it seems that some might be headed to jobs on the island, in its scattering of restaurants and businesses. A few are tourists come to stay in the handful of basic guesthouses and eat the sweet lobster that is a local speciality. My husband and I came out here because it was the edge of the map. He suggested it after seeing it way out on the rim of things, and I, not totally sure why we were going, made the plans.

More here.

David Berreby in Nautilus:

Artificial intelligence has been conquering hard problems at a relentless pace lately. In the past few years, an especially effective kind of artificial intelligence known as a neural network has equaled or even surpassed human beings at tasks like discovering new drugs, finding the best candidates for a job, and even driving a car. Neural nets, whose architecture copies that of the human brain, can now—usually—tell good writing from bad, and—usually—tell you with great precision what objects are in a photograph. Such nets are used more and more with each passing month in ubiquitous jobs like Google searches, Amazon recommendations, Facebook news feeds, and spam filtering—and in critical missions like military security, finance, scientific research, and those cars that drive themselves better than a person could.

Neural nets sometimes make mistakes, which people can understand. (Yes, those desks look quite real; it’s hard for me, too, to see they are a reflection.) But some hard problems make neural nets respond in ways that aren’t understandable. Neural nets execute algorithms—a set of instructions for completing a task. Algorithms, of course, are written by human beings. Yet neural nets sometimes come out with answers that are downright weird: not right, but also not wrong in a way that people can grasp. Instead, the answers sound like something an extraterrestrial might come up with.

More here.

Molly Ball in The Atlantic:

ATLANTA—Donald Trump was supposed to be the keynote speaker at the RedState Gathering here, a convocation of the hard-core conservative activists who read the influential blog edited by Erick Erickson. But when Trump said on CNN late Friday that debate moderator and Fox News host Megyn Kelly had “blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever,” Erickson, who is a Fox News contributor, announced he had disinvited Trump from the conference. “There are just real lines of decency a person running for President should not cross,” Erickson wrote.

As the linchpin of a GOP counter-establishment of Tea Party-oriented media and PACs, Erickson may be the most powerful conservative in America. A knowledgeable source confirmed to me last week’s report that he will soon announce his departure from RedState—Erickson’s heart is in his work as a radio host, and he will continue to write commentaries on his personal website. Trump was one of 10 presidential candidates who had accepted the invitation to speak at this year’s RedState Gathering, including Jeb Bush, Scott Walker, Marco Rubio,Ted Cruz, Mike Huckabee, Chris Christie, Bobby Jindal, Rick Perry, and Carly Fiorina.

More here.

More here.

Anthony Sattin in The Guardian:

Early 2014 wasn’t so long ago, but it is increasingly difficult to remember a time when the name Isis was not in daily use. Barely a day goes by now without mention of its strategic brilliance or imagination-defying brutality. Yet Daesh, as the terror organisation is commonly known in the Arab world, has only existed for a year under that name. In that time, it has become the poster boy of Islamist terror and the subject of a growing collection of books that includes Abdel Bari Atwan’s Islamic State, Benjamin Hall’s Inside Isis and Patrick Cockburn’s The Rise of Islamic State. Cockburn has also contributed a foreword to Charles Glass’s new book, Syria Burning.

One of the problems of writing about the current situation in the Middle East, as Glass, a veteran journalist, knows only too well, is that today’s certainties are tomorrow’s laughable speculations. Iran may still refer to the US as the “Great Satan”, but the two states now share some strategic interests. Although the US used to insist that Syrian president Bashar al-Assad must step down, it is now considering the very real possibility that he could survive the war and, like America’s lamentable “red line” of chemical weapons, what was unthinkable recently could soon be the acceptable status quo. But if news moves fast, assessments have not, which is one reason why we should all read Syria Burning.

More here.

From Esquire:

If you smoke, 
I can smoke, right?

Be my guest. If you're gonna smoke anything else, we'll bring in 
the incense.

I brought a miniature joint, but I'm not thrusting it upon 
you. I just thought it would be wrong to meet you and not bring a little something.

Well, then, let's get into this thing and see. We might want to take a break.

I don't want to put you in any kind of position.

Absolutely not. I've been in every position possible, and I've always gotten out of it.

How are you holding up on the [Stones] tour?

I can handle the show. In the '60s, it was 20 minutes, in and out. Now it's two hours. I don't come off as exhausted 
as I used to ten years ago, 
because I've learned more about how to pace a show. I don't think about the physical aspects—I just expect it all to work. I'm blessed physically 
with stamina. The frame's still holding. I eat the same as I 
always have. Meat and potatoes, basically, with a nice bit of fish now and again. My wife tries to force more salad down me, but I'd rather take the pill.

More here.

The Association of Man and Woman
.

Whatever badness there was,

sometimes
was not of us
but between us.

Because there was goodness,
which felt like a sure base.
While badness felt only
like incidents upon it.

The badness was only
the way you and I needed to behave,

sometimes.
Not what we were.

The badness was only
the small,
transient,
insignificant
pain,
like the tiny, instant
pain
from the prick of a rose’s thorn,
taking joy,
for a second,
away from the fragrance of the rose.

by Peggy Freydberg
from Poems from a Pond
published by Hybrid Nation
.

Massimo Pigliucci in Scientia Salon:

This is my third essay on what has become an informal series on socially relevant false dichotomies (the first one was on “trigger warnings” [1], the second one on Islamophobia [2]). On this occasion I’m going to focus again on nature-nurture [3], perhaps the motherlode of false dichotomies (as well as my area of technical expertise as a practicing biologist [4]).

The occasion is provided by recent controversies concerning the delicate concepts of gender and race, where once again — as in both the cases of trigger warnings and of Islamophobia — I see well intentioned progressives needlessly (in my mind) and harshly attacking fellow progressives, or at the least, people who ought to be their natural political allies. (As in the other two cases, I will ignore contributions from the right and from libertarians, on the ground that I find them both less constructive and less surprising than those from the sources I will be discussing here.)

Let me start with gender. I read with fascination a New York Times op-ed piece by feminist Elinor Burkett entitled “What makes a woman?” [5] explaining why a number of feminists have issues with certain aspects of the transgender movement, and in particular why Burkett had mixed feelings about the very public coming out of Caitlyn Jenner [6].

More here.

Emma Young in Mosaic:

We don’t think of ourselves as being particularly good smellers, especially compared with other animals. But research shows that smells can have a powerful subconscious influence on human thoughts and behaviour. People who can no longer smell – following an accident or illness – report a strong sense of loss, with impacts on their lives they could never have imagined. Perhaps we don’t rank smell very highly among our senses because it’s hard to appreciate what it does for us – until it’s gone.

Nick, who’s 34, can pinpoint the moment he lost his sense of smell. It was 9 January 2014. He was playing ice hockey with friends on the frozen pond at his parents’ place in Collegeville, Pennsylvania. “I’ve done it millions of times,” he says. “I was skating backwards, slowly, and I hit a rut on the ice. My feet went out from under me. I hit the back right side of my head. I was out.

More here.

Kenan Malik in Padaemonium:

I took part on Friday in a debate on ‘The state of free expression after Charlie Hebdo‘ at the Wilderness Festival, with Anshuman Mondal and Tahmima Anam. It was a good debate, but frustratingly short. I agreed with virtually all the issues raised by Tahmima Anam (her main argument, from the perspective of a Bangladeshi-born writer, was that the state is amore dangerous threat to free speech than extremist groups.) But Anshuman Mondal (‘There is almost nothing that Kenan and I agree on’, as he himself put it in the debate’) raised many points to which I would have liked to respond, but had not the time. So, let me pick up here two of the issues he raised.

The problem with the free speech debate, Mondal suggested, is that it has become polarized between those who are for and against free speech when in fact the debate about freedom is much more difficult. Freedom, he suggested, is ‘not a straightforward issue’; One cannot simply be ‘for or against freedom’. Nor can one see freedom merely as an ‘absence of restrictions’. It is also about the ‘assumption of responsibilities’.

I wonder if Mondal would have made the same argument 200 years ago during the debate about the abolition of slavery? ‘Freedom is not a straightforward issue. One cannot simply be for or against the abolition of slavery. We have to be more nuanced in the way we look upon the issue. We cannot simply see it as a matter of an absence of restrictions. Those being offered freedom have to accept their responsibilities too.’

More here.

Edward Carr in More Intelligent Life:

The word “polymath” teeters somewhere between Leo­nardo da Vinci and Stephen Fry. Embracing both one of history’s great intellects and a brainy actor, writer, director and TV personality, it is at once presumptuous and banal. Djerassi doesn’t want much to do with it. “Nowadays people that are called polymaths are dabblers—are dabblers in many different areas,” he says. “I aspire to be an intellectual polygamist. And I deliberately use that metaphor to provoke with its sexual allusion and to point out the real difference to me between polygamy and promiscuity.” “To me, promiscuity is a way of flitting around. Polygamy, serious polygamy, is where you have various marriages and each of them is important. And in the ideal polygamy I suspect there’s no number one wife and no number six wife. You have a deep connection with each person.” Djerassi is right to be suspicious of flitting. We all know a gifted person who cannot stick at anything. In his book “Casanova: A Study in Self-Portraiture” Stefan Zweig describes an extreme case:

[Casanova] excelled in mathematics no less than in philosophy. He was a competent theologian, preaching his first sermon in a Venetian church when he was not yet 16 years old. As a violinist, he earned his daily bread for a whole year in the San Samuele theatre. When he was 18 he became doctor of laws at the University of Padua—though down to the present day the Casanovists are still disputing whether the degree was genuine or spurious…He was well informed in chemistry, medicine, history, philosophy, literature, and, above all, in the more lucrative (because perplexing) sciences of astrology and alchemy…As universal dilettante, indeed, he was perfect, knowing an incredible amount of all the arts and all the sciences; but he lacked one thing, and this lack made it impossible for him to become truly productive. He lacked will, resolution, patience.

Mindful of that sort of promiscuity, I asked my colleagues to suggest living polymaths of the polygamous sort—doers, not dabblers. One test I imposed was breadth. A scientist who composes operas and writes novels is more of a polymath than a novelist who can turn out a play or a painter who can sculpt. For Djerassi, influence is essential too. “It means that your polymath activities have passed a certain quality control that is exerted within each field by the competition. If they accept you at their level, then I think you have reached that state rather than just dabbling.” They mentioned a score of names—Djerassi was prominent among them. Others included Jared Diamond, Noam Chomsky, Umberto Eco, Brian Eno, Michael Frayn and Oliver Sacks.

More here.

Walter Isaacson in The New York Times:

Walker Percy had a theory about hurricanes. “Though science taught that good environments were better than bad environments, it appeared to him that the opposite was the case,” he wrote of Will Barrett, the semi-autobiographical title character of his second novel, “The Last Gentleman.” “Take hurricanes, for example, certainly a bad environment if ever there was one. It was his impression that not just he but other people felt better in hurricanes.” Percy was a medical doctor who didn’t practice and a Catholic who did, which equipped him to embark on a search for how we mortals fit into the cosmos. Our reaction to hurricanes was a clue, he believed, which is why leading up to the 10th anniversary of Katrina, it’s worth taking note not only of his classic first novel, “The Moviegoer,” but also of his theory of hurricanes as developed in “The Last Gentleman,” “Lancelot” and some of his essays.

…Percy’s diagnosis was that when we are mired in the everydayness of ordinary life, we are susceptible to what he called “the malaise,” a free-floating despair associated with the feeling that you’re not a part of the world or connected to the people in it. You are alienated, detached. As Percy put it in “The Moviegoer,” “The malaise has settled like a fallout and what people really fear is not that the bomb will fall but that the bomb will not fall.” The heroes of his books, each in his own way, embark on a search for the cause and cure of this syndrome. “What is the nature of the search?” wonders Binx Bolling, the narrator of “The Moviegoer.” “The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life.” A real-world crisis can provide a respite from the malaise.

More here.

The Final Change
.

Being blind,
the fundamental thing my sister could not tolerate,
was change.
If her panic-fluttering fingers,
groping ahead in apprehensive search
for the familiar,
touched something alien,
she would halt,freeze, and then begin to whimper softly,
in heaven knows what depth of terror.

The years went by.
Her innocent, heroic heart gave out at last.
She died.
And I grew old.

In the course of time,
one night in sudden darkness of a blackout,
I lived my sister's panic
while groping for the light switch on the wall
I knew was there but could not find.
And, with the loss of some essential faith
in what is naturally due me,
like the permanence of my breathing,
all at once my blind eyes saw my death,
as fear-ful as the thousand deaths my sister died
each time she touched the empty dark.
.

by Peggy Freydberg
from Poems from a Pond
published by Hybrid Nation