John Sexton at The New Atlantis:

The hardcover American edition of Sapiens weighs two and a half pounds — a little less than the average weight of a Homo sapiens brain. This is unusual for something that is neither a reference work nor a coffee-table book, and that runs to fewer than five hundred pages. The reason for such disproportionate heft is the quality of the paper: the pages are thick like those of a book of prints, crisp white and replete with color illustrations. At any time, but especially in the age of the e-book, such pages in a book with a mass run represent a considerable investment by the publisher. The biography of Harari on the inside jacket boasts that Sapiens has “already become an international bestseller” in, among other places, Slovenia, so the confidence of the publisher may well be justified. Certainly, Mark Zuckerberg’s decision to select Sapiens for his online book club devoted to “big ideas” won’t have hurt sales.

Books like this meet an appetite for sweeping history written in an accessible style and stressing the role of science and technology in shaping human destiny. Probably the best-known work in this genre is Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997). Diamond endorses Sapiens on the cover and receives special thanks in the acknowledgments: Diamond “taught me to see the big picture,” Harari writes. But whereas Diamond stressed the role of climate and disease as well as technology in shaping human history, Harari makes the curious claim that it is only when humans have started making things up — imagining entities that do not objectively exist, like gods, ethical principles, and limited liability corporations — that we have made progress toward becoming a super species. Harari’s vision of history is therefore actually quite different from Diamond’s: while Diamond was really concerned with the influence of the external environment on human culture, or the power of matter over mind, for Harari, history is the story of the gradual triumph of mind over matter.

more here.

Frank Guan at n+1:

In spite of Gore’s smug demeanor and relentless interruptions, Perot maintained an even, though naturally increasingly vexed, tone; when Gore attempted to shift the topic, Perot retained his focus; when Gore cast aspersions on his motives, Perot parried them without excessive difficulty, albeit only by exposing himself as a traitor to his class.¹ It is difficult, reading the transcript of the NAFTA debate, not to come to certain conclusions: it was by far the most substantive televised debate on economic policy in American history, and the majority of the substance came from Perot, who by that token was the clear victor of the debate.

Yet the gloating and unanimous response on the part of the political media was precisely the opposite: Gore had triumphed, absolutely. His churlishness was taken as a mark of tactical genius, while Perot’s displeasure was played up as a sign of mental incompetence: William Safire, in the New York Times, cheerfully compared the debate to a bullfight, with the Texan in the role of the hapless, goaded beast; Dana Carvey mocked Perot’s requests to be allowed to finish his sentences onSaturday Night Live. A week later, NAFTA passed the House of Representatives by a vote of 234 to 200; Senate approval soon followed, and President Clinton signed the treaty into law in early December.

more here.

Frances Wilson at The New Statesman:

De Quincey’s career as a journalist (he wrote one book in 30 years, and roughly 250 articles) coincided with the birth of a genre that Walter Bagehot called the “review-like essay and the essay-like review”. He was not an essayist in the polished manner of Hazlitt; he did not create finished objects. The virtue of the essay is that it reflects a thought in the process of discovering itself, and De Quincey dramatised this process. He wrote in diversions, he recycled other people’s words, he produced experiments in inwardness, works-in-progress; instead of moving his writing forward, he either plunged downward or rose, as Leslie Stephen said, “like the bat . . . on the wings of prose to the borders of the true poetical region”. Naturally, opium helped with the language of reverie. De Quincey was not an opium eater but a laudanum drinker: he took his opium as drops dissolved in alcohol, and a decanter of the crimson liquid was kept by the desk on which he wrote.

During breaks from his writing, he scuttled through the London streets in a state of high anxiety, confiding in John Taylor that he had a sort of ominous anticipation “that possibly there was some being in the world who was fated to do him at some time a great & unexpiable injury”: Taylor thought “Wilson might be the man”. Opium released De Quincey’s paranoia, but his fears were not entirely ungrounded. John Wilson was a dangerous beast, and De Quincey’s betrayal of Blackwood’s was bound to have repercussions. “These things Wilson can never forgive,” De Quincey said: “they will rankle in his mind: and at some time or other I am sure he will do what he can to injure me.”

more here.

Steve Edwards in Orion:

Our move East had been necessitated by a pair of crises. Bouts of unemployment during the economic meltdown left Rebecca and me mere weeks from homelessness, and Wyatt — with his blue eyes and blonde curls, all sunshine and prairie — was chronically ill. A series of shifting, catch-all diagnoses followed him from doctor to doctor: colic became a protein intolerance, became reflux, became the suggestion of autism. He put on weight but had low muscle tone. He could say and repeat words but couldn’t really talk. And though he was meeting developmental milestones for growth and development, by two he still required the attention of a newborn. He raged and whined, napped in fitful spurts, spent half the night crying. If Wyatt played at helping with the chores, or if he had a peaceful afternoon nap, I’d think we were turning a corner, that the sweet boy we knew was inside him somewhere might now come blossoming out. It’s what we thought with each new doctor’s appointment, too. In the weeks following the hurricane, we discovered from a geneticist at Boston Children’s that his glycine numbers were high and his carnitine numbers were low. From an allergist we learned he had milk and tree-nut allergies. Each new clue brought with it changes we thought might somehow break the spell. We ditched the almond milk an old doctor had suggested in favor of rice milk. We went gluten free. On the advice of a nurse practitioner, we began giving him melatonin before bedtime.

Exhausting every option until he was healthy was our duty as his parents.

More here.

By The New York Times:

We’re taking the first week of April as an opportunity to debunk popular misconceptions about health and science that circulate all year round. Some of these items were inspired by areas of confusion that reporters on The New York Times’ science desk encounter again and again. Others came directly from our readers, who submitted the misconceptions that frustrate them the most to our science Facebook page.

Misconception: Exercise builds strong bones. Many public health groups and health sites promote this exercise prescription, promising it will stave off weak bones. It sounds too good to be true. And it is, writes Gina Kolata, a Times medical reporter. It turns out, exercise has little or no effect on bone strength. Read on.

Misconception: Climate change is not real because there is snow in my yard.

Actually: Anyone who utters an argument like this is mixing up climate and weather, writes reporter Justin Gillis. Read on.

Alina Quayyum Agha. Intersections, 2013.

Laser-cut Wood, Single Light Bulb, 6.5' Square Cube, Completed: December 2013, Cast Shadows.

Digital photograph by Sughra Raza, April 2, 2016.

“In a contextual milieu where difference and divergence dominate most conversations about the intersection of civilization, this piece explores the presence of harmonies that do not ignore the shadows, ambiguities, and dark spaces between them, but rather explore them in novel and unexpected ways.” – Anila Q Agha

More here, here, and here.

On view at Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, MA, until July 10, 2016.

Over at Princeton University Press, the introduction from Justin E. H. Smith new book:

This book, an essay in the proper Montaignean sense, seeks to answer that most fundamental of philosophical questions: What is philosophy? It does so, however, in an unusual way: by refraining from proclamations about what philosophy, ideally, ought to be, and by asking instead what philosophy has been, what it is that people have been doing under the banner of philosophy in different times and places. In what follows we will survey the history of the various self-conceptions of philosophers in different historical eras and contexts. We will seek to uncover the different “job descriptions” attached to the social role of the philosopher in different times and places. Through historical case studies, autobiographical interjections, and parafictional excursuses, it will be our aim to enrich the current understanding of what the project of philosophy is, or could be, by uncovering and critically examining lost, forgotten, or undervalued conceptions of the project from philosophy’s distinguished past.

This approach could easily seem not just unusual but also misguided, since philosophy is generally conceived as an a priori discipline concerned with conceptual analysis rather than with the collection of particular facts about past practice. As a result of this widespread conception, most commonly, when philosophers set about answering the question as to the nature of their discipline, they end up generating answers that reflect the values and preoccupations of their local philosophical culture. Thus Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari answer the question, in their 1991 book What Is Philosophy?, 1 by arguing that it is the activity of conceptual innovation, the generating of new concepts, and thus of new ways of looking at the world. But this is a conception of philosophy that would be utterly unfamiliar to, say, Ludwig Wittgenstein, who suggested that philosophy is the practice of “shewing the fly the way out of the bottle,”2 or, alternatively, that it is “a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language,”3 and it would be more unfamiliar still to the natural philosopher of the seventeenth century, who studied meteorological phenomena in order to discern the regularities at work in the world around us, and had no particular interest in devising new concepts for discerning these regularities. Thus when Deleuze and Guattari argue that philosophy is the activity of concept coining, they should really be saying that this is what they would like philosophy to be.

More here.

Orville Schell in The New York Review of Books:

“As a liberal, I no longer feel I have a future in China,” a prominent Chinese think tank head in the process of moving abroad recently lamented in private. Such refrains are all too familiar these days as educated Chinese professionals express growing alarm over their country’s future. Indeed, not since the 1970s when Mao still reigned and the Cultural Revolution still raged has the Chinese leadership been so possessed by Maoist nostalgia and Leninist-style leadership.

As different leaders have come and gone, China specialists overseas have become accustomed to reading Chinese Communist Party (CCP) tea leaves as oscillating cycles of political “relaxation” and “tightening.” China has long been a one-party Leninist state with extensive censorship and perhaps the largest secret police establishment in the world. But what has been happening lately in Beijing under the leadership of Chinese Communist Party General Secretary Xi Jinping is no such simple fluctuation. It is a fundamental shift in ideological and organizational direction that is beginning to influence both China’s reform agenda and its foreign relations.

At the center of this retrograde trend is Xi’s enormously ambitious initiative to purge the Chinese Communist Party of what he calls “tigers and flies,” namely corrupt officials and businessmen both high and low. Since it began in 2012, the campaign has already netted more than 160 “tigers” whose rank is above or equivalent to that of the deputy provincial or deputy ministerial level, and more than 1,400 “flies,” all lower-level officials.¹ But it has also morphed from an anticorruption drive into a broader neo-Maoist-style mass purge aimed at political rivals and others with differing ideological or political views.

To carry out this mass movement, the Party has mobilized its unique and extensive network of surveillance, security, and secret police in ways that have affected many areas of Chinese life. Media organizations dealing with news and information have been hit particularly hard. Pressured to conform to old Maoist models requiring them to serve as megaphones for the Party, editors and reporters have found themselves increasingly constrained by Central Propaganda Department diktats. Told what they can and cannot cover, they find that the limited freedom they had to report on events has been drastically curtailed.

More here.

Over at Rationally Speaking:

Uri Simonsohn

He's been called a “Data vigilante.” In this episode, Prof. Uri Simonsohn describes how he detects fraudulent work in psychology and economics — what clues tip him off? How big of a problem is fraud relative to other issues like P-hacking? And what solutions are there?

Ben Mauk in n+1:

LIKE ITS POLITICS, Germany’s version of bowling—kegeln—is a muted affair. You arrive at the kegelbahn by descending into the basement of a certain genus of unpretentious bar, with mastodonic beer mugs, imitation wainscoting, and a permissive smoking policy. The oldest alleys have been operating beneath these pubs for more than a century without mechanization or electronic upgrade, just two narrow wooden lanes—unwaxed and slightly concave—running the length of a bare hallway toward nine pins arranged in a diamond. Due to the slight bowing of the lane you need to bowl the croquet-sized ball so that it traces the path of a sine wave back and forth across the boards, moving gently to the left, then the right, until it reaches the pins, ideally just a hair off-center. A designated teammate reassembles the diamond and returns your ball by rolling it down a freestanding metal chute.

As an American whose experiences of both bowling and politics are those of fully automated, high-gloss, thunderous spectacles, I was excited when a friend invited me to the bowling night of one of the Berlin chapters of Social Democrats (SPD). I imagined that I would learn something about two national traditions. It was plain luck that I happened to come the night Berlin’s mayor, Michael Müller, turned up. We even bowled against each other, using the same craggy gray sponge to moisten our hands before each turn. The center-left politician was an expert bowler. He knew exactly how much force to apply in order to get the ball maneuvering back and forth over the center. I rolled mostly gutterballs.

After the game, we gathered around the basement’s long table for the nightly meeting, where various political issues are traditionally discussed. But tonight everyone was bursting to talk with Müller about the same thing: the previous day’s election results. Three of Germany’s state legislatures had held elections on March 13th, and Alternative for Germany (AfD), the country’s new far-right populist party, had managed to enter all three state parliaments, winning double-digit portions of the vote in Baden-Württemberg, Rhineland-Palatinate, and Saxony-Anhalt. In the latter state, AfD won a startling 24 percent of the vote, upending the coalition of Christian Democrats (CDU) and SPD. A new, larger coalition would have to be formed, possibly with the Greens, to reach a majority.

More here.

David Beer reviews Walter Benjamin’s Archive (edited by Ursula Marx, Gudran Schwarz, Michael Schwarz, Erdmut Wizisla and translated by Esther Leslie) in Berfrois:

Walter Benjamin’s Archive, which has just been published in paperback to mark the 75^thanniversary of his untimely death, has left me thinking that Benjamin might just have been a blogger in the making. The way that he organised and archived his work suggests that he would have embraced the classification, archiving and tagging facilities typical of blogging – he seemed to have a certain enthusiasm for metadata on his own works. We can then add to this his eagerness to share his work and his interest in capturing the everyday fragments and ephemera of modernity. And then we also have his non-linear approach to thought and expression.

I arrived at this conclusion whilst delving into this book’s revelations about the backstage processes that fed into Benjamin’s outputs. The unfinished book The Arcades Project has always given a flavour of these working practices, with its accumulating constellations of ephemera and ideas, but the guided and curated tour of the archives provided by this book show us his craft much greater detail. Seeing inside his working practices shows us the type of processes that he went through – from the type of paper, the size of the writing, the use of notepads, the collating of images, the classificatory overviews, the realisation of connections and patterns. These are all put on display in this book. We see, for instance, as his life became increasingly peripatetic, how Benjamin used whatever paper he could lay his hands on. We have Benjamin writing on hotel paper and prescription pads alongside more professional bound and durable notepads. The very paper became tellingly valuable. Benjamin’s scraps were far from scrappy though, they were full of thoughts on the world, serious thoughts from anything on the built environment to Kafka. We see how he used up every tiny bit of his precious notebooks with ordered yet kaleidoscopic ideas, that he liked to re-arrange and to cross-cut his thoughts, to find new connections and enable the pieces to fall into new and perhaps neglected, or otherwise invisible patterns.

As the editors of the collection have put it, “knowledge that is organized into slips and scraps knows no hierarchy”. Removing such a hierarchy opens up new possibilities for thought to escape convention.

More here.

Richard Marshall interviews Jonathan Cohen in 3:AM Magazine:

3:AM: You’re a leading expert in philosophy of mind and colour has been a key focus of your thinking in this area, using it to draw out philosophically interesting questions and answers. You cite CL Hardin as bringing about a sea change in the philosophy of colour: was it because he insisted that philosophers took on board the results of science that make him so important for the field? Have the armchair philosophers of mind been banished, and is this a good thing?

JC: Hardin’s 1988 book, Color for Philosophers, was transformative because it showed how advances in color science (which, I think it’s fair to say, hadn’t been centrally on the radar of philosophers of mind and perception at the time) had the capacity to reshape longstanding philosophical disputes about color. To a crude first approximation, the landscape of philosophical options, and the kinds of considerations used to choose between those options one saw in philosophical writing about color in the decades before Hardin looked surprisingly similar to those present in philosophical writing about color in the 16th and 17th centuries, in great modern philosophers like Boyle, Galileo, and Locke. Hardin pointed out that the science of color had moved considerably forward since the modern period, and showed by example that its discoveries could constrain philosophical debates about the nature of color and color perception in new and unanticipated ways.

It is too strong to say that the armchair philosophers of mind have now been banished — there are still many good ways to do important and interesting philosophy (about color and other topics) that are motivated by different mixes of empirical and non-empirical considerations. But I do think it is an adequacy constraint on responsible philosophical theorizing that one’s views must ultimately mesh in some way with our best theories of the world. And in cases where one is arguing about a subject, such as color, language, or mind, about which there is a reasonably well-established body of empirical knowledge, this requires respecting — a fortiori knowing something about — the relevant facts. I take this not to be any special constraint on philosophical theorizing in particular, but simply a matter of being a responsible inquirer in any field. In my view, philosophical work on color scores better on this yardstick now than it did before Hardin shook the field from its dogmatic slumber.

3:AM: Hardin argued that objects weren’t coloured didn’t he, so he wasn’t a colour realist but some kind of eliminatist? Why do you disagree with him?

JC: Hardin thinks not only that philosophers should pay attention to the findings of the contemporary color sciences, but that these findings collectively amount to an exceedingly stringent set of constraints on what colors could be — indeed, that these constraints are so stringent that nothing that satisfies all of them, i.e., that there are no colors in the actual world.

More here.

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Mohammed Hanif in The New York Times:

Karachi, Pakistan — IN the world we live in, there is no dearth of pious men who believe that most of the world’s problems can be fixed by giving their women a little thrashing. And this business of a man’s God-given right to give a woman a little thrashing has brought together all of Pakistan’s pious men. A few weeks ago, Pakistan’s largest province passed a new law called the Punjab Protection of Women Against Violence Act. The law institutes radical measures that say a husband can’t beat his wife, and if he does he will face criminal charges and possibly even eviction from his home. It proposes setting up a hotline women can call to report abuse. In some cases, offenders will be required to wear a bracelet with a GPS monitor and will not be allowed to buy guns. A coalition of more than 30 religious and political parties has declared the law un-Islamic, an attempt to secularize Pakistan and a clear and present threat to our most sacred institution: the family. They have threatened countrywide street protests if the government doesn’t back down.

Their logic goes like this: If you beat up a person on the street, it’s a criminal assault. If you bash someone in your bedroom, you’re protected by the sanctity of your home. If you kill a stranger, it’s murder. If you shoot your own sister, you’re defending your honor. I’m sure the nice folks campaigning against the bill don’t want to beat up their wives or murder their sisters, but they are fighting for their fellow men’s right to do just that. It’s not only opposition parties that are against the bill: The government-appointed Council of Islamic Ideology has also declared it repugnant to our religion and culture. The council’s main task is to ensure that all the laws in the country comply with Shariah. But basically it’s a bunch of old men who go to sleep worrying that there are all these women out there trying to trick them into bed. Maybe that’s why there are no pious old women on the council, even though there’s no shortage of them in Pakistan. The council’s past proclamations have defended a man’s right to marry a minor, dispensed him from asking for permission from his first wife before taking a second or a third, and made it impossible for women to prove rape. It’s probably the most privileged dirty old men’s club in the country.

More here.

In The Economist:

“TECHNOLOGY IS NEITHER good nor bad; nor is it neutral,” said the late Melvin Kranzberg, one of the most influential historians of machinery. The same is true for the internet and the use of data in politics: it is neither a blessing, nor is it evil, yet it has an effect. But which effect? And what, if anything, needs to be done about it?

Jürgen Habermas, the German philosopher who thought up the concept of the “public sphere”, has always been in two minds about the internet. Digital communication, he wrote a few years ago, has unequivocal democratic merits only in authoritarian countries, where it undermines the government’s information monopoly. Yet in liberal regimes, online media, with their millions of forums for debate on a vast range of topics, could lead to a “fragmentation of the public” and a “liquefaction of politics”, which would be harmful to democracy.

The ups and downs of the presidential campaign in America and the political turbulences elsewhere seem to support Mr Habermas’s view. Indeed, it is tempting to ask whether all this online activism is not wasted political energy that could be put to better use in other ways. Indeed, the meteoric rise of many online movements appears to explain their equally rapid demise: many never had time to build robust organisations.

But online activism cannot be dismissed. Some movements have had real impact, either by putting an issue on the political agenda or by taking over an existing organisation. Without the Occupy movement, the debate about income inequality in America would be much less prominent. The same goes for the Black Lives Matter campaign and violence against African-Americans. In Britain, Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters managed to commandeer the Labour Party. In America, Donald Trump seems about to do the same with the Republican Party (though whether he can do it to the whole country remains to be seen).

More here.

Mike Davis in The New Left Review:

Anthropogenic climate change is usually portrayed as a recent discovery, with a genealogy that extends no further backwards than Charles Keeling sampling atmospheric gases from his station near the summit of Mauna Loa in the 1960s, or, at the very most, Svante Arrhenius’s legendary 1896 paper on carbon emissions and the planetary greenhouse. In fact, the deleterious climatic consequences of economic growth, especially the influence of deforestation and plantation agriculture on atmospheric moisture levels, were widely noted, and often exaggerated, from the Enlightenment until the late nineteenth century. The irony of Victorian science, however, was that while human influence on climate, whether as a result of land clearance or industrial pollution, was widely acknowledged, and sometimes envisioned as an approaching doomsday for the big cities (see John Ruskin’s hallucinatory rant, ‘The Storm Cloud of the Nineteenth Century’), few if any major thinkers discerned a pattern of natural climate variability in ancient or modern history. The Lyellian world-view, canonized by Darwin in The Origin of Species, supplanted biblical catastrophism with a vision of slow geological and environmental evolution through deep time. Despite the discovery of the Ice Age(s) by the Swiss geologist Louis Agassiz in the late 1830s, the contemporary scientific bias was against environmental perturbations, whether periodic or progressive, on historical time-scales. Climate change, like evolution, was measured in eons, not centuries.

Oddly, it required the ‘discovery’ of a supposed dying civilization on Mars to finally ignite interest in the idea, first proposed by the anarchist geographer Kropotkin in the late 1870s, that the 14,000 years since the Glacial Maximum constituted an epoch of on-going and catastrophic desiccation of the continental interiors. This theory—we might call it the ‘old climatic interpretation of history’—was highly influential in the early twentieth century, but waned quickly with the advent of dynamic meteorology in the 1940s, with its emphasis on self-adjusting physical equilibrium. What many fervently believed to be a key to world history was found and then lost, discrediting its discoverers almost as completely as the eminent astronomers who had seen (and in some cases, claimed to have photographed) canals on the Red Planet. Although the controversy primarily involved German and English-speaking geographers and orientalists, the original thesis—postglacial aridification as the driver of Eurasian history—was formulated inside Tsardom’s école des hautes études: St Petersburg’s notorious Peter-and-Paul Fortress where the young Prince Piotr Kropotkin, along with other celebrated Russian intellectuals, was held as a political prisoner.

The famed anarchist was also a first-rate natural scientist, physical geographer and explorer. In 1862, he voluntarily exiled himself to eastern Siberia in order to escape the suffocating life of a courtier in an increasingly reactionary court. Offered a commission by Alexander II in the regiment of his choice, he opted for a newly formed Cossack unit in remote Transbaikalia, where his education, pluck and endurance quickly recommended him to lead a series of expeditions—for the purposes of both science and imperial espionage—into a huge, unexplored tangle of mountain andtaiga wildernesses recently annexed by the Empire. Whether measured by physical challenge or scientific achievement, Kropotkin’s explorations of the lower Amur valley and into the heart of Manchuria, followed by a singularly daring reconnaissance of the ‘vast and deserted mountain region between the Lena in northern Siberia and the higher reaches of the Amur near Chita’, were comparable to the Great Northern Expeditions of Vitus Bering in the eighteenth century or the contemporary explorations of the Colorado Plateau by John Wesley Powell and Clarence King. After thousands of miles of travel, usually in extreme terrain, Kropotkin was able to show that the orography of northeast Asia was considerably different from that envisioned by Alexander von Humboldt and his followers.

More here.