Adam Kirsch in Tablet:

Today most Americans would be surprised to learn that the original ghettos were inhabited by Jews. That is the experience Mitchell Duneier relates in his new book Ghetto: The Invention of a Place, the History of an Idea, when it comes to teaching his own students at Princeton about the history of the ghetto. For the last 70 years, Duneier shows, the word “ghetto” has for Americans become exclusively associated with poor black neighborhoods, especially in big cities like New York and Chicago. Few people know that, for centuries before America even existed, Jews in many European cities were legally confined to walled neighborhoods known as ghettos. (“Ghetto” is the Italian word for “foundry”; the first Jewish enclave in Venice was located on the same island as a foundry, and the word came to refer to the neighborhood by extension.)

When it comes to understanding the black American ghetto, can we learn anything from the history of the European Jewish ghetto? It is a tricky question, which Duneier addresses carefully, since it seems to invite comparisons about who was more victimized and more resilient. Yet as he tells the story of the evolution of American thinking about the black ghetto—primarily through the lens of successive generations of academic sociologists, from Gunnar Myrdal to William Julius Wilson—the Jewish ghetto refuses to disappear. It haunts the subject like a ghost, raising questions that continue to define the way sociologists think about ghettos today.

Matters are complicated by the fact that, during the Holocaust, the word “ghetto” took on a very different freight than the one it had traditionally carried. Ghettos like the ones in Venice or Frankfurt were poor, isolated neighborhoods subject to discrimination and surveillance; but they were places where Jews lived and where their culture and civilization sometimes thrived. These ghettos had almost all disappeared by the 20th century, as European countries abolished official discrimination against Jews. It was the Nazis who brought the word back into common use when they created their own Jewish ghettos in occupied cities like Warsaw and Vilna. But the Nazi ghettos were not places for Jews to live; they were places for Jews to die of starvation and disease, or to await death in the gas chambers.

More here.

Salil Tripathi in Live Mint:

Sixty years ago this month, film critics Lindsay Anderson, Georges Sadoul and Lotte Eisner joined filmmaker Jules Dassin to prevail upon Dassin’s co-jurists at the Cannes Film Festival to give a little-known black-and-white film another chance. Many of them had missed that film at its first screening, but they trooped in to see it. The film was made on location and had a bunch of unknown actors who seemed so natural that it appeared they were living out their lives in front of the cameras. And the critics were transfixed.

Later that week, the jury honoured the film, Satyajit Ray’sPather Panchali, with the award for the best human document. The long journey Ray had begun almost five years earlier, staking everything including his wife’s jewellery and convincing the chief minister of West Bengal to become the film’s producer, had reached a resounding end.

Ray had made that film based on Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay’s elegiac tale set in rural Bengal. The Cannes honour has stood the test of time. Sixty years later,Pather Panchali resonates with freshness and with what critics have called its lyrical humanism. There is poetry in that film—in its silences, its imagery, its starkness—and there is humanity. Pather Panchali shines.

More here.

Jessa Crispin in Boston Review:

Two weeks after I left the United States for a stay in Germany, I found myself nearly incapacitated by nausea, pain, dizziness, and fatigue. I had moved to Berlin on my own. I knew no one in the city and barely spoke the language. My American health insurance did me no good, and I had not yet set up German coverage.

Alone, with no one to care for me, I dragged myself to daily doctor appointments. I stumbled around grocery stores, trying to cope with the nationwide lack of Saltine crackers when everything I ate immediately came back up. And every day, I worked from my bed, with my laptop laid warmly on my chest. Freelance writers do not get sick leave. After about ten days of this, I had a quick outpatient surgery, paid for with cash. I woke up from the anesthesia, still alone, in a small, curtained cubicle, only to find the clinic would not release me unless someone picked me up. I called the only local whose phone number I had, a German guy I had met at a party on one of my first days in the country. “This is going to sound weird . . . .” But he was a war photographer, and he handled it well. “I once had to have surgery in rural Nigeria,” he told me as he bundled me into his car.

While reading Rebecca Traister’s All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation, I often thought of this episode. In her examination of America’s fast-growing unmarried population, Traister makes single life sound so romantic. She is married now, but she looks back on singlehood as a period of ease and freedom. If bad things happened to her, it was only the universe demonstrating how much she could overcome. Her great challenge was transporting an air conditioner to her apartment. Turns out, it wasn’t that hard. She got a taxi, and then her landlord helped her carry it up the stairs. She felt empowered.

My story does not make me feel empowered. It makes me feel lucky. I was lucky that German law allows even uninsured people to obtain treatment at a price I could afford. I was lucky to have had surgery early enough to fix my problem. But with luck comes fear.

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Eliana Osborne in The Morning News:

I believe that my soul is eternal. It was before I was here and it will remain when my body is worm-ridden. Rather than a comfort in my life, this has been a trial to me. I don’t want to have a life after this one. The idea of forever horrifies my mind and churns my stomach. I like endings. They make sense. Continuation? That seems like hell. I hope that when this stage is done my mind will comprehend better rather than fear. I was raised in a religious family, though that has little to do with my own faith. I’ve always felt the presence of God in my life and feel connected to Him. Some view that as a gift of the spirit, but that surety has stressed me out as often as it has comforted me. I hesitate to call my belief faith, so clear it seems to me that I couldn’t turn it off if I tried (and I have).

Actively, I am not looking to die. But it wouldn’t really bother me. I don’t want to make life challenging for my kids but for myself? I’ve got no worries on the subject. As you might imagine, people don’t generally enjoy talking to me about The Big Picture. I truly don’t understand how the myriad Christians I know, who profess to believe that resurrection is available, are terrified of death. My mother says she’s just not ready now. Others say they fear the pain and suffering before death. Both arguments make sense, I suppose—the theoretical is always different than the personal. And no one, not even the most sanguine, would invite excruciating pain into her life. But really, if you believe, shouldn’t you be cool with it?

More here.

Winter

When the new room was built my mother showed me What To Do In Case Of Fire. There were
four metal rungs embedded in the balcony wall: this was the escape route. She did not show me
(then) the other one.

What happened was, my mother was very very sad. She was so sad she could not hold up her
head, she could not sit down, she could not lie down, she could not see out of the dark, my very
sad mum.

In the course of my research I learned a new kind of love. This lesson taught me to pray. I made
a prayer for my mother. By ‘prayer’ I mean a meditation on a want that can never be answered.
A prayer for the dead alive inside the living. That’s what it is to burn a flame. We were in the
darkest days of winter, approaching the celebration of light.

I watched the white men in their pastel coats / Roll you up and put you away / They put you
inside their white box / With its clicks and locks / And carried you far away
.

by Emily Berry
from The Poetry Review
Vol. 105, No.4, Winter 2015
.

From Kurzweil AI:

The results of two Yale University psychology experiments suggest that what we believe to be a conscious choice may actually be constructed, or confabulated, unconsciously after we act — to rationalize our decisions. A trick of the mind. “Our minds may be rewriting history,” said Adam Bear, a Ph.D. student in the Department of Psychology and lead author of a paper published April 28 in the journal Psychological Science. Bear and Paul Bloom performed two simple experiments to test how we experience choices. In one experiment, participants were told that five white circles would appear on the computer screen in front of them and, in rapid-fire sequence, one would turn red. They were asked to predict which one would turn red and mentally note this. After a circle turned red, participants then recorded by keystroke whether they had chosen correctly, had chosen incorrectly, or had not had time to complete their choice. The circle that turned red was always selected by the system randomly, so probability dictates that participants should predict the correct circle 20% of the time. But when they only had a fraction of a second to make a prediction, these participants were likely to report that they correctly predicted which circle would change color more than 20% of the time. In contrast, when participants had more time to make their guess — approaching a full second — the reported number of accurate predictions dropped back to expected levels of 20% success, suggesting that participants were not simply lying about their accuracy to impress the experimenters. (In a second experiment to eliminate artifacts, participants chose one of two different-colored circles, with similar results.)

Confabulating reality

What happened, Bear suggests, is that events were rearranged in subjects’ minds: People unconsciously perceived the color red from the screen image before they predicted it would appear, but then right after that, consciously experienced these two things in the opposite order. Bear said it is unknown whether this “postdictive” illusion is caused by a quirk in perceptual processing that can only be reproduced in the lab, or whether it might have “far more pervasive effects on our everyday lives and sense of free will.”

More here.

Jamieson Cox in The Verge:

Peter Gabriel, St. Vincent (aka Annie Clark), Jon Hopkins, and Esa-Pekka Salonen are going to help The Sync Project — the initiative headed up by former Nokia design head Marko Ahtisaari — explore the future of musical medicine. The four musicians are joining the collaborative venture as advisors, roles that'll necessitate working with the scientists researching music's therapeutic properties and helping to raise the project's awareness. While they represent a wide range of musical styles and experiences — Gabriel and Clark are art-rock veterans, Hopkins is an accomplished electronic producer, and Salonen conducts the London Philharmonia Orchestra — Ahtisaari is more interested in their value as thinkers than their musical bona fides.

“We're very much looking for musicians and creators who have an active relationship with technology,” says Ahtisaari. “I felt that was a common denominator for everyone, in slightly different ways… It wasn't so much about the contents of the music, or to commission any work. These are creative thinkers — let's involve them.” Ahtisaari had preexisting relationship with Gabriel and Salonen that facilitated their involvement, and he reached out to Hopkins and Clark after consulting with Gabriel, Salonen, and others. “We meet regularly to discuss the product, we show prototypes, we design together. We're engaging them as creative product thinkers.”

The product in question is wildly ambitious: musical treatment programs for medical conditions that match the efficacy of drug-based treatment without subjecting patients to the dangers and side effects of pharmacological programs. Ahtisaari cites treatment for Parkinson's disease as an example.

More here.

Scott Aaronson in Shtetl-Optimized:

I read Kanigel’s The Man Who Knew Infinity in the early nineties; it was a major influence on my life. There were equations in that book to stop a nerdy 13-year-old’s pulse, like

A thousand pages of exposition about Ramanujan’s mysterious self-taught mathematical style, the effect his work had on Hardy and Littlewood, his impact on the later development of analysis, etc., could never replace the experience of just staring at these things! Popularizers are constantly trying to “explain” mathematical beauty by comparing it to art, music, or poetry, but I can best understand art, music, and poetry if I assume other people experience them like the above identities. Across all the years and cultures and continents, can’t you feel Ramanujan himself leaping off your screen, still trying to make you see this bizarre aspect of the architecture of reality that the goddess Namagiri showed him in a dream?

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Peter Coates at The Times Literary Supplement:

The original and unsurpassed cowboy president – though the quartet’s only Easterner, and a New Yorker to boot – was not only an ardent hunter and all-round outdoorsman. The “damned cowboy” (as the Republican Party boss Mark Hanna derided the vice president elevated to the top job when an anarchist assassin killed William McKinley) was also a skilled naturalist and fervent conservationist, as well as a peerless presidential creator of wildlife refuges, national forests, national monuments and national parks. Small wonder that the cover of Otis Graham’s Presidents and the American Environment (2015) shows him at Glacier Point during his 1903 trip to Yosemite.

The pervasive campfire aroma of Roose­velt’s larger-than-life persona is reflected in book titles such as David McCullough’s Mornings on Horseback (1981), Sarah Watts’sRough Rider in the White House (2003) or Candice Millard’s The River of Doubt(2005) – the latter about the near-fatal, post-presidency voyage up Brazil’s Rio da Duvida that proved to be the last major ad­venture before 1919, when the man who’d ­survived countless scrapes met a rather unmemorable end, from a blood clot in his sleep. Roosevelt was the sort of person of whom it was easy to imagine that he, like Leonardo DiCaprio’s character in The Revenant, would have survived a mama grizzly’s mauling, a roller-coaster ride down a raging, frigid river, and a night inside a dead horse. After all, as Michael R. Canfield recounts in this new account of Roosevelt’s relationship with the outdoors, in 1912, in Milwaukee, he pressed on with a scheduled campaign speech despite having just taken an assassin’s bullet in the chest, proceeding to speak for over an hour, as the bloodstain gradually spread across most of his shirt (the bullet was never removed).

more here.

J. Kates at The Harvard Review:

When curmudgeons want to argue the intractability of poetry to translation, one of the first names they pull out of the hat is that of Quintus Horatius Flaccus. It is generally acknowledged that his poetry is about as untranslatable as you can get. Therefore, in the perversity of human endeavor, Horace is probably the most translated poet in the Western world, honored even by the attentions of at least one prime minister of the British Empire, William Ewart Gladstone. “'We love Horace,'” William Peterfield Trent wrote,

“and hence we must try to set him forth in a way to make others love him,” is what all translators, it would seem, say to themselves, consciously or unconsciously, when they decide to publish their respective renditions. And who shall blame them? Where is the critic competent to judge their work, who has not himself listened to the Siren’s song, if but for a moment in his youth, who has not a version of some ode of Horace hid away among his papers, the memory of which will doubtless forever prevent him from flinging a stone at any fellow-offender? [1]

One of Horace's most thoroughly worked-over poems is the fifth ode in his first book ofcarmina. [2] It begins with the speaker of the poem putting a question to a blonde bombshell. Pyrrha—her name actually means “redhead,” but the adjective (flavam) used within the poem to describe her hair means golden yellow—is asked rhetorically who her latest victim might be.

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Matthew Buckley in the Boston Review:

CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is located in a vast tunnel along the France-Switzerland border, 27 kilometers around and 300 feet underground. It was planned, designed, and constructed through a remarkable international effort, extending over a period of nearly twenty-five years at a cost of billions of dollars. Building it required great technical innovations and incredible collaboration by thousands of people. All with the promise of finding one thing: the particle known as the Higgs boson.

After 2000, the Higgs was the only missing piece of the Standard Model of particle physics—the theory that physicists developed in the 1970s to describe the properties of the most fundamental particles of the Universe and how they interact to make up the world as we experience it. As the structure of the Standard Model came into focus, physicists knew there had to be a new kind of quantum field, but less powerful particle accelerators, such as the Tevatron at Fermilab in Illinois and CERN’s own Large Electron-Positron Collider, had failed to detect it.

Even before the LHC was built, we physicists had very high confidence the new accelerator would be able to find it. But if the LHC had not found the Higgs boson, we still would have been incredibly excited. We would have understood that our grasp of nature’s basic components and their interactions was flawed. Contrary to some depictions in popular culture, scientists love to learn that our expectations are wrong.

More here.

Deirdre Serjeantson at The Dublin Review of Books:

When modern readers reach for a great Florentine poet, their hands tend to light on a volume of Dante. Dante had been enormously popular in the late middle ages, and if his overtly Catholic subject matter made him less visible during the English Renaissance, his great revival in the nineteenth century assures his fame in modern times. There is even a computer game based on the Inferno. Petrarch is less accessible: a considerable number of his works, including his Penitential Psalms and many of his letters, have never been translated into English. He survives most prominently as an adjective attached to sonnets by the great writers of the sixteenth century, but the term “Petrarchan” only acknowledges the tradition which built up around the love poetry and ignores the bulk of Petrarch’s achievement. And yet, he is ubiquitous in early-modern literature – a knowledge of Petrarch has the power of bringing a host of more familiar works suddenly into focus. From throwaway jokes about young lovers to political iconography in paintings of Elizabeth I, his writing is one of the keys to reading the Renaissance.

All of this is not to say that Petrarch is neglected. The tradition of scholarship around his works, which began even before his death, continues today. The seven-hundredth anniversary of his death in 2004 saw a number of important international conferences, and their proceedings join other recent books in re-evaluating and celebrating his legacy. These publications, however, constitute a professional literature: the British Academy’s excellent collection of essays, Petrarch in Britain, sells for around €95, which is quite an obstacle in the way of the general reader, no matter how interested he or she might be. This is where the new Cambridge Companion to Petrarch, edited by AR Ascoli and Unn Falkeid, and retailing at closer to €20, comes in.

more here.

Santiago Zabala in the Columbia University Press Blog:

In order to respond to this important question, it is first necessary to emphasize that there isn’t much difference among philosophers, theologians, scientists, or artists when it comes to intellectual freedom. Whatever the training, traditions, or debates the intellectually free are those who know how their disciplines are framed. For example, when the scientist Laurent Ségalat, in his bookLa Science à bout de souffle?, criticized how the management of funds has become more important than search for truth in his field, he was both pointing out what frames his discipline and also exercising intellectual freedom. Only those who thrust us into the“absence of emergency” are intellectually free today.

When Martin Heidegger said in the 1940s that the “only emergency is the absence of emergency,” he was referring to a “frame” (“Ge-stell”), a technological power that had grown beyond our ability to control it. Today this framing power is globalization, where emergencies, as Heidegger specified, do not arise when something doesn’t function correctly but rather when “everything functions . . . and propels everything more and more toward further functioning.” This is why he was so concerned with the specialization and compartmentalization of knowledge that would inevitably limit and frame independent and critical thought. So to be intellectually free today means disclosing the emergency at the core of the absence of emergency, thrusting us into knowledge of those political, technological, and cultural impositions that frame our lives.

The recent passing of the philosopher Umberto Eco, the musician Prince, and the filmmaker Ettore Scola ought to remind us how important intellectual freedom is. Their works have all resisted orthodox interpretations of artistic creation, social stereotypes, and fascistic discrimination.

More here.

Dexter Filkins in The New Yorker:

Hanif got the idea of writing about a nurse in a decrepit hospital. Alice Bhatti (named for his old editor) is a ferociously strong young woman: smart, independent, and rebellious to the point of recklessness. She works as a nurse in the Sacred Heart Hospital for All Ailments, a shambling Catholic institution in Karachi that is corrupt, underfunded, and horrifyingly filthy: rats make nests of human hair; gunnysacks filled with body parts sit in a corner. Alice is Christian, the daughter of a faith healer, from a Christian slum called the French Colony, where Jesus is known as “Lord Yassoo.” She comes from a family of “sweepers,” or janitors, a job performed overwhelmingly by Christians. At the hospital, Alice sees the most vicious tendencies of Karachi—murders and molestations that go unreported, bodies that go unclaimed. She freely mocks the Islamic faith, in concert with her father, who warns her, “These Muslas will make you clean their shit and then complain that you stink.” More than anything, Alice is determined to defend herself from an endless wave of insults and assaults:

There was not a single day—not a single day—when she didn’t see a woman shot or hacked, strangled or suffocated, poisoned or burnt, hanged or buried alive. Suspicious husband, brother protecting his honour, father protecting his honour, son protecting his honour, jilted lover avenging his honour, feuding farmers settling their water disputes, moneylenders collecting their interest: most of life’s arguments, it seemed, got settled by doing various things to a woman’s body.

When a wealthy patient’s relative tries to force Alice to perform oral sex, she slashes his genitals with a razor and dispatches him to the emergency room. “Go to Accidents. And no need to be shy, they get lots of this sort of thing during their night shift,” she says. “And stop screaming.”

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From PhysOrg:

The directions, which came via cell phone, were a little garbled, but as you understood them: “Turn left at the 3rd light and go straight; the restaurant will be on your right side.” Ten minutes ago you made the turn. Still no restaurant in sight. How far will you be willing to drive in the same direction? Research suggests that it depends on your initial level of confidence after getting the directions. Did you hear them right? Did you turn at the 3rd light? Could you have driven past the restaurant? Is it possible the directions are incorrect? Human brains are constantly processing data to make statistical assessments that translate into the feeling we call confidence, according to a study published today in Neuron. This feeling of confidence is central to decision making, and, despite ample evidence of human fallibility, the subjective feeling relies on objective calculations. “The feeling ultimately relies on the same statistical computations a computer would make,” says Professor Adam Kepecs, a neuroscientist at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) and lead author of the new study. “People often focus on the situations where confidence is divorced from reality,” he says. “But if confidence were always error-prone, what would be its function? If we didn't have the ability to optimally assess confidence, we'd routinely find ourselves driving around for hours in this scenario.” Calculating confidence for a statistician involves looking at a set of data—perhaps a sampling of marbles pulled from a bag—and making a conclusion about the entire bag based on that sample. “The feeling of confidence and the objective calculation are related intuitively,” says Kepecs. “But how much so?”

In experiments with human subjects, Kepecs and colleagues therefore tried to control for different factors that can vary from person to person. The aim was to establish what evidence contributed to each decision. In this way they could compare people's reports of confidence with the optimal statistical answer. “If we can quantify the evidence that informs a person's decision, then we can ask how well a statistical algorithm performs on the same evidence,” says Kepecs. He and graduate student Joshua Sanders created video games to compare human and computer performance. They had human volunteers listen to streams of clicking sounds and determine which clicks were faster. Participants rated confidence in each choice on a scale of one (a random guess) to five (high confidence). What Kepecs and his colleagues found was that human responses were similar to statistical calculations. The brain produces feelings of confidence that inform decisions the same way statistics pulls patterns out of noisy data.

More here.

Sally Goerner in Evonomics:

The media has made a cottage industry out of analyzing the relationship between America’s crumbling infrastructure, outsourced jobs, stagnant wages, and evaporating middle class and the rise of anti-establishment presidential candidates Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. Commentators are also tripping all over one another to expound daily on the ineffectual response of America’s political elite – characterized by either bewilderment or a dismissal of these anti-establishment candidates as minor hiccups in the otherwise smooth sailing of status-quo power arrangements. But the pundits are all missing the point: the Trump-Sanders phenomenon signals an American oligarchy on the brink of a civilization-threatening collapse.

The tragedy is that, despite what you hear on TV or read in the paper or online, this collapse was completely predictable. Scientifically speaking, oligarchies always collapse because they are designed to extract wealth from the lower levels of society, concentrate it at the top, and block adaptation by concentrating oligarchic power as well. Though it may take some time, extraction eventually eviscerates the productive levels of society, and the system becomes increasingly brittle. Internal pressures and the sense of betrayal grow as desperation and despair multiply everywhere except at the top, but effective reform seems impossible because the system seems thoroughly rigged. In the final stages, a raft of upstart leaders emerge, some honest and some fascistic, all seeking to channel pent-up frustration towards their chosen ends.

More here.

Petra Bonfert-Taylor in the Washington Post:

Why do smart people enjoy saying that they are bad at math? Few people would consider proudly announcing that they are bad at writing or reading. Our country’s communal math hatred may seem rather innocuous, but a more critical factor is at stake: we are passing on from generation to generation the phobia for mathematics and with that are priming our children for mathematical anxiety. As a result, too many of us have lost the ability to examine a real-world problem, translate it into numbers, solve the problem and interpret the solution.

Mathematics surrounds us, yet we have become accustomed to avoiding numerical thinking at all costs. There is no doubt that bad high school teaching and confusing textbooks are partly to blame. But a more pernicious habit does the most damage. We are perpetuating damaging myths by telling ourselves a few untruths: math is inherently hard, only geniuses understand it, we never liked math in the first place and nobody needs math anyway.

Often adults are well-meaning when telling children about their own math phobia: after all, won’t it make the children feel better if they know that others feel that way as well? Research shows the answer is a resounding “no.”

More here.

Dominic Frisby in Aeon:

The impact of record-keeping on the course of history cannot be overstated. For example, the act of preserving Judaism and Christianity in written form enabled both to outlive the plethora of other contemporary religions, which were preserved only orally. William the Conqueror’s Domesday Book, compiled in 1086, was still being used to settle land disputes as late as the 1960s. Today there is a new system of digital record-keeping. Its impact could be equally large. It is called the blockchain.

Imagine an enormous digital record. Anyone with internet access can look at the information within: it is open for all to see. Nobody is in charge of this record. It is not maintained by a person, a company or a government department, but by 8,000-9,000 computers at different locations around the world in a distributed network. Participation is quite voluntary. The computers’ owners choose to add their machines to the network because, in exchange for their computer’s services, they sometimes receive payment. You can add your computer to the network, if you so wish.

All the information in the record is permanent – it cannot be changed – and each of the computers keeps a copy of the record to ensure this. If you wanted to hack the system, you would have to hack every computer on the network – and this has so far proved impossible, despite many trying, including the US National Security Agency’s finest.

More here.