Richard King in the Sydney Review of Books:

In October 1976 an aged Austrian economist assumed the podium in a Melbourne hotel and delivered, extempore, a speech that set libertarian hearts racing. The economist was Friedrich Hayek and the occasion was the Annual General Meeting of the Institute of Public Affairs (IPA), which was then in the process of transforming itself into a radical free-market think-tank of the kind we now associate with neoliberal economics. Still buzzing from Milton Friedman’s visit to Australia in 1975, the IPA’s members lapped it up. A standing ovation followed Hayek’s address. So too did an effusive editorial in the next edition of IPA Review:

Professor Hayek came to Australia at a peculiarly appropriate time. It is clear that this country has reached a grand climacteric, a fateful parting of the ways so far as its political and economic future is concerned. The momentous question is whether, in the years ahead, libertarian values are to prevail, enterprise, both corporate and individual, is to be properly rewarded, and the market is to be allowed to perform its traditional function of allocating the resources of the community in the most effective manner in the interests of all; or whether Government as such is to assume an even larger role in the distribution of resources and income, in the provision of so-called Welfare and in the general direction of the lives of the people. In short, what is ultimately at stake is the survival of individual freedom.

There you have the libertarian critique – or right-libertarian critique – in a nutshell: the free market as the guarantor, not just of an efficient economy, but of human freedom and flourishing. It’s a long way from the traditional conservative worldview, in which family, nation, religion and community form the key components of the desirable life; and, as we’ll see, its effects on the right more broadly have been problematic. But one has to admire, even if only grudgingly, its boldness and simplicity.

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Prudence Peiffer in Bookforum:

IF EVERY BIOGRAPHY PEDDLES the aura of the unknown with a promise of revelation, Diane Arbus: Portrait of a Photographer acknowledges a darker obfuscation from the start. As his book’s fitting epigraph, Arthur Lubow chooses the artist’s cryptic challenge to anyone attempting to uncover the meaning behind her work: “A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know.” Arbus wrings out the cliché that a photograph doesn’t lie and rehangs it as a riddle. What is the relationship between a secret and knowledge? How well can we understand someone, even with access to her confidences? And does this information help us see her art better, too? Or, in a Derridean twist, does knowing a secret reveal the very impossibility of its existence in the first place?

Lubow confronts an extreme instance of this problem within the first twenty pages of his seven-hundred-plus tome. He reveals, without fanfare, the ultimate secret of Arbus’s life: According to her psychiatrist, Arbus had a sexual relationship with her older brother, the onetime US poet laureate Howard Nemerov, beginning in childhood, and she last slept with him just a few weeks before her suicide. I was shocked to encounter this claim so early on (and that her therapist would have shared this still feels wrong). But in detonating the taboo at the beginning, Lubow defuses it, too. (No spoiler alert here.) It is not the climax of the book, but one more beveled pane of the window onto its subject.

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Adam Shatz in the NY Review of Books:

In 1975, Miles Davis put down his trumpet and retired. Davis was famous for his dramatic silences in performance: the notes he chose not to play were almost as meaningful as those he did. But this silence would last for nearly five years, during which he all but disappeared into his Upper West Side brownstone. Visitors evoked a macabre dungeon swarming with prostitutes, drug dealers, hangers-on, and corpulent roaches. Davis, who styled himself as jazz’s “Prince of Darkness,” later confirmed the rumors with unabashed relish in his 1989 autobiography, Miles, written with the poet Quincy Troupe.

Yet for all this decadence, there was a noble, almost monastic aura to Davis’s retirement at forty-nine, after one of the most extraordinary careers in postwar music. Davis had taken part in almost every phase in jazz’s evolution since the mid-1940s. Born in 1926 into a prosperous black family just outside East St. Louis, he arrived in late 1944 in New York. His official reason was to attend Juilliard, but this was a smokescreen to placate his father, an oral surgeon who owned a three-hundred-acre farm. His real reason was to follow his idols, the alto saxophonist Charlie Parker and the trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie, who were revolutionizing jazz at clubs in Harlem and on West 52nd Street. Parker, whose appetite for music was exceeded only by his appetite for heroin, taught Davis bebop, a form of small-group improvisation characterized by extreme velocity and complex chord progressions, and warned him to stay away from the needle—advice Davis ignored to his lasting regret. He was a classic bohemian rebel, irresistibly drawn to the sound, and the forbidden pleasures, of the street.

Davis, who died of a stroke in 1991, played on some of Parker’s finest sessions, but he was a somewhat tentative, even ambivalent bopper, because he couldn’t play as high or as fast as Gillespie. He was searching for a mellower, less frenetic approach to bop, and found it in “cool” jazz, a style he developed in the late 1940s with the Canadian-born orchestrator Gil Evans. So fervently did he believe in his own vision that, at twenty-three, he turned down an offer from Duke Ellington.

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Damon Young and Graham Priest in Aeon:

Commentators often highlight the influence of Fountain on conceptual art, and this most ‘aggressive’ readymade, as Robert Hughes put it, has certainly had an enduring legacy. In 2004, it was voted the most important 20th-century work by hundreds of art experts. From Andy Warhol to Joseph Beuys to Tracey Emin, this urinal inspired artists to reconsider the traditional artwork. Instead of paintings and sculptures, art was suddenly Brillo boxes, an unmade bed, or a light-bulb plugged into a lemon: ordinary objects, some readymade, removed from their original contexts and placed on display in art galleries. The art critic Roberta Smith sums it up this way: ‘[Duchamp] reduced the creative act to a stunningly rudimentary level: to the single, intellectual, largely random decision to name this or that object or activity “art”.’ As we will see, Duchamp’s choice was not random at all, but Smith’s description points to the broader shock that Duchamp’s work prompted: if this can be art, then anything can.

Since then, scholars have discussed Fountain to demonstrate a shift away from aesthetics to thought. As the philosopher Noël Carroll notes, it’s possible to enjoy thinking about Duchamp’s work without actually looking at it, which cannot be said for Henri Matisse’s vivid paintings or Barbara Hepworth’s dignified stone sculptures.

These traditional ideas, as we will see, are all important to Fountain. But they do not go far enough. They treat Fountain as art, but of a mocking sort: a kind of intellectual heckling that nudged artists to taunt and scoff more academically at their own field. Our explanation of the artwork’s power is much more controversial: we believe that Fountain isart only insofar as it is not art. It is what it is not – and this is why it is what it is. In other words, the artwork delivers a true contradiction, what’s called a dialetheia. Fountain did not simply usher in conceptual art – it afforded us an unusual and intriguing concept to consider: a work of art that isn’t really a work of art, an everyday object that is not just an everyday object.

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Jonathan Basile in 3:AM Magazine:

After beginning with the end, we have ended up at the beginning. The newest of Jacques Derrida’s seminars is the oldest yet published, Heidegger: The Question of Being & History,which pre-dates the philosopher’s 1967 debut, the year he published three of the twentieth century’s most influential works of philosophy. Derrida died in 2004 and left behind more than 14,000 pages of lectures and notes from a half-century of teaching. Thanks to the critical work of the editors of the French editions and the Derrida Seminar Translation Project, five of his seminars have now appeared in book form in French and four in English translation. The editors began with the last seminars before his death, The Beast and the Sovereign andThe Death Penalty, courses taught from 1999-2003, before returning to 1964-5, to a young scholar’s inchoate reflections on Heidegger, who would endure as a focus of Derrida’s career and the frequent subject of his close reading practice, which came to be known as deconstruction.

There’s an intuitive sense to this distribution. The seminars served as a sort of laboratory for Derrida’s published work, often presaging and developing the themes that would appear there. The final seminars, however, had not yet been elaborated in book form. The Beast and the Sovereign, begun in November of 2001 after the attacks of September 11th, dealt in particular with political themes that Peggy Kamuf, member of both the French editorial team and the translation project, described as “most pressing.”

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Ferdinand Mount at the Times Literary Supplement:

Marx’s crucial premiss is that work constitutes man’s essence: we are truly human only when we are engaged in self-chosen, purposeful activity. But how precisely were menial tasks to be de-alienated under socialism? How indeed were they to be allocated? When asked who would polish the shoes after the revolution, Marx snapped back, “you should”. In any case, that dismissal of man’s “animal function” throws away three-quarters of what makes life worthwhile for most of us – love and family and home. And what precisely is the nature of the harm that alienation does to us? Marx was not alone at the time in his assumption that the backbreaking grind of factory work degraded men to the condition of animals, and this is what you would expect from the central Marxist doctrine that “social being determines consciousness”. Something of the sort is to be seen in Disraeli’s description of Woodgate in Sybil. Yet Stedman Jones points out that Marx had scarcely met any flesh-and-blood workers until he arrived in Paris in 1843. And then he was highly impressed: “the brotherhood of man is no empty phrase but a reality, and the nobility of man shines forth upon us from their toilworn bodies”. Twenty years later, when he attended a trade union meeting chaired by John Bright, he recorded with a note of surprise, “the working men themselves spoke very well indeed without a trace of bourgeois rhetoric”. Nineteenth- century working-class culture was, after all, remarkably rich, as more recent historians such as E. P. Thompson and Jonathan Rose have reminded us. If this is alienation, one is tempted to say, it can’t be all bad.

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Adam Gopnik at The New Yorker:

Jane Jacobs’s aura was so powerful that it made her, precisely, the St. Joan of the small scale. Her name still summons an entire city vision—the much watched corner, the mixed-use neighborhood—and her holy tale is all the stronger for including a nemesis of equal stature: Robert Moses, the Sauron of the street corner. The New York planning dictator wanted to drive an expressway through lower Manhattan, and was defeated, the legend runs, by this ordinary mom.

Even after the halo above the saint’s head fades, however, we have to make sense of the ideas that rattled around inside. I. F. Stone’s independence remains thrilling to every blogger, or should, but his attempts in retirement to reconcile Jefferson and Marx seem less inspiring than impossible. Now, in the year of Jane Jacobs’s centenary, with the biography out there, along with a new collection of her uncollected writings, “Vital Little Plans: The Short Works of Jane Jacobs” (Random House), and an anthology of conversations between her and various friends, “Jane Jacobs: The Last Interview and Other Conversations” (Melville House), it seems fair to pay her the compliment of taking her seriously—to ask what exactly she argued for, and what exactly we should think about those arguments now.

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Haider Shahbaz in Jadaliyya:

Interest in Islamic art—a label that became popular in Western museums after World War II—has substantially increased since 11 September 2001. Some of the biggest and wealthiest museums in Europe and North America, including The Louvre, Benaki Museum, Metropolitan Museum of Art, British Museum, and the Victoria and Albert Museum, have expanded, renovated, and highlighted their collections of Islamic art. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s collection of Islamic art, which began purchasing works in 1973, has seen major acquisitions since 9/11. Middle Eastern museums have also joined the race. The Kuwait National Museum and the Museum of Islamic Art in Doha have become major competitors in this market. The controversial openings of Guggenheim Abu Dhabi and Louvre Abu Dhabi are scheduled for the next few years.

All these museums hope to boost profits in the tourism and culture industries by playing on a renewed fascination with Islam. Moreover, they hope to introduce visitors to a softer, more tolerant side of Muslims by educating them about the history and culture of regions that have become associated with war and religious fundamentalism. As Sophie Makariou, head of the Louvre's Islamic art department, said, “I like the idea of showing the other side of the coin.”

Unfortunately, such gestures are still unable to move beyond two sides: the inevitable binary of the good, cultured Muslim and the bad, terrorist Muslim.

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Sarah Knapton in The Telegraph:

Microsoft has vowed to “solve the problem of cancer” within a decade by using ground-breaking computer science to crack the code of diseased cells so they can be reprogrammed back to a healthy state.

In a dramatic change of direction for the technology giant, the company has assembled a “small army” of the world’s best biologists, programmers and engineers who are tackling cancer as if it were a bug in a computer system.

This summer Microsoft opened its first wet laboratory where it will test out the findings of its computer scientists who are creating huge maps of the internal workings of cell networks.

The researchers are even working on a computer made from DNA which could live inside cells and look for faults in bodily networks, like cancer. If it spotted cancerous chances it would reboot the system and clear out the diseased cells.

Chris Bishop, laboratory director at Microsoft Research, said: “I think it’s a very natural thing for Microsoft to be looking at because we have tremendous expertise in computer science and what is going on in cancer is a computational problem.

More here.

From Vanity Fair:

In their conversation, the president and Goodwin exhibit an easy camaraderie, sometimes completing each other’s sentences. They touch on everything from comedy Web sites to bodysurfing in Hawaii. But the central focus is on history, and on enduring questions. What is presidential temperament? How does a leader maintain perspective? When does the job of president feel the heaviest? What is good and bad about ambition?

Obama and Goodwin spent more than an hour over coffee, water, and scones (“I won’t be eating those,” said the president), followed by a brief chat in the Oval Office. Obama, in shirtsleeves, sat in a straight-backed chair, his long frame relaxed, legs crossed, as he responded or parried—always thoughtfully, sometimes intensely. V.F.’s Annie Leibovitz photographed at the start of the session and then re-entered, periodically, but mainly let them be.

The walls of the private dining room and the hallway nearby are lined with telling mementos: images of Martin Luther King Jr.; a photo of the president with Nelson Mandela; and a Life-magazine cover showing the 1965 march on Selma, signed by civil-rights leader John Lewis (who, inside the House chamber the next morning, would lead a sit-in against gun violence). Tables in the room hold framed family photos, a bust of J.F.K., and a pair of Muhammad Ali’s boxing gloves.

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Paul Rincon in BBC News:

Present-day people outside Africa were thought to descend from a group that left their homeland 60,000 years ago. Now, analysis of nearly 500 human genomes appears to have turned up the weak signal of an earlier migration. But the results suggest this early wave of Homo sapiens all but vanished, so it does not drastically alter prevailing theories of our origins. Writing in the academic journal Nature, Luca Pagani, Mait Metspalu and colleagues describe hints of this pioneer group in their analysis of DNA in people from the Oceanian nation of Papua New Guinea. After evolving in Africa 200,000 years ago, modern humans are thought to have crossed through Egypt into the Arabian Peninsula some 60,000 years ago. Until now, genetic evidence has shown that every non-African alive today could trace their origins to this fateful dispersal. Yet we had known for some time that groups of modern humans made forays outside their “homeland” before 60,000 years ago.

• Fossilised remains found at the Qafzeh and Es Skhul caves in Israel had been dated to between 120,000 and 90,000 years ago.
• Then in 2015, scientists working in Daoxian, south China, reported the discovery of modern human teeth dating to at least 80,000 years ago.
• An additional piece of evidence recently came from traces of Homo sapiens DNA in a female Neanderthal from Siberia's Altai mountains. The analysis suggested that modern humans and Neanderthals had begun mixing around 100,000 years ago – presumably outside Africa.

In order to reconcile this evidence with the genetic data from living populations, the prevailing view advanced by scientists was of a wave of pioneer settlement that ended in extinction. But the latest results suggest some descendents of these trailblazers survived long enough to get swept up in the later, ultimately more successful migration that led to the settling of Oceania.

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Sean Illing in Vox:

College professors are increasingly liberal — according to a study cited in the Washington Post earlier this year, the percentage of American professors identifying as “liberal” or “far left” jumped from 42 percent in 1990 to 60 percent in 2014.

Glenn Loury is an outlier in this environment — his politics are difficult to pin down exactly, but they’re probably best described as right of center. An author and professor of economics at Brown University, Loury has written books questioning what he sees as the liberal orthodoxy on race and history, including One by One From the Inside Out and The Anatomy of Racial Inequality.

I spoke with Loury earlier this month about his views on political correctness, the legacy of state-sanctioned racism, and his disagreements with the Atlantic writer Ta-Nehisi Coates. Our conversation, edited for length and clarity, follows.

Sean Illing: “Political correctness” has become a catchall term. Often it’s a trite signaling device or it’s used to paper over nasty rhetoric. Occasionally, though, it’s a legitimate backlash against a tendency to suppress uncomfortable speech. What do you think about this term and the way it’s used?

Glenn Loury: My argument about political correctness is not tendentious or partisan — it's analytical. The core of the argument is that when groups care a lot about maintaining conformity of belief on some matter of critical interest to them, then the hunt for heretics is always ongoing. We're always looking for deviants. The willingness to speak in certain ways can be a sign of deviance, because if speakers know that punishment awaits them for speaking in particular ways, the only speakers willing to take the risks are indeed people who are not reliable on whatever the core belief or value is.

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Jason G. Goldman in Scientific American:

As Earth enters the Anthropocene epoch, its biodiversity wobbles on the precipice of disaster—and island species have been hit especially hard. About 80 percent of recorded extinctions have occurred on islands and 40 percent of the world's endangered and threatened species are island dwellers. Researchers say the leading cause of these extinctions is invasive rodents—rats and mice that stowed away on ships, then quickly populated islands where they have no natural predators and often find a buffet of things like eggs and baby wildlife. Whereas there are several ways to clear such invaders, the most effective has been rodenticides. But these poisons can neither be deployed effectively on islands with large human populations nor where residents disapprove of their use. And poisons do not discriminate, killing along with unwanted pests the native species they are meant to protect.

But now a controversial new strategy called gene drive offers a brutally efficient solution by introducing genetically modified organisms designed to spread a chosen trait—such as producing infertile offspring—throughout a wild population. Scientists, government officials and other interested parties debated the idea last week at the International Union for Conservation of Nature's (IUCN) World Conservation Congress in Honolulu.

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Janet Reitman in Rolling Stone:

They were everywhere this summer, the wanna-be statesmen, the failed comedians, the conspiracy theorists and entrepreneurs with political convictions, or absolutely no convictions, selling the national id. In Cleveland, they trawled the streets outside the Republican National Convention, shouting, “Hillary's lies matter!” or “Hillary for prison!” – the slogans stamped on buttons, T-shirts, bumper stickers, decals, trucker hats, hoodies, onesies. At the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, diehards in Bernie 2016 shirts held signs reading “#NeverHillary” or “Shillary,” or handed out posters renaming the Democratic nominee “War Hawk” or “Goldman Girl” or “Monsanto Mama.” Everywhere the venom was carefully packaged and rigorously on-message. One button, plumbing the depths of the anti-politically correct, read “Life's a Bitch – Don't Vote for One.” Another promoted a “KFC Hillary Special: 2 Fat Thighs, 2 Small Breasts…Left Wing.” There were images of an angry Hillary giving America the finger and countless others of her yelling, scowling, looking mean. “Hillary sucks, but not like Monica!” yelled one T-shirt vendor, who told me he'd sold almost 500 shirts in Cleveland with that catchphrase. “Trump that bitch!”

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David Livingstone Smith in Aeon:

Imagine looking down to see a severed hand scuttling toward you across the floor like a large, fleshy spider. Imagine a dog trotting up to you, amiably wagging its tail – but as it gets near you notice that, instead of a canine head, it has the head of an enormous green lizard. Imagine that you are walking through a garden where the vines all writhe like worms.

There’s no denying that each of these scenarios is frightening, but it’s not obvious why. There’s nothing puzzling about why being robbed at knifepoint, pursued by a pack of wolves, or trapped in a burning house are terrifying given the physical threat involved. The writhing vines, on the other hand, can’t hurt you though they make your blood run cold. As with the severed hand or the dog with the lizard head, you have the stuff of nightmares –creepy.

And creepiness – Unheimlichkeit, as Sigmund Freud called it – definitely stands apart from other kinds of fear. Human beings have been preoccupied with creepy beings such as monsters and demons since the beginning of recorded history, and probably long before. Even today in the developed world where science has banished the nightmarish beings that kept our ancestors awake at night, zombies, vampires and other menacing entities retain their grip on the human imagination in tales of horror, one of the most popular genres in film and TV.

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Ray Monk at The New Statesman:

On YouTube there is a three-minute clip of the funeral of Jean-Paul Sartre. The funeral took place on Saturday 19 April 1980 and the television coverage from which the clip is taken follows the journey of the hearse from the hospital where Sartre died to Montparnasse Cemetery, where he was to be buried – a distance of about three kilometres. Along the way, the hearse moves through a staggering number of people. The commentator says that there are 50,000 mourners in total, 30,000 on the streets leading to the cemetery and another 20,000 at the cemetery itself. When the camera pans out, you can see how extraordinarily packed the streets are; when it homes in on some of the faces, you notice that many of the mourners are young, in their early twenties. If you did not know whose funeral it was, you would guess a famous actor or actress, a rock star, or some such popular public figure as Diana, Princess of Wales or Winston Churchill. It would never occur to you that what you were seeing was the public reaction to the death of a philosopher.

It is often remarked that this shows the difference between French and British culture, because it is unimaginable that so many people in this country would be so deeply affected by the death of an intellectual. But, in fact, it is a pretty unusual event anywhere and at any time.

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Adolph Reed, Jr. at nonsite:

Some readers will know that I’ve contended that, despite its proponents’ assertions, antiracism is not a different sort of egalitarian alternative to a class politics but is a class politics itself: the politics of a strain of the professional-managerial class whose worldview and material interests are rooted within a political economy of race and ascriptive identity-group relations. Moreover, although it often comes with a garnish of disparaging but empty references to neoliberalism as a generic sign of bad things, antiracist politics is in fact the left wing of neoliberalism in that its sole metric of social justice is opposition to disparity in the distribution of goods and bads in the society, an ideal that naturalizes the outcomes of capitalist market forces so long as they are equitable along racial (and other identitarian) lines. As I and my colleague Walter Benn Michaels have insisted repeatedly over the last decade, the burden of that ideal of social justice is that the society would be fair if 1% of the population controlled 90% of the resources so long as the dominant 1% were 13% black, 17% Latino, 50% female, 4% or whatever LGBTQ, etc. That is the neoliberal gospel of economic justice, articulated more than a half-century ago by Chicago neoclassical economist Gary Becker, as nondiscriminatory markets that reward individual “human capital” without regard to race or other invidious distinctions.

We intend to make a longer and more elaborate statement of this argument and its implications, which antiracist ideologues have consistently either ignored or attempted to dismiss through mischaracterization of the argument or ad hominem attack.1 For now, however, I want simply to draw attention to how insistence on reducing discussion of killings of civilians by police to a matter of racism clouds understanding of and possibilities for effective response to the deep sources of the phenomenon.

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Peter E. Gordon at The Nation:

The pensive man with the snow-white hair was the philosopher and social theorist Jürgen Habermas, who for more than six decades has played the part of gadfly in modern Germany, just as Socrates did in ancient Athens. Even at his ripe age—he is now 87—Habermas’s passion remains undiminished. As a public intellectual, however, he may seem an unlikely hero. We live in an age when what some of us still fondly call “the public sphere” has grown thick with personalities who prefer the TED Talk to the printed word and the tweet to the rigors of rational argument. For Habermas, it’s clear that without the constant exercise of public deliberation, democracy will collapse, and this means that citizens must be ready to submit their arguments to the acid bath of rational criticism. The debates that preceded the construction of the Holocaust Memorial brought bitter memories to the surface—the novelist Martin Walser complained of “a monumentalization of our disgrace”—but for Habermas, a willingness to engage productively in self-criticism is a prerequisite for democratic consciousness. National pride in the conventional sense leaves him cold: In an essay for Die Zeit, he responded to Walser, emphasizing that “anyone who views Auschwitz as ‘our shame’ is more interested in the image others have of us than in the image German citizens retrospectively form of themselves in view of the breakdown of civilization, in order to be able to look each other in the face and show each other respect.” Habermas argues instead for “constitutional patriotism,” a sense of loyalty to the principles and procedures of the modern democratic state.

The ideal that most animates Habermas is a belief in the possibility of a genuinely critical and self-reflexive form of modern consciousness that can serve as the groundwork for politics.

more here.