Stefany Anne Golberg at The Smart Set:

The Welcome sign stands in the town of Paradise, four miles outside Las Vegas city limits, near the huge stone columns of the old McCarran Airport and the bright green hologram of the Bali Hai Golf Club. The sign does not face Las Vegas, but rather looks away. So, if you live in Las Vegas, and you want to see the sign, you have to leave the city. You have to get in your car and head south out of town, turn around, and come back in. If, for some reason, you find yourself at the south end of Las Vegas Boulevard, all you will see is the sign’s backside suggesting you DRIVE CAREFULLY and Come Back SOON.

It makes sense that the great icon of Las Vegas is not actually in Las Vegas. Most cities keep their icons within city walls for the benefit of its citizens. Any Los Angeleno standing on the corner of La Brea and Hollywood Boulevard can see the HOLLYWOOD sign. The Eiffel Tower can be viewed from all over Paris; the Kremlin is in the heart of Moscow. What makes the “Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas” sign true to Las Vegas is that it exists mostly for visitors.

more here.

Seymour Hersh at The London Review of Books:

It’s been four years since a group of US Navy Seals assassinated Osama bin Laden in a night raid on a high-walled compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. The killing was the high point of Obama’s first term, and a major factor in his re-election. The White House still maintains that the mission was an all-American affair, and that the senior generals of Pakistan’s army and Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI) were not told of the raid in advance. This is false, as are many other elements of the Obama administration’s account. The White House’s story might have been written by Lewis Carroll: would bin Laden, target of a massive international manhunt, really decide that a resort town forty miles from Islamabad would be the safest place to live and command al-Qaida’s operations? He was hiding in the open. So America said.

The Wire (India) is new media venture founded by Siddharth Varadarajan and Sidharth Bhatia that seeks to “reimagine the media as a joint venture in the public sphere between journalists, readers and a concerned citizenry.” Debarshi Dasgupta:

It is early December. A chill has started to descend along with the opaque dark that cloaks Bijapur’s jungles every night. A few locals in Bedre, a small village on the banks of the Indrawati and next to the border with Maharashtra, have gathered around a crackling fire. Without televisions in most households, congregating around some warmth is how villagers here like to keep themselves entertained on long winter evenings. One of them, a government worker, flicks open his phone. He decides the occasion merits a song.

I await a mawkish Bollywood number. It is all I have heard public bus stereos belt out in Chhattisgarh. On these long, rough journeys, escapist refrains have turned out to be a favourite of the people here, scarred, not unlike their roads, by the persistent Naxal conflict.

Instead, a booming female voice plays out of his phone. An infectious rhythmic drumbeat and a rousing chorus roll in to keep her company. “Jaburjaburjangalte deke atina, laljhandalaltenima des kinaam…” the Gondi recording progresses.

She is singing of her love for her hero, not one who cavorts to woo her but a martyr who has died defending her land. “The beauty of the jungle you fought for misses you. Where are you? Where is your voice? We can’t hear it.” There’s little doubt about the song’s provenance and loyalty; it is one performed to support the Naxals. But this gathering is one of ordinary villagers, not Naxal cadres bonding around a boot-camp bonfire. Why would they play a rebel song openly, and before an outsider?

More here.

Robert McCrum in The Guardian:

No 86 marks a milestone: it’s the first time in this series that we have listed a living writer. From this (1969) publication date, we shall now be addressing contemporary English and American literature, and many living writers. Inevitably, the choice will be correspondingly more difficult. Portnoy’s Complaint is the novel that made Philip Roth an international literary celebrity, an iconic book that changed everything for the writer, pitching him headlong into a relentless world of banal public curiosity. After Portnoy, his working life became dominated by answering questions about the inter-relationship of fact and fiction in his writing. Roth’s response has been to take refuge in a variety of alter egos, notably Nathan Zuckerman. He will never again hold forth as brilliantly or as memorably as he does in this novel. The context of Portnoy’s hilarious, ranting monologue is established on the closing page. “So [said the doctor]. Now vee may perhaps to begin. Yes?”

Alexander Portnoy lies on the couch. Dr Spielvogel sits behind, listening to a subject that is, says Roth, “so difficult to talk about and yet so near at hand”. In short, masturbation, and its corollary, satyromania. To facilitate his solitary lust, Portnoy commands a far richer arsenal of sex aids than most horny young men: old socks, his sister’s underwear, a baseball glove and – notoriously – a slice of liver for the Portnoy family dinner. This is a “talking cure” as Freud never envisaged it, a farcical monologue by – this is Roth again – “A lust-ridden, mother-addicted young Jewish bachelor”, a tirade that would “put the id into yid”. Alex is an archetypal Jewish-American son, coincidentally the same age as his creator, and a former “honour student” who’s now working in New York as a civil rights lawyer. His mother would have preferred him to become a doctor, marry and have children, but we are all too aware that her wishes will never be part of her son’s adult life. Alex free associates for Spielvogel with a wild frenzy that some have suggested is owed to the standup comics of Roth’s youth, and perhaps near-contemporaries such as Lenny Bruce. Roth’s response has been to identify his main influence as “a sit-down comic named Franz Kafka”.

More here.

Andrew Pollack in The New York Times:

BERKELEY, Calif. — As a child in Hilo, one of the less touristy parts of Hawaii, Jennifer A. Doudna felt out of place. She had blond hair and blue eyes, and she was taller than the other kids, who were mostly of Polynesian and Asian descent. “I think to them I looked like a freak,” she recently recalled. “And I felt like a freak.” Her isolation contributed to a kind of bookishness that propelled her toward science. Her upbringing “toughened her up,” said her husband, Jamie Cate. “She can handle a lot of pressure.” These days, that talent is being put to the test. Three years ago, Dr. Doudna, a biochemist at the University of California, Berkeley, helped make one of the most monumental discoveries in biology: a relatively easy way to alter any organism’s DNA, just as a computer user can edit a word in a document. The discovery has turned Dr. Doudna (the first syllable rhymes with loud) into a celebrity of sorts, the recipient of numerous accolades and prizes. The so-called Crispr-Cas9 genome editing technique is already widely used in laboratory studies, and scientists hope it may one day help rewrite flawed genes in people, opening tremendous new possibilities for treating, even curing, diseases. But now Dr. Doudna, 51, is battling on two fronts to control what she helped create.

While everyone welcomes Crispr-Cas9 as a strategy to treat disease, many scientists are worried that it could also be used to alter genes in human embryos, sperm or eggs in ways that can be passed from generation to generation. The prospect raises fears of a dystopian future in which scientists create an elite population of designer babies with enhanced intelligence, beauty or other traits. Scientists in China reported last month that they had already used the technique in an attempt to change genes in human embryos, though on defective embryos and without real success. Dr. Doudna has been organizing the scientific community to prevent this ethical line from being crossed. “The idea that you would affect evolution is a very profound thing,” she said. She is also fighting for control of what could be hugely lucrative intellectual property rights to the genome editing technique. To the surprise of many, the first sweeping patents for the technology were granted not to her, but to Feng Zhang, a scientist at the Broad Institute and M.I.T. The University of California is challenging the decision, and the nasty skirmish has cast a bit of a pall over the field.

Picture: Dr. Emmanuelle Charpentier and Dr. Doudna, center, with Dick Costolo, Twitter's chief executive, and the actress Cameron Diaz, in November. Each scientist won a $3 million Breakthrough Prize.

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Eric Sealine. Breathing Room, 2012.

Forced perspective construction of wood, Lexan, paint.

More here and here.

K. Sabeel Rahman presents his argument, over at the Boston Review with responses by Juliet B. Schor, Adam Thierer, Arun Sundararajan, Sofia Ranchordás, Dean Baker, Robin Chase, David Bollier, Mike Konczal, and Richard White. Rahman (image by Rodrigo Corral):

Recent commentary on threats posed by Internet companies has drawn on the language of antitrust and monopoly. In a provocative New Republic essay last year, Franklin Foer argued that Amazon represented a modern form of monopoly; like U.S. Steel and the monopolies of the late nineteenth century, Amazon had acquired the power to unfairly discriminate on the market. But unlike those monopolies, Foer argued, Amazon has kept consumer prices low, obscuring its market power. According to Paul Krugman, Amazon is a different kind of monopoly. It does not extract rents from consumers but rather operates as a monopsony, a company whose buying power allows it to discriminate against suppliers. Google too is the subject of monopoly concerns thanks to its dominance in information gathering and its growing political influence. Former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich used the same analogy to nineteenth-century monopolies in his critique of Comcast.

In contemporary antitrust regulation, however, the central question is whether concentrations of economic and market power enable extractive or unfair consumer prices. On that metric, it is hard to show how Amazon and other Internet companies use power in harmful ways. If these companies lower prices and increase access for consumers, how could they be considered dangerous? Defenders of these companies also point out that they face competitors in the marketplace: Amazon does not control the retail sector; on paper, at least, Google has rivals in search; at the national level, Comcast faces competition in Internet service provision.

The kinds of power that Amazon, Comcast, and companies such as Airbnb and Uber possess can’t be seen or tackled via conventional antitrust regulations. These companies are not, strictly speaking, monopolies; Uber and Airbnb, in particular, do not engage in the kind of price-fixing or market dominance that is the usual target of antitrust regulation today. These companies are better understood as platforms or utilities: they provide a core, infrastructural service upon which other firms, individuals, and social groups depend. For instance, the publisher Hachette depends on Amazon to access the book-buying public. This dependency operates in the other direction as well. Consumers depend on the diligence of Airbnb and Uber to ensure that services contracted through them are safe and as advertised.

A platform thus presents a uniquely troubling form of private power that manifests in its ability to set not just prices but also the wages or returns for producers, and, most importantly, the terms of access to the marketplace itself.

More here.

Richard Marshall interviews Markus Gabriel in 3:AM Magazine:

3:AM: Let’s start with your arguments about ontology. You argue that the world doesn’t exist and you want to be very clear that this isn’t what Kant, Heidegger or Gadamer might claim and then smuggle in a way round the claim – cheating! So can you first outline what philosophical position you are disagreeing with with your ‘real predicate’ argument? Metaphysics of a certain stripe collapses according to your idea doesn’t it?

MG: I agree with certain versions of the famous Kantian line of thought according to which existence is not what I call a proper property. In the first step of the overall argument, by a “proper property” I mean a property reference to which puts one in a position to distinguish an object in the world from other objects in the world. Existence certainly is not a property that divides the world up into two realms: that of the existing things on the one hand and that of the non-existing things (things lacking the feature of existence) on the other hand. That would be a weird world-picture.

Against this background, Kant has argued that existence is world-containment, that is, the world’s property to contain spatiotemporal individuals. On this construal, existence is precisely not a proper property of individuals. To assert that some object x exists is to say something about the world, namely that x is to be found in the world. However, this immediately raises the question whether the world itself can exist on this model? Is the world contained by the world? What exactly is the relation of containment supposed to be? Is the world some kind of set or a mereological whole? Would it even make sense to say that the world is a spatiotemporal individual located within the world and to be met with in it? What kind of totality is the world? All of Kant’s answers hinge on his notion of the world as the “field of possible experience” (CPR, A 227/B 280f.).

This creates all sorts of problems. Yet, what is right about his view is that to exist is a property of a field or a domain and not an ordinary discriminatory property of objects we encounter within the domain. As I read him, Kant distinguished between questions concerning the existence of individuals (which he takes to be a function mapping individuals onto the field of possible experience) and questions concerning the world itself. The latter, metaphysical questions, for him, are famously unanswerable.

If this is right, the question is what we mean when in metaphysics we search for the furniture of reality or the fundamental structure of the world. If “the world” is explicitly or implicitly modeled along the lines of a huge spatio-temporal container inhabited by the totality of individuals, this creates the problem that it is entirely unclear in what sense such a container is supposed to exist.

More here.

The plus team in Plus Magazine:

Statistics about sex are not all equally good. Some, like the number of births in a given year, are cast-iron facts, but others are much harder to come by. The number of sexual partners is a good example. The mismatch above comes from the third The National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles (Natsal), conducted between 2010 and 2012, in which men reported having had 14 sexual partners, on average, and women 7. Studies have suggested that women give lower numbers when they fear the survey isn't entirely confidential, something that doesn't seem to affect men (contrary to my expectation, it doesn't induce them to exaggerate). So that's one possible explanation for the mismatch: sadly, women still need to fear social stigma.

But there are other explanations too. One is that men (more than women) may have some of their sexual experience with sex workers. These aren't included in the surveys, so their experiences are missing from the female tally. Another is that there are different attitudes as to what counts as a sexual partner. If a woman feels she's been coerced by a man, for example, she may not want to count him.

More here.

Kai Wright in The Nation:

Allen Bullock became an unwitting star of the Baltimore riots. In a photo splashed across the front page of The Baltimore Sun, the 18-year-old stood on the hood of a cop car, smashing the windshield with an orange cone. It was a striking portrait of the youthful rage that has forced everyone from President Obama to Geraldo Rivera to belatedly notice West Baltimore’s pain.

Bullock’s well-meaning parents urged him to turn himself in to the police. “We wanted Allen to do the right thing,” his mother told The Guardian. That sentiment plunged the family into a trick bag of morality that black people routinely encounter when they brush up against the criminal-justice system. For smashing that window, Bullock is being held on $500,000 bail and faces a sentence of four to eight years in prison. Bail for the six officers charged with taking Freddie Gray’s life topped out at $350,000. We couldn’t ask for a starker example of property being valued higher than black life.

Whether Bullock and his peers had already done “the right thing” by erupting in the streets of Baltimore will remain the subject of debate for some time. What’s clear, though, is that their rioting prompted a remarkable shift in the public discussion over police violence. What had been a narrow debate about cops opened up into something larger—and more honest.

More here.

David P Barash in Aeon:

There is something peculiarly — even paradoxically — appealing about taking a dim view of human nature, a view that has become unquestioned dogma among many evolutionary biologists. It is a tendency that began some time ago. When the Australian-born anthropologist Raymond Dart discovered the first australopithecine fossil in 1924, he went on to describe these early hominids as:
Confirmed killers: carnivorous creatures that seized living quarries by violence, battered them to death, tore apart their broken bodies, dismembered them limb from limb, slaking their ravenous thirst with the hot blood of the victims and greedily devouring living writhing flesh.

This lurid perspective has deep antecedents, notably in certain branches of Christian doctrine. According to the zealous 16th century French theologian John Calvin:
The mind of man has been so completely estranged from God’s righteousness that it conceives, desires, and undertakes, only that which is impious, perverted, foul, impure and infamous. The human heart is so steeped in the poison of sin, that it can breathe out nothing but a loathsome stench.

It’s bad enough for the religious believer to be convinced of humanity’s irrevocable sinfulness, punishable in the afterlife. But I’m even more concerned when those who speak for science and reason promote a theory of human nature that threatens to become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

More here.

My Father-in-law at Twenty

when mother-in-law is in China
father-in-law will take off his shirt
unwire the ancestral wok from the ancestral nail
mix salt and steam and cigarette ash into the fried rice
he learned to make in London.

in London when he was twenty
standing by a snowy statue in Trafalgar Square
someone taking black and white woman
in an expensive white hat.

he handsome in a dark suit
speaking dishwater English yet
the way he held his cigarette
the way he leaned towards her
dismissed the camera the cold
the woman must have understood.

I have seen those pictures
my wife knows where they are hid
and he once told me when others were in bed
how on the ship from Hong Kong to London
there was more than one fistfight with gweilo
except when the ship stopped in Egypt
a ceasefire to see the Sphinx

he has lost the photos, he says,
smiling,
coughing,
checking his heart,
blowing smoke away from me,
too long ago.

for my father-in-law at twenty
the sands of Egypt spicy under his feet
fists bloodied against condensation
stacks of unwashed dishes awaiting his arrival in London
and a mysterious white woman
smiling at him from under an expensive white hat
the riddles of the Sphinx must once have seemed
no more difficult than striking a match on ice.
.

by Timothy Kaiser
from Yuan Yang, Vol.1

Judith Shulevitz in The New York Times:

As I was thinking about Mother's Day today and read the article below in the NYT, I remembered the following which validates the thesis presented: I once asked my mother that she had raised seven children, did she have a favorite? She promptly said, yes, of course. I was so shocked at this blatant admission and the first thought I had was I will kill myself if it is not me. Who, I demanded nervously. She wisely responded, 'Anyone of you who is vulnerable at the moment becomes my favorite and all my love and attention becomes focused on that child. So all of you have taken turns to be my favorite'.

THERE’S a story my daughter loves to hear me tell: The day after I came home from the hospital with her big brother, my first child, I was seized by the certainty that I was about to die. I sobbed; I asked my husband: “But who will keep him in socks? Who’ll make sure he’s wearing his little socks?” “Didn’t you think Daddy could put the socks on?” my daughter exclaims, delighted that I’d been so ridiculous. “I wasn’t sure he’d remember,” I say, “or have enough on hand.” New parenthood, of course, does things to your brain. But I was on to something, in my deranged, postpartum way. I should state for the record that my husband is perfectly handy with socks. Still, the parent more obsessed with the children’s hosiery is the one who’ll make sure it’s in stock. And the shouldering of that one task can cascade into responsibility for the whole assembly line of childhood. She who buys the bootees will surely buy the bottle washer, just as she’ll probably find the babysitter and pencil in the class trips. I don’t mean to say that she’ll be the one to do everything, just that she’ll make sure that most everything gets done. Sociologists sometimes call the management of familial duties “worry work,” and the person who does it the “designated worrier,” because you need large reserves of emotional energy to stay on top of it all.

I wish I could say that fathers and mothers worry in equal measure. But they don’t. Disregard what your two-career couple friends say about going 50-50. Sociological studies of heterosexual couples from all strata of society confirm that, by and large, mothers draft the to-do lists while fathers pick and choose among the items. And whether a woman loves or hates worry work, it can scatter her focus on what she does for pay and knock her partway or clean off a career path. This distracting grind of apprehension and organization may be one of the least movable obstacles to women’s equality in the workplace. IT’S surprising that household supervision resists gender reassignment to the degree that it does. In the United States today, more than half of all women work, and women are 40 percent of the sole or primary breadwinners in households with children under 18. The apportionment of the acts required to keep home and family together has also been evening out during the past 40 years (though, for housework, this is more because women have sloughed it off than because men have taken it on). Nonetheless, “one of the last things to go is women keeping track of the kind of nonroutine details of taking care of children — when they have to go to the doctor, when they need a permission slip for school, paying attention at that level,” says the social psychologist Francine Deutsch, author of “Halving It All: How Equally Shared Parenting Works.”

More here.

Daniel Okrent in the New York Times:

It’s been nearly half a century since David McCullough published “The Johns­town Flood,” which initiated his career as our matchless master of popular history. His 10th book, “The Wright Brothers,” has neither the heft of his earlier volumes nor, in its intense focus on a short period in its subjects’ lives, the grandness of vision that made those works as ambitious as they were compelling. Yet this is nonetheless unmistakably McCullough: a story of timeless importance, told with uncommon empathy and fluency.

It does not begin promisingly. The first 30 or so pages consist of a somewhat desultory recounting of early years in the Wright household. But then 32-year-old Wilbur writes a letter to the Smithsonian, requesting any papers they have, or know of, regarding human flight. “I am an enthusiast,” he assures whoever might open the letter, “but not a crank in the sense that I have some pet theories as to the proper construction of a flying machine.”

Did he ever. There is no fortuity in the Wright brothers’ saga as related by McCullough, no unexpected events that changed their course. Except for Orville’s startling emergence from a horrible wreck during one of his flights, there’s not even any luck. Neither brother attended college, nor had been trained in physics or engineering, yet each step they took was not only correct but in many cases brilliant, and in nearly all cases original. That every one of those steps was also achieved through excruciating patience and obsessive attention to detail does not diminish the only word that can express what Wilbur, particularly, possessed: genius.

McCullough shows how endless calculation, application and recalculation led them to determine the proper shape of the wing, the means of manipulating its angle into the wind, how to compensate for the weight of the engine.

More here.

Peter Byrne in Scientific American:

For more than 20 years, Ivan Deutsch has struggled to design the guts of a working quantum computer. He has not been alone. The quest to harness the computational might of quantum weirdness continues to occupy thousands of researchers around the world. Why hasn’t there been more to show for their work? As physicists have known since quantum computing’s beginnings, the same characteristics that make quantum computing exponentially powerful also make it devilishly difficult to control. The quantum computing “nightmare” has always been that a quantum computer’s advantages in speed would be wiped out by the machine’s complexity.

Yet progress is arriving on two main fronts. First, researchers are developing unique quantum error-correction techniques that will help keep quantum processors up and running for the time needed to complete a calculation. Second, physicists are working with so-called analog quantum simulators—machines that can’t act like a general-purpose computer, but rather are designed to explore specific problems in quantum physics. A classical computer would have to run for thousands of years to compute the quantum equations of motion for just 100 atoms. A quantum simulator could do it in less than a second.

Quanta magazine spoke with Deutsch about recent progress in the field, his hopes for the near future, and his own work on scaling up binary quantum bits into base-16 digits.

QUANTA MAGAZINE: Why would a universal quantum machine be so uniquely powerful?

IVAN DEUTSCH: In a classical computer, information is stored in retrievable bits binary coded as 0 or 1. But in a quantum computer, elementary particles inhabit a probabilistic limbo called superposition where a “qubit” can be coded as 0 and 1.

Here is the magic: Each qubit can be entangled with the other qubits in the machine. The intertwining of quantum “states” exponentially increases the number of 0s and 1s that can be simultaneously processed by an array of qubits. Machines that can harness the power of quantum logic can deal with exponentially greater levels of complexity than the most powerful classical computer. Problems that would take a state-of-the-art classical computer the age of our universe to solve, can, in theory, be solved by a universal quantum computer in hours.

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Zaheer Kazmi in The Brooklyn Rail:

The Sears Tower in Chicago, renamed the Willis Tower in 2009, was once renowned for being the tallest skyscraper in the world, outstripping even the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers in its bid to reach the heavens. It too stands fantastically high—an awesome testament to human ingenuity, American power, and hubris.

In his musical homage to Illinois, the American songwriter, Sufjan Stevens, weaves together a collection of allusive, often dark and beautiful vignettes about the Prairie State subtly suffused with a spirit of Biblical mysticism. In the haunting song, “The Seer’s Tower,” evoking images of the Tower of Babel, Stevens intones ominously about the “tower above the earth […] built for Emmanuel.”

Seven miles above the earth,
There is Emmanuel of mothers.
With his sword, with his robe,
He comes dividing man from brothers.

Like God’s fateful decision to alienate the living from one another at Babel by creating intractable differences between them, the earthly arrival of the son of God, foretold in the prophecy of Emmanuel, also presaged division and conflict in the city of man. Once God is among us, a sacred unity is broken. Between the believers and the damned, the harbingers of divine truth leave only violence in their wake.

The play on the words, “Seer/Sear,” in the title of Stevens’s song conjures up prophetic visions and the violence they portend as much as the God’s eye view of the city from the top of the Chicago landmark.

More here.