Aleksandar Hemon at Lapham's Quarterly:

I’m of a staunch belief that anything that can be said and thought in one language can be thought and said in another. The words might have a different value or interpretative aura, but there is always more than enough overlapping not to dismiss the project of translation, which is essential not only to the project of literature, but to the project of humanity as well.

But then there is the Bosnian word kata­strofa, which, most obviously, comes from the same Greek word (katastrophe [καταστροφή], meaning overturning) as its English counterpartcatastrophe. But in Bosnian—or at least in the language my family uses—katastrofa has a substantially different value and applicability than catastrophe has in English. We use it all the time, deploying it in the contexts that would be less appropriate in English. My mother would thus reprimand my father by saying, “Ti si, ćale, katastrofa!” (translatable as: You, Pop, are a catastrophe!) because he left a trail of dirty socks all the way to the bedroom. Or my father, in his report on a pipe bursting in their house wall, would use katastrofa to refer to the necessity of digging through said wall to find the source of the leak. My sister, who lives in London, would describe the leaden January skies depressingly looming over England and her head as katastrofa. And I could apply katastrofa to, say, the inability of Liverpool FC to defend corner kicks, or to the realization that I’m in the bathroom without toilet paper and the nearest roll is a hallway away. One of the few Bosnian words Teri understands is katastrofa, mainly by way of hearing me bemoan various unfortunate turns of events.

more here.

Amartya Sen in New Statesman:

It cannot be said that the European ­Union is doing particularly well at this time. Its economic performance has been mostly terrible, with high unemployment and low economic expansion, and the political union itself is showing many signs of fragility. It is not hard to understand the temptation of many in Britain to call it a day and “go home”. And yet it would be a huge mistake for Britain to leave the EU. The losses would be great, and the gains quite puny. And the “home” to go back to no longer exists in the way it did when Britannia ruled the waves.

…The proposal of Brexit is born out of panic, and it is as important to see that the reasoning behind the panic is hasty and weak as it is to recognise that wisdom is rarely born of fright. In his Nexus Lecture, called “The Idea of Europe”, given a dozen years ago, George Steiner wondered about the prospects for Europe playing a leadership role in the pursuit of humanism in the world. He argued: “If it can purge itself of its own dark heritage, by confronting that heritage unflinchingly, the Europe of Montaigne and Erasmus, of Voltaire and Immanuel Kant may, once again, give guidance.” Brexit would certainly be a bad economic move, but the threat that it carries is very much larger than that.

More here.

Susan Schneider in KurzweilAI:

Some things in life cannot be offset by a mere net gain in intelligence. The last few years have seen the widespread recognition that sophisticated AI is under development. Bill Gates, Stephen Hawking, and others warn of the rise of “superintelligent” machines: AIs that outthink the smartest humans in every domain, including common sense reasoning and social skills. Superintelligence could destroy us, they caution. In contrast, Ray Kurzweil, a Google director of engineering, depicts a technological utopia bringing about the end of disease, poverty and resource scarcity. Whether sophisticated AI turns out to be friend or foe, we must come to grips with the possibility that as we move further into the 21st century, the greatest intelligence on the planet may be silicon-based. It is time to ask: could these vastly smarter beings have conscious experiences — could it feel a certain way to be them? When we experience the warm hues of a sunrise, or hear the scream of an espresso machine, there is a felt quality to our mental lives. We are conscious.

A superintelligent AI could solve problems that even the brightest humans are unable to solve, but being made of a different substrate, would it have conscious experience? Could it feel the burning of curiosity, or the pangs of grief? Let us call this “the problem of AI consciousness.” If silicon cannot be the basis for consciousness, then superintelligent machines — machines that may outmode us or even supplant us — may exhibit superior intelligence, but they will lack inner experience. Further, just as the breathtaking android in Ex Machina convinced Caleb that she was in love with him, so too, a clever AI may behave as if it is conscious. In an extreme, horrifying case, humans upload their brains, or slowly replace the parts of their brains underlying consciousness with silicon chips, and in the end, only non-human animals remain to experience the world. This would be an unfathomable loss. Even the slightest chance that this could happen should give us reason to think carefully about AI consciousness.

The philosopher David Chalmers has posed “the hard problem of consciousness,” asking: why does all this information processing need to feel a certain way to us, from the inside? The problem of AI consciousness is not just Chalmers’ hard problem applied to the case of AI, though. For the hard problem of consciousness assumes that we are conscious.

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Jessica Johnson in The New Republic:

One of the most pure and innocent of decisions, at least in theory, is the ritual of choosing a flavor in an ice cream shop. There, behind the counter, is the bounty of options ranging from the classic (vanilla, chocolate) to the nostalgic (rocky road, butter pecan) to the exotic (what is in that blue barrel over in the corner?). Somewhere in the frosty air hangs the suggestion that whatever selection we end up with will be uniquely “us”—along with an idea that, whatever everyone else gets, all options are uniquely good.

A cone of ice cream, one vanilla and one chocolate, appear on the two different covers, one red and one blue, of You May Also Like: Taste in an Age of Endless Choice, Tom Vanderbilt’s new book on the mechanisms of the aesthetic world. Vanderbilt suggests there is probably very little that is natural, independent, or even “right” about any of our choices. “The more a person’s experience with a product matches his expectation, the more he will like it, and vice versa,” he writes, reporting on a research facility that develops M.R.E. rations. It turns out the reason soldiers can tolerate the same bland food for months may also be why your mother always orders vanilla. Human beings are wired both for familiarity and novelty, the gas-and-brake system of evolution. While an initial arc of appreciation for what’s new and exciting quickly tapers, the familiar has longevity—perhaps also reflecting some innate biological prejudice against extremes. In other words, “What did not kill you last time is good for you this time.”

In the hallways of the Louvre, Vanderbilt finds further insight into the wisdom of crowds: Visitors marvel at the Mona Lisa over, say, a lesser-known work nearby, because they have already been told to expect a masterpiece.

More here.

Nona Robinson in Inference:

Umberto Eco died in Milan on February 19, 2016. Like the mathematician Giuseppe Peano, Eco was born in the Piedmont, the rice-growing region of Italy that slopes upward toward the Alps. There is a current of sympathy that flows between the two men. Peano was much taken with a form of Latin stripped of its declensions, what he called Latino sine flexione, and argued for its adoption in a paper published in the Revue de Mathématiques. A masterpiece in its own way, the paper begins in classical Latin and by its end is expressed entirely in pidgin; had he kept it up, Peano would, no doubt, have invented Italian. Like Peano, Eco was an accomplished Latinist, an incurable erudito, a great poker into obscure facts. His family name, an acronym of the phrase ex caelis oblatus (a gift from the skies), was bestowed by a city official on his grandfather, a foundling.

Eco studied medieval philosophy and literature at the University of Turin, writing his thesis on the aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas—Il problema estetico in San Tommaso. In the preface to the 1970 Italian edition of Il problema, Cristina Farronato argued that what originally inspired Eco to write about Aquinas was his immersion in the Thomistic religious universe. Fair enough. But while writing his dissertation, she adds, Eco “distanced himself more and more from [its] spiritual content and was left with a methodological experience.”¹ This might suggest an enveloping sense of aridity on Eco’s part. Readers who know nothing of Eco’s story-telling gusto might imagine that he often required a glass of water.

Not at all. Eco was wet by nature.

More here.

Justin E. H. Smith in his own blog:

Elon Musk, the billionaire inventor and amateur futurologue, has recently taken to the idea that we may all be living in a simulation akin to Second Life. He has been influenced in his thinking by the philosopher Nick Bostrom, though something of the latter's rigour has been lost as the argument is translated into a version suitable to capture the imagination of a global 'thought leader', who, in turn, is positioned to get the rest of us talking about it. Of course some of us can remember talking about it before either of these men forced it into the zeitgeist, perhaps in an informal setting where the exploratory mood was enhanced by a joint and we found ourselves starting our sentences with, “Whoah, what if, like…” But now the adventure of ideas, of which any stoner is capable, and indeed of which our ancestors millennia before the invention of video games were capable, has been given weight by the interest of an Oxford philosopher, and cachet by the derivative interest of a rich person. And now when people talk about it they will not say, “Whoah, what if, like…” and they will probably not have a joint in hand. They will soberly, straight-facedly say to their coworkers, “I read this one expert who…” or, more succinctly, “They say that…”

You do not need to be a Heideggerian to be wary of 'the they'.

It is certainly possible that we are living in a simulation, if by this we mean that things are not as they appear, that reality is not just brute stuff sitting there on its own. This is a possibility that has been contemplated in various ways by great minds for quite some time now, and that has provided fuel for the wild speculations of not-so-great minds for just as long. What is new is the way in which one manoeuvres into the appearance of expertise by doing nothing more than being very wealthy and deciding to take up the social role of a visionary. What Musk has done is to update an ancient possibility, to cause it to appear as something never-before-thought when in truth it is only a repackaging and a re-enchantment.

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Amanda Kolson Hurley at Architect Magazine:

A quick detour for context: Among the few designers who focus on the suburbs today, most fall into a camp that I’ll call the Reformers. Led by the New Urbanists, this group believes that suburban development seriously imperils the climate, and that typical suburban living patterns are bad for public health, community spirit, and individual well-being. You can probably guess what the solution is: Make suburbs more like cities. Suburban Nation, by Andrés Duany, FAIA, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, FAIA, and Jeff Speck (North Point Press, 2001), is a manifesto in this mold, while Retrofitting Suburbia(Wiley, 2011), by Ellen Dunham-Jones and June Williamson, gathers practical case studies of sprawling zones that, like caterpillars into butterflies, have morphed into urban districts.

MIT’s CAU, on the other hand, seems to be rallying its own troops around a very different agenda. Let’s call them the Validators. They believe that suburbia is fundamentally OK. They maintain that when people have options, they will usually choose to live in a single-family home in the suburbs, and for intellectuals to resist this is classist and perverse. Validators point out (correctly) that the much-hyped urban revival we keep reading about is mostly limited to affluent white Gen Xers and Millennials. At the conference, economist Jed Kolko analyzed recent census data to show that on the whole, America continues to suburbanize.

more here.

Lorraine Daston at The Point:

Some of you may be mentally re-parsing my title to something more like “Can Liberal Education Be Saved from the Sciences?” For today’s embattled humanities, the sciences have come to stand for the antithesis of what is now understood to constitute the content and values of a liberal education, namely: the cultivation of the intellectual and artistic traditions of diverse cultures past and present, the assertion of the generalist’s prerogatives over those of the specialist, and the defense of non-utilitarian values as preparation for civic engagement in the cause of the commonweal. In contrast, what are currently known as the STEM disciplines—science, technology, engineering and mathematics—stand for knowledge that is presumed universal and uniform, for narrow specialization and, above all, for applications that are useful and often lucrative. A comparative glance at the budgets for the sciences and for the disciplines that constitute the core of the Core seems to tell it all: it’s not the sciences that need saving, most certainly not by the likes of liberal education, a minnow—a starving minnow, at that—sent out to rescue a fat and sassy whale.

Nonetheless, I’m sticking to my original title. In the scant time allotted, I’m going to gallop through the history of the place of the sciences and mathematics in the liberal education curriculum, from the medieval university through the present. This is a history that packs some surprises. I’ll then draw some lessons for the place of the sciences in a liberal education for the here and now.

more here.

Dan Chiasson at The New Yorker:

“One rainy day in the spring of 1960, the San Francisco poet Robert Duncan arrived at my door,” Adrienne Rich wrote in her essay “A Communal Poetry.” Duncan was a daemonic bard with a Homeric attitude, who often wore a black cape and a broad-brimmed hat. Rich made him tea while trying to comfort her sick son, who moved between the high chair and her lap; Duncan, whom Rich cautiously admired, “began speaking almost as soon as he entered the house” and “never ceased.” Later, driving him to Boston in the rain, Rich realized that her car was on empty and pulled into a gas station. Throughout it all, Duncan, the oracle, was still talking about “poetry, the role of the poet, myth.” Apparently, Rich’s “role” was to make tea for him, and to keep things like sick children and empty gas tanks from interrupting the great man’s groove. Rich concluded, generously, that Duncan’s “deep attachment to a mythological Feminine” made it hard for him to manage “so unarchetypal a person as an actual struggling woman caring for a sick child.”

Rich, who died in 2012, had these kinds of run-ins with literary men throughout her life. Her father was an eminent doctor and a professor at the Johns Hopkins medical school, who made her copy out verses from Blake and Keats from an early age, and graded the results; her mother, who had studied in Vienna to be a concert pianist and a composer, put aside her art to raise the family. Rich’s sense that she was the benefactor of her mother’s sacrifice and the object of her father’s fixations never left her.

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Rupert Cornwell in The Independent:

“The Party of Lincoln is Dying.” Thus a headline in The Washington Post this week on top of an article about how far the Republican Party – whose moniker the “Grand Old Party” harks back to the Great Emancipator and the saviour of his country’s unity in the Civil War – has strayed from the great man’s ideals. So much, however, has long been obvious. More pertinent is the question: what comes next? Imagine the Republican Party as a supermarket product. If the product isn’t selling well, managers of the company would change or replace it. Indeed, an in-house post-mortem after Mitt Romney’s resounding 2012 defeat (an election Republicans genuinely expected to win), recommended precisely that. The party had to stop “marginalising itself”, said the report by the Republican National Committee, and boost its appeal to women, minorities and the young. Instead, the opposite happened. Republicans stuck to the same-old, same-old, concentrating not on making their product more appealing, but on making it harder for consumers to buy the rival one. Hence the introduction of tougher ID requirements for voters in Republican-run states, and other tactics designed to make it harder for poorer people, preponderantly Democrats, to take part in elections.

In short, the party was crying out for someone who claims to know how to run a business. And lo and behold, up pops Donald Trump, who boasts he’s the smartest businessman since John D Rockefeller. In doing so, he has blown to bits the coalition forged by Ronald Reagan, the Republicans nominal patron saint. Broadly, this coalition had three parts: traditional conservatives (including Wall Street, country-club Republicans and advocates of small government); national security hawks and neocons; and social conservatives and evangelicals. Sometimes the parts co-existed uneasily; more often they overlapped. Trump, though, has flouted core tenets of all three. By no measure is he a traditional economic conservative; he refuses to take an axe to social security. He’s obligatorily hawkish on America’s own security, but is positively Obama-like in his aversion to the sort of “boots on the ground” adventures in the Middle East and elsewhere favoured by neocons. His past support for abortion rights flies in the face of social conservative dogma. But none of this has mattered. Trump may change his position on the issues every few days, or even hours. But grassroots Republicans (and not a few Democrats as well) have responded to his call. What’s happened reflects a rejection of “politics as usual” of which Trump is the antithesis, amid disgust at Washington and the internal games of the ruling class, its disconnect with ordinary America. And yes, it also reflects the nativism and racism that persists in a party whose citadel is now the South.

More here.

Making Foots

Many a foot
was chopped
off an African highgrass runner
and made into
a cotton picking
plowing peg
was burned away into
two festering runaway sores
was beaten around
into a gentleman’s original
club-foot design

They went for our feet first
for what we needed most
to get ‘way

My papa’s feet
are bad
(bad)
once under roof
his shoes are always
the first to go
a special size is needed
to fit around
ankle bones broken at birth

Sore feet
standing on freedom lines
weary feet
stomping up a southern dust bowl march
simple feets
wanting just the chance
(just one)
to Black Gulliver jump
a Kress lunch counter
or two
and do a Zulu Watusi Zootsuited
step
instead of a fallen archless
wait wait wait
for the time to come
Him wanted to put his feet up
and sip himself some

Read more »

Paul Tullis in Nature:

Apart from the treadmill desk, Pieter Dorrestein's office at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), is unremarkable: there is a circular table with chairs around it, bookshelves lined with journals, papers and books, and a couple of plaques honouring him and his work. But Dorrestein likes to offer visitors a closer look. On his computer screen, he pulls up a 3D rendering of the space. Four figures seated around the table — one of whom is Dorrestein — look as if they've been splashed with brightly coloured paint. To produce the image, researchers swabbed every surface in the room, including the people, several hundred times, then analysed the swabs with mass spectrometry to identify the chemicals present. The picture reveals a lot about the space, and the people in it. Two of Dorrestein's co-workers are heavy coffee drinkers: caffeine is splotched across their hands and faces (as well as on a sizeable spot on the floor — a remnant of an old spill). Dorrestein does not drink coffee, but has left traces of himself everywhere, from personal-care products to a common sweetener that he wasn't even aware he'd consumed. He was also surprised to find the insect repellent DEET on many of the surfaces that he had touched; he hadn't used the chemical in at least six months.

Then there were signatures of the office's other inhabitants: the microbes that reside on human skin. Dorrestein has been using mass spectrometry to look at the small molecules, or metabolites, produced by these microbes, and to get a clearer picture of how microorganisms form communities and interact — with other microbes, with their human hosts and with the environments that they all inhabit. He has analysed microbial communities from plants, seawater, remote tribes, diseased human lungs and more, in an effort to listen in on their chemical conversations: how they tell one another of good or bad places to colonize, or fight over territory. The work could identify previously unknown microbes and useful molecules that they make, such as antibiotics.

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Aftermath of the massacre at Pulse in Orlando.

This post is in honor of the LGBT community in Orlando and worldwide, and the innocent victims of this horrific crime. In solidarity.

“Club was sister's tribute to gay brother who died of AIDS … “

More here, and here.

Malise Ruthven in The New York Review of Books:

The extreme jihadists, of course, are now mainly drawn to the so-called caliphate ofISIS, also known as Daesh. While several books have already charted the rise of ISISout of the chaos of the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq, in ISIS: A History, Fawaz Gerges joins Lynch in explaining its provenance more specifically as a direct consequence of the sectarian feelings the invasion unleashed, for which America must bear responsibility:

By destroying state institutions and establishing a sectarian-based political system, the 2003 US-led invasion polarized the country along Sunni-Shia lines and set the stage for a fierce, prolonged struggle driven by identity politics. Anger against the United States was also fueled by the humiliating disbandment of the Iraqi army and the de-Baathification law, which was first introduced as a provision and then turned into a permanent article of the constitution.

In his well-researched and lucidly argued text Gerges shows how the US de-Baathification program, combined with the growing authoritarianism and exclusion of Sunnis under Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, provided fertile conditions for the emerging of ISIS out of al-Qaeda under the brutal leadership of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and the self-styled caliph Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, his even more extreme successor. Al-Baghdadi is an evident fraud whose claim to legitimacy by virtue of descent from the Prophet’s tribe Gerges discredits on genealogical grounds.

De-Baathification, based on the American envoy Paul Bremer’s foolish analogy with the postwar denazification of Germany, had deprived the country of the officer class and administrative cadres that had ruled under Saddam Hussein, leaving the field to sectarian-based militias. As Gerges rightly observes, Baathism as practiced in Iraq and Syria was “less of a coherent ideology than a hizb al-Sulta, a ruling party that distributed rewards to stakeholders based on loyalty to the head of the party.” In view of the absence of ideological content, it was hardly surprising that disenfranchised former officers of Saddam Hussein’s army, facing exclusion from Maliki’s Shia-dominated government, should have migrated to the militant version of Sunnism Gerges calls Salafi-jihadism.

In analyzing ISIS’s success, Gerges points to the legacy of Paul Bremer: some 30 percent of the senior figures in ISIS’s military command are former army and police officers from the disbanded Iraqi security forces. It was the military expertise of these men that transformed the Sunni-based insurgent movement of al-Qaeda in Iraq into ISIS, “an effective fighting machine, combining urban guerilla warfare and conventional combat to deadly effect.”

More here.

Mark Noble in The LA Review of Books:

THERE IS A MOMENT in Henry David Thoreau’s Journal that has always bothered me. It’s the middle of August 1851, and Thoreau begins a desultory afternoon entry with regrets about the finitude of human perspectives. Long hikes require so much gear, we cannot migrate so easily as birds, we are not everywhere at home like bugs. So he concedes it’s often easier, and perhaps no less profitable, to just stay in and record events of the mind:

As travellers go round the world and report natural objects & phenomena—so faithfully let another stay at home and report the phenomena of his own life. Catalogue stars—those thoughts whose orbits are as rarely calculated as comets. It matters not whether they visit my mind or yours—whether the meteor falls in my field or in yours—only that it came from heaven.

If the mind is like the sky, then astronomy legitimates introspection. Mental landscapes compel attention as natural landscapes. But what authorizes this analogy also effaces the idea that one’s thoughts could be one’s own. Maybe some thoughts are as luminous as stars, but are they also as remote? Can Thoreau really mean that the exteriority of a thought, or even its celestial origin, so utterly trivializes the idea that thoughts belong to anyone in particular? In the very moment we’re granted permission to indulge the life of the mind, we’re also dispossessed of it. If you would presume to have your own thoughts, he seems to argue, then you should search the night sky in hopes of tracing their ancient patterns.

Few studies have illuminated both the challenges and the exhilarations of this dispossession as powerfully as Branka Arsić’s new book, Bird Relics: Grief and Vitalism in Thoreau, which reorients our understanding of Thoreau’s materialist vitalism. Arsić’s reading of both canonical texts and understudied fragments uncover a radical philosophy of life — a vibrant ontology in which writing about what generates our experience also means blurring conventional distinctions between the realistic and the fantastic, animate bodies and inanimate ones, what it means to live and what it means to die.

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Gary J. Bass in the New York Times Book Review:

“It was like the sound of rain, the sound of firebombs dropping,” Keiko Utsumi remembers. She is an elderly, dignified Japanese woman, retired as a nurse and a midwife, impeccably dressed in a beige linen blazer in the sweltering Tokyo summer heat. Late in World War II, during the spring of 1945, she was 16 years old, put to work at a military factory in the port city of Yokohama, just south of Tokyo. During one of the United States’ incendiary bombing raids, she recalls huddling in a bomb shelter all night, terrified, watching the inferno of wooden houses all around. When she emerged into a scorched wasteland the next morning, with the ground so hot it melted her shoes, she saw the dead: “They were all black, all burned.”

Seventy years after the end of the war, Utsumi met me in central Tokyo last August to tell her story. Remarkably, she had never discussed her terrible experiences with anyone. “When I was leaving the house this morning,” she said, “and told my son I’d be in an interview about the war, my son asked, ‘You were in the war?’ ”

This kind of stoic quietude may seem odd, even unhealthy, to Americans, accustomed to ventilating the most mundane experiences, with no incident too banal to be rehashed. But respect for such forbearance is at the heart of David Rieff’s insightful and humane new book.

More here.