The Mercy

The ship that took my mother to Ellis Island
eighty-three years ago was named “The Mercy.”
She remembers trying to eat a banana
without first peeling it and seeing her first orange
in the hands of a young Scot, a seaman
who gave her a bite and wiped her mouth for her
with a red bandana and taught her the word,
“orange,” saying it patiently over and over.
A long autumn voyage, the days darkening
with the black waters calming as night came on,
then nothing as far as her eyes could see and space
without limit rushing off to the corners
of creation. She prayed in Russian and Yiddish
to find her family in New York, prayers
unheard or misunderstood or perhaps ignored
by all the powers that swept the waves of darkness
before she woke, that kept “The Mercy” afloat
while smallpox raged among the passengers
and crew until the dead were buried at sea
with strange prayers in a tongue she could not fathom.
“The Mercy,” I read on the yellowing pages of a book
I located in a windowless room of the library
on 42nd Street, sat thirty-one days
offshore in quarantine before the passengers
disembarked. There a story ends. Other ships
arrived, “Tancred” out of Glasgow, “The Neptune”
registered as Danish, “Umberto IV,”
the list goes on for pages, November gives
way to winter, the sea pounds this alien shore.
Italian miners from Piemonte dig
under towns in western Pennsylvania
only to rediscover the same nightmare
they left at home. A nine-year-old girl travels
all night by train with one suitcase and an orange.
She learns that mercy is something you can eat
again and again while the juice spills over
your chin, you can wipe it away with the back
of your hands and you can never get enough.
.

by Philip Levine
from The Mercy
Knopf, 2000
.

Owen Hatherley at The Guardian:

Although it is a long time since anyone bar the neoliberal right believed that history was on their side, it is always nice to feel that you have a usable past. For much of the left, this has been a difficult matter. The 20th-century experiences of “really existing socialism” are understandably rather forbidding, and those of social democracy, though often fondly recalled, are just a little too conformist and mainstream. If there is a rock on which the fissile contemporary left might all agree to build itself on, it is the two-month-long Paris Commune of 1871, that bloodily suppressed, chaotic and radically democratic experiment in municipal anarcho-communism.

In the geography of David Harvey, the philosophy of Alain Badiou or the revolutionary heritage guidebooks of Eric Hazan, the Commune is the culmination of the French revolution, a “Universal Republic” whose ambitions were as expansive as its existence was brief. Kristin Ross’s recent Communal Luxury, for instance, tried to wrest the Commune out of the history of communism or the French left, instead tracing an unusual, intriguing line from the ideas of the Commune’s self-educated artisans, to those of figures such asWilliam Morris and Peter Kropotkin, who were inspired by their acts to reassess their entire approach to art, nature and politics. According to Ross, “the world of the communards” – migratory lives, precarious work, insecure housing – “is much closer to us than that of our parents”. These two books about celebrated communards, however, deal in myths and legends.

more here.

Aashish Kaul at The Quarterly Conversation:

What saved these stories or inquiries from being mere postmodernist feints then, and what has always distinguished Brooks’s writing from the start—for instance, his early ekphrastic novel The House of Balthus where subjects from the paintings of the Polish-French artist Balthasar Klossowski de Rola come to life in an apartment block in a French country town—is their underlying humanity, and the struggle, plain to see, to birth them into being, the thrill of watching that rare dynamic, dialectic process where the writer is transformed in equal measure by the very material he works diligently to transform.

Napoleon’s Roads, in language now on the point of collapsing, now suddenly gone transparent to reveal the world in its minute splendor, but always totally committed to its stylistic and ethical concerns, is a step further along that path. “To hold nothing back!” writes Brooks in Balthus. “Isn’t that what the stars do? The dark, the nothing behind them, held back by them, and yet made so much the more evident because they are there?” Like the ancient seers of Vedic India, Brooks knows that the visible puts down its roots only in the soil of the invisible, that perhaps, like them, it is better to seek—in Roberto Calasso’s words—not power but rapture.

more here.

Ricky D'Ambrose at The Nation:

Looks aren’t unique to images. There are live performances with looks (immersive theater, with its prodigal vision of classical Hollywood cinema), just as there are paintings (color fields, all-over abstraction, moiré patterns) and photographs (the hot white of the flash bulb, the contrast of Tri-X, the color of Kodachrome) that are said to have a “good look.” The audience, which sees something of its own viewing habits, and its own tastes, confirmed by the image, is in any case continuously flattered: One can watch a movie like Ain’t Them Bodies Saints and very easily single out what its director, David Lowery, calls the “dirty” palette of Robert Altman’s McCabe & Mrs. Miller and Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate, and feel gratified. What underlies the shift to looks is the belief in neutral, impersonal images: Anything can become a picture, and any picture, overlaid with a look, can be customized, shored up temporarily with a borrowed feeling. And that feeling is confused with evidence of achievement. Thus, all looks take the form of a direct address; each image, no matter how depersonalized and routine, always seems “personalized,” made-to-order, and aimed at gratifying an existing idea of what a ’70s movie or a ’60s canvas or an ’80s photograph is like. Nothing about an image with a look is inexplicit or ambiguous.

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Frans de Waal in Aeon:

Scientists working on animal cognition often dwell on their desire to talk to the animals. Oddly enough, this particular desire must have passed me by, because I have never felt it. I am not waiting to hear what my animals have to say about themselves, taking the rather Wittgensteinian position that their message might not be all that enlightening. Even with respect to my fellow humans, I am dubious that language tells us what is going on in their heads. I am surrounded by colleagues who study members of our species by presenting them with questionnaires. They trust the answers they receive and have ways, they assure me, of checking their veracity. But who says that what people say about themselves reveals actual emotions and motivations?

This might be true for simple attitudes free from moralisations (‘What is your favourite music?’), but it seems almost pointless to ask people about their love life, eating habits, or treatment of others (‘Are you pleasant to work with?’). It is far too easy to invent post-hoc reasons for one’s behaviour, to be silent about one’s sexual habits, to downplay excessive eating or drinking, or to present oneself as more admirable than one really is.

No one is going to admit to murderous thoughts, stinginess or being a jerk. People lie all the time, so why would they stop in front of a psychologist who writes down everything they say? In one study, female college students reported more sex partners when they were hooked up to a fake lie-detector machine, demonstrating that they had been lying when interviewed without the lie-detector. I am in fact relieved to work with subjects that don’t talk. I don’t need to worry about the truth of their utterances. Instead of asking them how often they engage in sex, I just count the occasions. I am perfectly happy being an animal watcher.

More here.

Shirin Ebadi in the Wall Street Journal:

In advance of a United Nations envoy’s visit to the country, Burmese officials in June instructed U.N. officials to refer to Burma’s Muslim minority as “people who believe in Islam in Rakhine state.” This is the latest chapter in what has become a tragic campaign to reassure Buddhist nationalists that the government will continue to oppress the Rohingya—even to the point of denying them their name and citizenship in Burma.

Sadly, this campaign is being led by Nobel peace laureate Aung San Suu Kyi.

After decades of defiant activism, house arrest and unimaginable personal sacrifice, Ms. Suu Kyi is finally in a position to bring democracy to her country. Ms. Suu Kyi’s party won Burma’s national elections in November 2015, and this spring, in addition to being named foreign minister, she was appointed state counselor, the de facto prime minister. The new title effectively gives her the power to run Burma.

I’m sure it is a responsibility that my fellow Nobel peace laureate—a woman who was under house arrest off and on for more than two decades—takes very seriously. Yet those of us who spoke up for Aung San Suu Kyi those many years when her human rights were being violated—including His Holiness the Dalai Lama and Archbishop Desmond Tutu—are deeply pained that she won’t extend the same respect for human rights to Burma’s more than one million Rohingya.

Like thousands of human-rights defenders around the world, we have also called upon Burma to respect the rights of other political prisoners and minorities in Burma—including the Karen, the Shan and the Chin. Global human-rights organizations, along with courageous grass roots organizations in Burma, have documented how the Burmese military and state have suppressed these minorities through religious persecution, killings, rape, disappearances, torture and other crimes against humanity.

More here.

Sanjay G. Reddy over at his website:

UK voters who favoured remaining may be aggrieved by what they view as a poor choice in a flawed process, by the majority of voters who might have individually or collectively acted differently on another day — if they had more time to reflect, or if more had turned out, for instance. However, those who favoured leaving might also have viewed the aspects of Europe to which they objected as being the product of poor choices in a flawed process, by citizens too deferential to institutions and to bureaucracies and given too few democratic rights. In both cases, a more subtle view of democracy, recognizing the claims of parts of the whole, and giving them fuller realization in terms of process and outcomes, was needed. For example, under the circumstances the referendum vote might have been avoided by giving the UK fuller concessions including a temporary exception from the free mobility requirement of the EU while Eastern European wages caught up sufficiently to diminish flows, but this was not acceptable to the grandees of Europe, especially as Eastern European integration had been a political as well as economic project. (It is interesting that those who view this commitment as ‘fundamental’ do not take the same view when it comes to international mobility more generally). On the other side, the referendum mechanism provided insufficient recognition of the vital interests involved, especially as they were perceived by territorial minorities such as the Scots and non-territorial minorities with vital interests, such as the young. This is a specific and unusually stark version of a more general democratic conundrum.

Of course, the need for such choices is never fated. Political decisions, such as that of the Conservatives to address the challenge from UKIP by dignifying its narrative, and the failure of Labour to provide a robust progressive case for remaining, ushered in the impossible.

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Matt McGrath in BBC News:

The scientists said that in September 2015 the hole was around 4 million sq km smaller than it was in the year 2000 – an area roughly the size of India. The gains have been credited to the long term phasing out of ozone-destroying chemicals. The study also sheds new light on the role of volcanoes in making the problem worse. The natural production and destruction of ozone in the stratosphere balances itself out over long time, meaning that historically there has been a constant level to protect the Earth by blocking out harmful ultraviolet radiation from the Sun. Its absence increases the chances of skin cancer, cataract damage, and harm to humans, animals and plants. British scientists first noticed a dramatic thinning of ozone in the stratosphere some 10 kilometres above Antarctica in the mid 1980s. In 1986, US researcher Susan Solomon showed that ozone was being destroyed by the presence of molecules containing chlorine and bromine that came from chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs). These gases were found in everything from hairsprays to refrigerators to air conditioning units. The reason the thinning was occurring mainly over Antarctica was because of the extreme cold and large amounts of light. These helped produce what are termed Polar Stratospheric Clouds. In these chilled-out clouds, the chlorine chemistry occurs that destroys the ozone.

Thanks to the global ban on the use of CFCs in the Montreal Protocol in 1987, the situation in Antarctica has been slowly improving. Several studies have shown the declining influence of CFCs, but according to the authors this new study shows the “first fingerprints of healing” and the ozone layer is actively growing again. Prof Solomon and colleagues, including researchers from the University of Leeds in the UK, carried out detailed measurements of the amount of ozone in the stratosphere between 2000 and 2015. Using data from weather balloons, satellites and model simulations, they were able to show that the thinning of the layer had declined by 4 million sq km over the period. The found that more than half the shrinkage was due solely to the reduction in atmospheric chlorine.

More here.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie in The New York Times:

The New York Times Book Review asked the acclaimed novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie to write a short story about the American election. A second work of election fiction — by a different writer — will follow this fall.

Melania decided she would order the flowers herself. Donald was too busy now anyway to call Alessandra’s as usual and ask for “something amazing.” Once, in the early years, before she fully understood him, she had asked what his favorite flowers were. “I use the best florists in the city, they’re terrific,” he replied, and she realized that taste, for him, was something to be determined by somebody else, and then flaunted. At first, she wished he would not keep asking their guests, “How do you like these great flowers?” and that he would not be so nakedly in need of their praise, but now she felt a small tug of annoyance if a guest did not gush as Donald expected. The florists were indeed good, their peonies delicate as tissue, even if a little boring, and the interior decorators Donald had brought in — all the top guys used them, he said — were good, too, even if all that gold yellowness bordered on staleness, and so she did not disagree because Donald disliked dissent, and he only wanted the best for them, and she had what she really needed, this luxurious peace. But today, she would order herself. It was her dinner party to celebrate her parents’ anniversary. Unusual orchids, maybe. Her mother loved uncommon things.

Her Pilates instructor, Janelle, would arrive in half an hour. She had just enough time to order the flowers and complete her morning skin routine. She would use a different florist, she decided, where Donald did not have an account, and pay by herself. Donald might like that; he always liked the small efforts she made. Do the little things, don’t ask for big things and he will give them to you, her mother advised her, after she first met Donald. She gently patted three different serums on her face and then, with her fingertips, applied an eye cream and ­sunscreen. What a bright morning. Summer sunlight raised her spirits. And Tiffany was leaving today. It felt good. The girl had been staying for the past week, and came and went, mostly staying out of her way. Still, it felt good. Yesterday she had taken Tiffany to lunch, so that she could tell Donald that she had taken Tiffany to lunch.

“She adores all my kids, it’s amazing,” Donald once told a reporter — he was happily blind to the strangeness in the air whenever she was with his children.

More here.

A Ghazal from Ghalib

مقدمِ سیلاب سے دل کیا نشاط آہنگ ہے

خانۂ عاشق مگر سازِ صدائے آب تھا

The waters rise past the rafters in my house.
Their undulant music calms my rage tonight.

I was homeless before: it was a proper life.
Wine-free, woman-free, I had peace all night.

I was sightless in the cave of desire. Outside,
His light shone brilliantly night after night.

Is this nothing to you, that we live or die?
Time was, our pain kept you up all night.

It happened long ago. Afraid of losing us,
She parted the veil till her beauty sang all night.

Glad I stopped him. Ghalib was so rattled,
His tears may have drowned the stars tonight.
.

translation by M. Shahid Alam
Northeastern University
.

Daniel E. Ho and Becky Elias examined whether peer review for public servants can make the law more consistent in Boston Review:

Like many good arguments, this one started over a stiff drink. An Earl Grey MarTEAni, to be precise.

In January 2010, Nathalie Louissaint, a New York City health inspector, visited Pegu Club, an upscale cocktail bar. She watched as the bartender mixed the signature tea-infused drink. Borrowing a technique from the nineteenth century, the bartender added raw egg whites, which give the drink a silky body and an alluring layer of foam. Louissaint decided that the raw egg warning on the menu was insufficient and cited the bar for a health code violation.

The citation outraged many. Paul Clarke, a Seattle-based food writer, was perplexed by the department’s rigid position on raw eggs, writing on the website Serious Eats, “Does this mean the health department will begin targeting restaurants that serve raw eggs in a Caesar salad?” Others decried the health department’s seeming mandate to use pasteurized eggs, but those, said Pegu Club owner Audrey Sanders, “impart this really funky wet-diaper nose.” One bartender, who insisted on anonymity for fear of reprisal, told the New York Times, “If they make it illegal to serve egg-white drinks, that would be Hurricane Katrina for us.” In response to the uproar, the health department overruled the inspector.

This confusion is no outlier. Nationwide, implementation of health codes varies dramatically across inspectors and health departments. In Seattle, two inspectors observed Caesar salad dressing prepared with raw (unpasteurized) eggs in the same restaurant, but disagreed about whether to cite a violation. Contrary to New York City health department guidelines, New York State’s website doesn’t mention menu warnings, instead admonishing, “Consider using commercially pasteurized eggs in recipes that use eggs or consider removing the item from your menu.” The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) document that 80 percent of restaurants nonetheless use unpasteurized eggs.

When it comes down to it, the marTEAni fight is not so much about eggs as it is an endemic challenge across government. From airport security checkpoints and routine traffic stops to home construction permits, citizens and government interact frequently through individual officials. At times, the decisions of these frontline government officials can seem disturbingly arbitrary.

More here.

Carol Oja in the TLS:

In the two months since Lemonade’s release, it has provoked an extraordinary cultural critique, with articles ranging from besotted fandom to probing essays about its racial and feminist politics. In fact, the visual album is simultaneously clear-as-a-bell and obscure, even at times surreal. In the “Denial” section, for example, Beyoncé falls off a very tall building, then is submerged under water. She floats like a ghost over a bed, ultimately striding forth from a building that suggests a seat of power, and she does so amid yet another surge of water. The omnipresence of water conjures up the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, which later moves to the foreground in “Formation”. The narrative ostensibly has an autobiographical thread, albeit with a celebrity tinge, with many critics claiming that it exposes Jay Z’s infidelity.

At a deeper level, Lemonade decries the history of oppression of African American women. “The most disrespected person in America is the black woman”, intones the sampled voice of Malcolm X after “Don’t Hurt Yourself”, the third song in the album.

Lemonade, then, is many things all at once: an extended feminist anthem with a Civil Rights inflection, performance art with an experimental edge, a revenue-generating media spectacle with high-flying aims. It juxtaposes the deep past with the vivid present, still photography with moving images, black-and-white with colour, African and Native American imagery with that of the American South, vandalism with tenderness. A startling twist is that Lemonade was released through Tidal, a streaming service owned by Jay Z and Beyoncé – the same Jay Z whom the work ostensibly exposes as an adulterer. As of mid-May,Lemonade had attracted 1.2 million new subscribers to Tidal.

Lemonade’s political intentions have been questioned: can ideological integrity coexist with big profits? Beyoncé “positively exploits images of black female bodies – placing them at the center, making them the norm”, asserts bell hooks, the African American feminist and social theorist. Yet, she concludes, “Ultimately Lemonade glamorizes a world of gendered cultural paradox and contradiction. It does not resolve”. “Glamour” certainly describes Lemonade, with Beyoncé singing, rapping, and dancing in magnificent gowns and artfully flowing hair. The women around her are also exquisitely turned out. “I’m so reckless when I rock my Givenchy dress (stylin’)”, Beyoncé intones in “Formation”, which has frequently been called a “Black Power Anthem” in the press. She flips the bird there, with perfectly manicured nails and wrists laden with expensive silver jewelry.

More here.

Hillary Chute reviews Bart Beaty new book in Critical Inquiry:

The cultural legitimization of comics; it is a topic that I, a scholar of contemporary literature and visual culture who has focused on comics, find singularly boring. It can feel backwards looking, instead of forward thinking. I certainly note this issue constantly, a natural impulse, as I track the public discourse around anything that compels me, but I have found that today the question of how and if comics is legitimated is often the least interesting avenue of inquiry one could consider about the form. I am, however, fascinated by the question of what constitutes art, as a practice and as material iteration—and how the form of comics has presented a productive challenge, particularly in the post WWII period, to conceptions of art and literature, and how and where they meet. Bart Beaty’s Comics versus Art, with its polemical title and 1978 Gary Panter illustration of a cape and beret-sporting superhero on the cover, appears a welcome and exciting contribution; finally someone, I thought, will wade right into these murky waters for the length of entire monograph, unfolding connections and possibilities; the title must just be a hook. Beaty, an English professor at Toronto who published the excellent studies Frederic Wertham and the Critique of Mass Culture (2005) and Unpopular Culture: Transforming the European Comic Book in the 1990s(2007), among others, has also translated some of the most sophisticated French scholarship on comics by Thierry Groensteen and Thierry Smolderen.

But the simplicity of the title is the real critical framework here. Beaty “interrogates the specific historical and social processes that have led to the devaluation of comics as a cultural form and takes note of the recent rise to art world prominence of (certain kinds of) comics. . . . In an increasingly postmodern world in which the distinction between high and low culture is often assumed to have been eroded, outmoded biases continue to persist” (p. 7). Beaty argues throughout, predictably, that the art world hasn’t accepted comics on its own terms, yet. Specifically, Beaty is interested in analyzing comics from a sociological perspective as its own “distinct art world” and network. Inspired by Howard Saul Becker’s 1982 Art Worlds (along with Pierre Bourdieu and a smattering of Friedrich Nietzsche’s theory ofressentiment), he disputes what he suggests are formalist definitions of comics that ignore the “comics world” and its relation to cultural value.

More here.

Ian Ground at the Times Literary Supplement:

Central to what is known as the “paradox of the ugly” is that ugliness does not just repel but also invites fascination and (prima facie at least) aesthetic appreciation. Thus the blobfish, the no doubt proud recipient of the ugliest animal award, the goblin shark and the naked mole rat hold – and in an as yet unexplained sense, reward – our attention. Deformity and injury – for all the moral problems that swirl around our reactions – excite a morbid fas­cination. And, of course, countless artworks and traditions have long enlisted negative responses to the revolting, disgusting, horrific and abject in pursuit of their positive goals.

Three strategies can go some way to sidestepping the sense of paradox. First, we may say that the paradox arises because of a failure to distinguish between the aesthetically and the artistically valuable. The ugly may be put to beautiful artistic purpose. But in such cases it could be that the aesthetically bad may be artistically good. For example, it would be intelligible to say of Francis Bacon’s “Screaming Pope” that the painting is insufficiently ugly. The ugly may be beautifully represented by the artist.

Second, we may say that the ugly is the vehicle for the appreciation of certain thoughts and feelings that could not otherwise be expressed. It might be the vehicle for cognitive value, for instance, in the traditional artistic duty of holding up a mirror to its audience. Third, we may say that the delight we take in the ugly is a parasitic response to the norm.

more here.

Ara H. Merjian at Bookforum:

Setting out in his Fiat 1100 from the Ligurian coast in June of 1959, Pier Paolo Pasolini spent the next couple months wending his way around Italy’s seemingly endless shoreline, arriving—at summer’s end—in the northeastern seaport of Trieste, not far from the Slovenian border. Commissioned by the magazine Successo, Pasolini’s spirited travelogue appeared in successive issues, illustrated with shots by the photographer Paolo di Paolo of chaises longues and beachside cafés, the holiday jet-set and throngs of teenagers clad in swimwear. Expertly translated by Stephen Sartarelli (whose renderings of Pasolini’s poetry came out from University of Chicago Press in 2014), this handsome English-language edition of Pasolini’s features photographs by Philippe Séclier, who retraced Pasolini’s journey, taking images that provide striking counterpoints to the text and update di Paolo’s repertoire in a more personal, intimate vernacular.

A notoriously heretical Marxist and sworn enemy of modernity, Pasolini calls to mind anything but the bourgeois trappings of “success.” His verse, cinema, journalism, and theater waged, in fact, tireless opposition against Italy’s neo-capitalist transformation, in nearly every medium imaginable. Yet here, just as the country’s post-war “economic miracle” picks up steam, we find Pasolini waxing enthusiastic about its future, reveling in those countless pockets of dialect and regional culture that still marked the peninsula’s coast, from sprawling resort towns to tiny fishing villages.

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Owen Hatherley at The London Review of Books:

The point Mason reiterates again and again is that in the struggle between postcapitalism and its alleged neoliberal enemies, ‘everything is pervaded by a fight between network and hierarchy.’ This is perhaps the issue on which he differs most from Srnicek and Williams. The first part of Inventing the Future mounts a critique of local, self-organised, non-hierarchical politics. Srnicek and Williams prefer to call it ‘folk politics’, though it seems as deeply enmeshed in the internet and its social networks as the futurism they advocate; more so, in fact. The participants in folk politics, like Mason’s young networked individuals, prefer ‘the everyday over the structural … feeling over thinking’. Their exponents can be found in Occupy, 15M in Spain, the Zapatistas and most forms of politics predicated on direct action: immediacy is all. In folk politics, ‘the importance of tactics and process is placed above strategic objectives,’ so that the mode of communication – whether the face-to-face deliberations in a protest camp or the use of social media to organise – becomes a fetish, and political content secondary. So far as Srnicek and Williams are concerned, the idea of being the change you want to see in the world practically guarantees that change won’t take place.

Why does folk politics apparently thrive in the networked world of contemporary protest? Because, they claim, it creates a warm glow, a sense that you are indeed ‘doing something’, reinforced when a minor battle is actually won: ‘Small successes – useful, no doubt, for instilling a sense of hope – nevertheless wither in the face of overwhelming losses.’ The ‘key challenge facing the left today,’ they write, ‘is to reckon with the disappointments and failures of the most recent cycle of struggles.’

more here.

Stephen Robinson in The Telegraph:

This is a journalist’s account of the ordeal of spending time with Donald Trump, and it is often very funny indeed, for it turns out that Trump’s elaborately sculpted hairweave is by no means the weirdest thing about him. Like any true narcissist and mountebank, Trump often talks of himself in the third person, and like some very rich men, he views women as commodities to be traded when marital sentiment turns bearish. When Singer asks him if he confides in anyone during moments of tribulation, he replies: “Nobody, it’s just not my thing.” So then what, Singer asks, is Trump’s notion of ideal company – well, comes the reply, “a total piece of ass”. Now on the campaign trail, he demands a high wall be built along the southern border with Mexico, and showily suggests that Muslims be banned from the United States until he has got the Islamist terror thing sorted out. Despite the hand-wringing of the Republican establishment, these are not “gaffes”, for they do not reveal a concealed truth; nor are they evidence of a blunt political outsider speaking truth to Washington elites. They are just cynical little morsels tossed into the crowd of angry American men (mostly) who are fed up with stagnant wages and immigrants. Trump lies so brazenly and routinely that one former New York political figure declared he would not trust a word he said even “if his tongue were notarised”. The man who presents himself as a self-made tycoon in fact inherited a multi-million-dollar New York real estate fortune from his father. The self-styled tough guy was not drafted for the Vietnam war because of a “heel spur”, although this did not give Trump pause when he questioned the valour of Senator John McCain, who was held prisoner for five years by the North Vietnamese.

…There is a type of liberal, conventional American who will tell you how it is “real scary” that Trump could one day be president. That will not happen, of course, as they know perfectly well: the Trump campaign is already showing signs of unravelling, and it is not impossible that the party elders will strike to kill him off at the convention in Cleveland next month. But anyway, it isn't feasible to run for the White House against American women, Hispanics, Muslims and gays. As a Republican presidential contender you can afford one or two useful enemies, but not the whole gamut, because then the numbers simply don’t work. Trump’s campaign is now failing because, as Singer notes, he has “no core beliefs, no describable political philosophy, and not an iota of curiosity about the practicalities of policy or governance”. Ultimately, you almost feel sorry for the man, with his “suspicion that an interior life was an intolerable burden” and his germophobe’s terror of shaking hands with the great unwashed he claims to represent.

More here.

John Rousseau in KurzweilAI:

The future of human consciousness will be a hybrid affair. We will live and work in a ubiquitous computing environment, where physical reality and a pervasive digital layer mix seamlessly according to the logic of software and the richness of highly contextual data. This is mixed reality (MR) — and it will soon simply be reality: projected onto our mind’s eye, always on, always connected, and deeply personalized. It will be delivered first through a head-mounted display, and ultimately embedded in our perception via subtler inputs. The resulting human network will be a massive, dynamic system capable of generating enormous value for humankind, as we embrace our cyborg future and the superpowers it enables. We’re not there yet, though this vision is far from science fiction. Today’s MR/VR products are somewhat clunky in terms of hardware, awkward in terms of user experience, and constrained by practical performance issues and limited content. However, these are temporary limitations that will be solved in time — and probably more quickly than we expect. Future hardware will be capable of rendering high-resolution digital content that blends seamlessly with our environment, and devices will be small enough to wear all the time. The complex UX challenges will be resolved, and new interaction models will emerge along with a new computing paradigm. And eventually, the infrastructure, bandwidth, content, and connectivity will be in place to support a fully integrated experience.

…There is a clear risk that the types of behaviors we notice now — being “in your phone” rather than in the world — will be exacerbated by mixed reality. Future digital experiences need to counter this tendency and improve our ability to be present for ourselves and others, and help users balance complex streams of information, notifications, and stimuli within a holistic experience. There is an opportunity to counter the addictive aspects of technology (FOMO — fear of missing out) that impair our ability to focus, lead to increasingly short attention spans, and lessen human productivity and potential.

More here.