Ken Roth in the New York Times:

As the self-proclaimed Islamic State, or ISIS, commits horrendous videotaped executions, it might seem to pose the greatest threat to Syrian civilians. In fact, that ignoble distinction belongs to the barrel bombs being dropped by the military of Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad. The Islamic State has distracted us from this deadly reality.

Barrel bombs are improvised weapons: oil drums or similar canisters filled with explosives and metal fragments. They are dropped without guidance from helicopters hovering just above antiaircraft range, typically hitting the ground with huge explosions and the widespread diffusion of deadly shrapnel. They pulverize neighborhoods, destroy entire buildings and leave broad strips of death and destruction.

The Syrian military has dropped barrel bombs, sometimes dozens in one day, on opposition-held neighborhoods in Aleppo, Idlib, Dara’a and other cities and towns. They have pulverized markets, schools, hospitals and countless residences. Syrians have described to me the sheer terror of waiting the 30 seconds or so for the barrel bomb to tumble to earth from a helicopter hovering overhead, not knowing until near the very end where its deadly point of impact will be.

From the start of the war, the Assad government has pursued a murderous policy toward Syrian citizens who happen to live in areas that have been seized by opposition armed groups.

More here.

John Allen Paulos responds to the question, “What insight or idea has thrilled or excited you?” in The Atlantic:

I could mention my first introduction to Godel’s theorem about the essential incompleteness of mathematics; or my first encounter with the Banach-Tarski theorem in topology showing that a sphere the size of a pea can be decomposed into a finite number of pieces and put back together to get a sphere the size of a basketball; or Russell’s paradox about the set of all sets that do not belong to themselves; or any number of counterintuitive results in probability theory. All of these mathematical ideas excited me in high school and college, but I will concentrate instead on the thrill I felt in elementary school when I saw that the power of simple arithmetic was sufficient to vanquish a bully, my fifth-grade teacher. It still evokes the same emotions in me that it did decades ago.

I was about 10 years old and enthralled with baseball. I loved playing the game and aspired to be a major league shortstop. (My father played in college and professionally in the minor leagues.) I also became obsessed with baseball statistics and noted that a relief pitcher for the then Milwaukee Braves had an earned run average (ERA) of 135. (The arithmetic details are less important than the psychology of the story, but as I dimly recall, the pitcher had allowed the opposing team to score five runs and had got only one batter out. Getting one batter out is equivalent to pitching one-third of an inning, one-27th of a complete nine-inning game––and allowing five runs in one-27th of a game translates into an ERA of 5/(1/27) or 135.)

Impressed by this extraordinarily bad ERA, I mentioned it diffidently to my teacher during a class discussion of sports. He looked pained and annoyed and sarcastically asked me to explain the fact to my class. Being quite shy, I did so with a quavering voice, a shaking hand, and a reddened face. (A strikeout in self-confidence.) When I finished, he almost bellowed that I was confused and wrong and that I should sit down.

More here.

From KurzweilAI:

Climbing a tree or balancing on a beam can dramatically improve cognitive skills, according to a study recently conducted by researchers in the Department of Psychology at the University of North Florida. The study is the first to show that proprioceptively dynamic activities like climbing a tree, done over a short period of time, have dramatic working memory benefits. Working memory (the ability to process and recall information), is linked to performance in a wide variety of contexts from grades to sports. Proprioception (awareness of body positioning and orientation) is also associated with working memory. The results of this research, led by Ross Alloway, a research associate, and Tracy Alloway, an associate professor, recently published in Perceptual and Motor Skills, suggest that working-memory improvements can be made in just a couple of hours with these physical exercises.

The aim of this study was to see if proprioceptive activities completed over a short period of time can enhance working memory performance, and whether an acute and highly intensive period of exercise would yield working memory gains. The UNF researchers recruited adults ages 18 to 59 and tested their working memory. Next, they undertook proprioceptively dynamic activities, designed by the company Movnat, which required proprioception and at least one other element, such as locomotion or route planning.

More here.

Nick Ripatrazone at The Millions:

After I exhausted the late-night timer recordings on my VCR, I began borrowing obscure titles from older friends. I covered my eyes during The Beyond, a particularly gruesome Italian film set in Louisiana. When the movie ended and I turned off the television, I froze. I realized what scared me the most: that long walk down the silent hallway back to my bedroom. My brothers had moved out. My sister was home from college, but was on the phone in her room. My parents had gone to sleep after trying to convince me that I should do the same. I did what any kid with an overactive imagination would: I sprinted down the hallway, shut my door, and dove into bed.

When I built up enough nerve to actually finish all of the horror movies I rented or borrowed, it became obvious that hallway scenes are an essential element of American and international horror films. Hallways are tight, narrow, walled, made for transit — and yet sometimes our most sensitive moments are out in the hall, doors closed behind us. Hallways are places for tense encounters, confusion, and fear.

Here are eight essential hallways from horror films.

more here.

Nishita Jha in The Wire (image ‘Nudes 9’, by Erin M. Riley (2013)):

For a lot of women my age, our first encounter with what ‘young girls were like’ came in 2004, when a now-infamous MMS (multi-media messaging) clip of a 17-year-old Delhi schoolgirl giving her classmate a blowjob went viral. Back then, very few of us owned camera phones, and the internet was a place we visited for only a few hours a day. We had little to no awareness of child pornography, or that ideas like consent applied not just to our bodies, but also to the photographic and video documentation of them.

Despite this, something about the story felt very wrong. A boy had filmed a girl in a private moment, but screen grabs of the clip, with the girl’s face clearly visible, were splashed all over the news. The video was also made available for sale on baazee.com (India’s version of eBay), and everyone across the country seemed to have seen it (disclosure: I haven’t, and I suggest you don’t either).

This was clearly an outright violation of privacy, but the outrage in our homes, schools and newspapers was focussed on the fact that children from ‘good families’ (read: upper class homes) were having oral sex — and worse, they were filming themselves while doing it. Though the act itself was consensual and there were no legal consequences, there were other, unspoken punishments that taught us who was really at fault. The boy, who held the camera but whose face we’d never seen, missed his next cricket match. The girl left school, and eventually, the country.

Several years later, a Hindi film used the MMS ‘scandal’ as a backstory to explain why its female lead grew up to become a sex worker, adding a scene in which her father kills himself after learning his daughter was caught having sex on tape.

This, then, is the lesson we learned: as young girls, our sexual pleasure was always illicit. If caught, we would be shamed and punished for our desires — in ways that boys were not.

More here.

Max Zirngast in Jacobin:

On July 20 a suicide bombing took the lives of thirty-one socialists in Suruç. A delegation of the Federation of Socialist Youth Associations (SGDF) was on its way to Kobanê to help with the reconstruction of the city, and build a library and a playground.

The massacre took place in the yard of the Amara Cultural Center, a meeting point for those who flock to the Turkish border to show solidarity with the struggle in Kobanê or even cross the border. During a public declaration, a twenty-year-old ISIS supporter blew himself up amid some three hundred people.

The result: thirty-one dead and many more injured — a brutal and heinous attack on socialists from Turkey who stand in solidarity with the Kurdish national liberation movement and are struggling against Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) party — a party which by now basically is the state.

Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu and President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan expressed their condolences, but Erdoğan neither cut his trip to Cyprus short, nor did he declare a day of national mourning (as was declared after King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia passed away earlier this year).

International messages of condolence were mostly addressed to Erdoğan, and the Western media near-unanimously stated that “ISIS terror has now struck Turkey as well.” It was sometimes added that the attack may have been an act of revenge after a small number of ISIS supporters were detained a few weeks before, and Turkey was seemingly finally showing some motivation to join the fight against ISIS. However, this attack did not hit “Turkey” or her state institutions, but socialists, mostly young, who were expressing solidarity with the Kurdish struggle.

As was soon to become clear, this attack was only the prelude to a flurry of frenetic events unfolding in the days following the massacre, initiating a new phase in Turkey — state of emergency and war. War, directed not against ISIS, but against the revolutionary left and the Kurdish national liberation movement.

More here.

Ben Merriman in Boston Review:

To the extent that digital projects do have clear goals, they tend to yield recognizably humanist products, such as a new edition of a book, a map of the places discussed in a narrative, or attribution of authorship to a formerly anonymous text.

The literary scholar Franco Moretti and his colleagues, most notably Matthew Jockers, are exceptions: their project of “distant reading,” developed steadily over more than a decade, has an ambitious, nontraditional goal. In its strongest formulation, it seeks to explain long-term patterns of literary stability and change through the quantitative study of all surviving literary texts. Forms of change include large developments, such as the rise and fall of novel genres, already recognized by critics, but also many small shifts, such as changes in sentence structure, the gradual emergence of themes, or the increased use of locative prepositions, which are readily detected with statistics but mostly unnoticeable to a human reader. Jockers’s nascent work on novel plots, which suggests that nearly all novels conform to a half dozen basic structures, derives from many small measurements concerning the emotional sentiment of individual sentences.

This is an unmistakably scientific aspiration. Unfortunately, few scientists, or social scientists, have taken notice of this body of work, while humanists have responded to it in a remarkably partisan fashion. The main difficulty is that two distinct issues have been blurred. The first is legitimate disagreement about the goals of humanistic inquiry. But both critics and proponents tend to jump straight to a second, larger conflict about the transformation of the university and the proper place of the humanities in education and intellectual life. These are important value questions; however, the work of these digital humanists should not be expected to answer them.

The results of this earnest scientific project are mixed.

More here.

Kerri Smith in Nature:

Moving emotional journeys are the stock-in-trade of animation studio Pixar. In their Toy Story trilogy, released in 1995, 1999 and 2010, little Andy’s toys compete for his affections as his family move, threatening to leave them behind. In the 2009 Up, even the opening sequence — a poignant recap of the elderly protagonist’s life story – had audiences blubbing. InInside Out, now on general release, it is the emotions – personified – that themselves go on a journey. The feelings of 11-year-old Riley are characters (Joy, Sadness, Anger, Disgust and Fear) lodged in a neuroscientifically improbable ‘Headquarters’ reminiscent of Rene Descartes’ pineal gland — the brain area where he imagined mind governed body. This volatile crew rev into action when Riley’s parents move the family from Minnesota to San Francisco, where she faces the first big challenges of an easy life: finding new friends, getting used to a new home and school. As Riley navigates these changes, the narrative is driven by the interplay between her emotions – particularly Joy and Sadness — and their adventures in the wild kingdom of Riley’s psyche. Joy had had the upper hand in Riley’s life to date; the central message is of the crucial role of Sadness in forming Riley’s character as she makes the bitter-sweet transition from child to teen and beyond. The adventures of Joy and Sadness form a counterpoint to Riley’s as each navigates a thrilling narrative of lost and found.

The colours of emotions drench this film: golden for Joy and green for Disgust, for instance. They tintRiley’s experiences, which are delivered to HQ like bowling balls, and thence dispatched to be enshrined in memory or forever forgotten. Many travel along tubes to long-term storage, a maze of high shelves resembling the folds of cortex when seen from above. “Let’s get those memories down to long-term!” trumpets Joy, as Riley falls asleep at the end of a happy day. I found this a compelling portrayal of memory processing: neuroscientists know that memories spend a little time in the hippocampus, where they are made, before some are shuttled to the cortex for long-term storage.

More here.

Steven Pinker in Current Biology:

Between 2005 and 2007, a quartet of bestsellers by Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Dan Dennett, and Christopher Hitchens launched the New Atheism. Emboldened by the growing success of science in explaining the world (including our own minds), inspired by new research on the sources of religious belief, and galvanized by the baleful influence of religion in world affairs (particularly 9/11 and its aftermath), these Four Horsemen of the New Atheism — as they came to be called — pressed the case that God does not exist and that many aspects of organized religion are pernicious.

Though in the ensuing decade a growing sliver of the population has become disenchanted with religion, the majority of Americans still believe in God. Indeed, even many intellectuals — including scientists — are not ready to let go of religion. Few sophisticated people, of course, profess a belief in the literal truth of the Bible or in a God who flouts the laws of physics. But whether it comes from a loyalty to family and tribe, a fear of alienating purse-string-holding politicians and foundations, or a reluctance to concede that nerdy scientists might be right about the most fundamental questions of existence, many intellectuals have proclaimed that the new atheists have gone too far and that key components of religion are worth salvaging.

The backlash against the New Atheists has given rise to a new consensus among faith-friendly intellectuals, and their counterattack is remarkably consistent across critics with little else in common. The new atheists are too shrill and militant, they say, and just as extreme as the fundamentalists they criticize. They are preaching to the choir, and only driving moderates into the arms of religion. People will never be disabused of their religious beliefs, and perhaps they should not be, because societies need unifying creeds to promote altruism and social cohesion. Anyway, most people treat religious doctrine allegorically rather than literally, and even if they do treat it literally, it’s not these folk beliefs that serious thinkers should engage with, but rather the sophisticated versions of religion worked out by erudite theologians.

More here.

H. M. Naqvi in Scroll:

When Abdullah Hussain ashed a cigarette, he always missed the ashtray. There was an inevitable salting in his immediate periphery. He had large, dramatic hands that he used to swat the air when he spoke. He spoke English with a slight, lilting British intonation, tending to accent vowels. He chose his words carefully but did not seem to care about his appearance. I spent time palavering with him at my place, his place, in hotel rooms where the curtains always seemed drawn, but never saw him comb his hair or dwell before the mirror. He would change from one pair of track pants to another, from one crumpled shirt to another before leaving for a dinner or a session at a literary festival. He lumbered like a giant emerging from a cave into the bright light of day.

It was not as if Abdullah Sahab didn't care what people made of him, and it was not if he didn't care for company, but he didn't suffer fools, didn't care for crowds. Once he told me, “Lots of people come…you know, scores of people…I don't know them, never seen them ‒ they have never heard of me, probably, and never read a word that I have written, and they just want to come and have they their picture taken…In the last few months, there must have been thousands and thousands…It's ridiculous…It's like taking a picture of Humayun's tomb.”

More here.

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Albert Burneko in The Concourse:

At the intersection of all the annoying things a rock star can be—messianic, pretentious, vapid, dumb, old, creatively bankrupt, grandiose, utterly bereft of self-awareness, calcified into a grotesque oily wire-rack-in-the-grocery-store knockoff of himself, part of U2, et cetera—there sits Bono in his stupid housefly glasses, playing with his dick. He is, in the words of Deadspin’s own Tim Marchman, “the worst music man of all time.” He is puke, and I want to punch him in the ear.

Here is a sentence: This past Wednesday, Bono spoke at an Amnesty International ceremony at Ellis Island, celebrating the 40th anniversary of John Lennon receiving his green card. Here is another sentence: John Lennon did not immigrate to the United States through Ellis Island, Amnesty International had nothing to do with his immigration to the United States, and Bono never knew him. Nevertheless, a tapestry was unfurled, depicting, with metaphoric incoherence, Manhattan as a Lennon-piloted yellow submarine shining its light on Liberty Island, which is not Ellis Island. Bono spoke, and claimed Lennon and the Beatles as Irishmen—because Lennon’s derelict father may or may not have been descended from the Irish, and for the more important reason that nothing in American culture is better public relations than making a too-big deal of flimsy, possibly spurious Irish heritage.

(To be honest, I don’t much care about which part of the British Isles rightly may claim John Lennon’s ancestry. He mostly was a self-promoting misogynist checkbook activist who imagined no possessions from one of the most exclusive addresses in the history of planet earth, so whichever country wants him can have him. This is beside the point, which is that Bono sucks.)

More here.

Rafael Gómez Barros. Casa Tomada, 2012.

Resin, Fiber Glass, Madera, Screen Cotton, Cuerda Arenas, Cerrejón, Coal.

More here, here, and here.

Barbara J. King in NPR:

This week, Switzerland's Court of Arbitration for Sport ruled that the Indian sprinter Dutee Chand may race as a woman in international competition. This decision is significant because, just last year, Chand was denied by track and field's governing body (the International Association of Athletics Federations or IAAF) the right to compete against women because her natural levels of testosterone were considered too high for a female athlete. As The New York Times reported Monday, Chand is now cleared for the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro — if she qualifies. It's likely that this ruling also will serve as a legal precedent for women in sports beyond just track and field. The court did grant the IAAF two years to provide further evidence in support of their so-called “hyperandrogenism regulation.” Chand's victory, therefore, rests on a suspension, rather than an outright overturning, of the biologically based rule.

Even so, there's no doubt this ruling represents a step forward for women like Chand who refuse to alter their bodies by chemical or surgical means in order to conform to arbitrary biological standards of what it means to be a woman. Also this week, a young man named Gavin Grimm from Gloucester, Va., was profiled in a piece by The New York Times editorial board. Grimm, whom I have met and talked with, is a transgender teenager who was assigned female status at birth but who now identifies as male. Originally, when he asked to use the male restroom at his high school, all went smoothly. Then, parents got wind of the fact and the small semi-rural county where I live exploded. I attended (and briefly spoke at) last fall's school board meeting about the issue, a gathering accurately described by the Times in this passage:

“Gavin Grimm sat quietly in the audience last November as dozens of parents at a school board meeting in Gloucester County, Va., demanded that he be barred from using the boys' restrooms at school. They discussed the transgender boy's genitals, expressed concern that he might expose himself and cautioned that being in a men's room would make the teenager vulnerable to rape. One person called him a 'freak.'”

More here.

Richard Marshall interviews Philip Kitcher in 3:AM Magazine:

3:AM: You’ve written books on science in a democratic society, living with Darwin, the ethical project and an invitation to Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake. This is a broad field of interests and captures the flavour of your philosophical position where you argue for the importance of both science and humanities. How did your philosophical career begin? Were you always asking questions, reading and thinking?

Philip Kitcher: I rather stumbled into philosophy. When I began my undergraduate career at Cambridge, I studied mathematics (pure and applied, with a dash of theoretical physics). Under the British system, I’d had to specialize at age 15, and I found it very hard to decide between mathematics and literature (English, French, and German). After two years of undergraduate study, it was clear that I was bored by the regime of problem-solving required by the Cambridge mathematical tripos. A very sensitive mathematics don recommended that I talk to the historian of astronomy, Michael Hoskin, and the conversation led me to enroll in the History and Philosophy of Science for my final undergraduate year. I’d originally intended to concentrate in history of science, but reading Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions prompted me to switch to philosophy of science. Despite the fact that I hadn’t done any serious philosophy as Princeton understood it, I was accepted as a graduate student in the philosophy side of Princeton’s HPS program (now defunct). I struggled at first, but eventually managed to correct some of my initial ignorance.

But I think that, all along, I was occupied by a range of questions, often different from those fashionable in the professional philosophy of the past half century, that have sometimes troubled philosophers in the past. It’s taken me several decades to work out my own philosophical agenda, and it is, as your question suggests, wide. Some people would probably describe it as quite weird. Maybe this interview will dissolve some of that sense of weirdness.

More here.

Jim Rutenberg in The New York Times:

The fundamental promise of American democracy is that every citizen gets a vote, but delivering the franchise from on high and in the face of violent local opposition has always been a complicated legal proposition. The 13th Amendment freed the slaves, and the 14th Amendment gave them citizenship. But the key to Reconstruction was the 15th Amendment, ratified in 1870, which did something far more radical, not just guaranteeing (male) former slaves the right to vote but giving Congress the authority to enforce that right state by state, an authority that to this day many legislators see as a drastic intrusion into local affairs.

The new laws immediately enfranchised more than 700,000 black Southerners. Although blacks made up just 13 percent of the overall United States population, they made up 36 percent of the South’s population and a much higher percentage in some states, including a majority in Mississippi and South Carolina. Their enfranchisement was a shock to the political system that almost exclusively benefited Republicans, the party of Lincoln.

Like its former Confederate neighbors, North Carolina sent several black Republicans to Congress. In the state’s General Assembly, legislators with the support of black Republicans wrote a new state Constitution in 1868 that created state-supported public schools; apportioned state representation based on population rather than wealth — a setback for the 1 percent of that era, the plantation owners; and, eventually, instituted a property tax.

Democrats throughout the South responded to the growing influence of black legislators with a brutal effort to suppress the black vote, enforced by the Ku Klux Klan and its many paramilitary imitators, who kept blacks from election polls at gunpoint and whipped or lynched many who resisted. The Southern Democrats ran on an open message of white supremacy and quickly retook statehouses, city halls and courthouses throughout the South. Within 15 years of the Civil War’s end, Reconstruction was just a memory. What followed was deconstruction: the era of Jim Crow, the poll tax, the literacy test, double primaries and a host of other mechanisms that blocked the black vote. For decades, most black citizens in the South had no practical right to vote.

More here.

Philip Ball in New Statesman:

For an introduction to this bioger­ontological mythology, I recommend last year’s documentary The Immortalists, which profiles two of the most vocal advocates of scientific immortality: the computer scientist Aubrey de Grey and the biotech entrepreneur Bill Andrews. Yet the film shows that these men aren’t lone mavericks with unconventional ideas about ageing and its abolition, but participants in a complex and self-supporting network of techno-myth. And as is the case with, for example, human cloning, nutrition and the surprising properties of water, there is no convenient partitioning here into respectable and cranky science. In consequence, the immortality market can’t simply be eliminated by the appliance of science; it needs to be understood as a cultural phenomenon. Ageing is partly genetic but there are no “ageing genes” – merely ordinary genes that may cause problems in later life. Age-related conditions such as heart failure, dementia and cancer typically stem from an interplay between genes and environment: we can inherit predispositions but environmental factors such as diet and pollution affect whether they manifest. (Research that was widely reported early this year as showing that most cancers are due to “bad luck”, irrespective of environmental influences, in fact had a more complex message.)

It is surprising, perhaps alarming, that we know so little about ageing.

More here.