Maggie Fergusson in More Intelligent Life:

Late last summer my parents called in their local undertaker. It was not that they felt they were nearing the end: at 86 and 82 they were both still fairly fit and leading independent lives. But they were about to downsize from the rambling Victorian house where they’d brought up five children, and were in the business of sorting things out so as to save us bother further down the line. Planning their funerals was a part of their tidying up. Neither Mum nor Dad is especially frightened of dying. Both have a faith; both share Pope John XXIII’s belief – often cited at funeral services – that “death, like birth, is only a transformation”, that it is “as easy and natural as going to sleep here and waking up there”. So it was disconcerting to find that the lady from the undertakers pointedly sidestepped the words “death” and “dying”. Instead, she guided them through a lengthy menu of coffins: the “Balmoral”, the “Priory”, the “Autumn Oak” – names seeming to imply that the transition out of this life is just another move up the suburban property ladder. And she talked of the impeccable service she could guarantee them in their “hour of need”. What precisely, my sister pressed, might this “service” consist of, given that by the time it was required Mum and Dad would no longer be alive? “Well, for one thing,” she replied, “we would be sure to keep them at the optimum temperature.” Oh, how we laughed! But perhaps we should not have been surprised by this dodging of the D word. Roughly every half a second, someone, somewhere in the world, dies – and nearly a person a minute in the United Kingdom. Yet ours is an age in which death has become taboo. “For all but our most recent history death was an ever present possibility,” writes Atul Gawande, an American surgeon and author of the bestseller “Being Mortal”, which has established him as a leading authority on the end of life. “It didn’t matter if you were 5 or 50. Every day was a roll of the dice.” But things have changed. Fifty years ago, most of us would have died at home. Now, though 70% of us would like to, only 12% do, leaving the vast majority to die in hospitals, hospices or care homes. So many – perhaps most – of us no longer know what death looks like. “A hundred years ago, everyone knew how people died,” says Min Stacpoole, a clinical nurse specialising in palliative care and based at St Christopher’s Hospice in south London. “Now many people are frightened of having a dead body in their house.”

As medicine advances, so life spans stretch. In the past 50 years, the number of people living to 100 has increased dramatically. Take this as an illustration: in 1955, the third year of her reign, Queen Elizabeth sent greetings to 199 people on their 100th birthdays. Last year, as Her Majesty herself nudged 90, this figure had risen to 6,946. Meanwhile, in the course of 2014, 780 people in Britain turned 105. With the horizon steadily receding, it’s easy to be lulled into a feeling that death is not something with which we need to be concerned, and a sense that mortality is just another illness to be tackled and treated. And yet possibly the only way to reduce the fear of death, and to be ready for it when it comes, is to look at it head on. “I’d like to introduce conversations about death to kids in school,” says Mary Flatley, a nurse at a large London hospice who has accompanied around 500 people in their final hours, and for whom dying holds little terror. “I’d like to have death right there at the forefront of life.”

More here.

The Editors at n+1:

HOW WILL IT END? For centuries even the most sanguine of capitalism’s theorists have thought it not long for this world. Smith, Ricardo, and Mill pointed to a “falling rate of profit” linked to inevitable declines in agricultural productivity. Marx applied the same concept to industrial production, suggesting that the tendency to replace workers with machines would lead to a chronic and insurmountable lack of demand. Sombart saw the restive adventurousness of capitalism as the key to its success—and, ultimately, its failure: though the appearance of new peripheries had long funneled profits back to the center, the days of “stout Cortez” had ended and there would one day be no empires or hinterlands to subdue.

Schumpeter was the gloomiest of all. He opened a chapter titled “Can Capitalism Survive?” (in his Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy) with the definitive answer, “No. I do not think it can.” Inspired by Marx, he imagined that the very success of capitalism—the creation of large enterprises through continuous innovation—would lead to profound fatigue as innovation came to be merely routine, and the bourgeoisie turned its attention toward the banalities of office life: “Success in industry and commerce requires a lot of stamina, yet industrial and commercial activity is essentially unheroic in the knight’s sense—no flourishing of swords about it, not much physical prowess, no chance to gallop the armored horse into the enemy, preferably a heretic or heathen — and the ideology that glorifies the idea of fighting for fighting’s sake and of victory for victory’s sake understandably withers in the office among all the columns of figures.”

more here.

Toby Craig Jones in The New York Times:

WHEN Saudi Arabia executed the Shiite cleric and political dissident Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr on Saturday, the country’s leaders were aware that doing so would upset their longtime rivals in Iran. In fact, the royal court in Riyadh was probably counting on it. It got what it wanted. The deterioration of relations has been precipitous: Protesters in Tehran sacked Saudi Arabia’s embassy; in retaliation, Saudi Arabia severed diplomatic ties. More severe fallout could follow — possibly even war. Why did Saudi Arabia want this now? Because the kingdom is under pressure: Oil prices, on which the economy depends almost entirely, are plummeting; a thaw in Iranian-American relations threatens to diminish Riyadh’s special place in regional politics; the Saudi military is failing in its war in Yemen. In this context, a row with Iran is not a problem so much as an opportunity. The royals in Riyadh most likely believe that it will allow them to stop dissent at home, shore up support among the Sunni majority and bring regional allies to their side. In the short term, they may be right. But eventually, stoking sectarianism will only empower extremists and further destabilize an already explosive region.

Over the past decade, Saudi rulers have turned to Iran and Shiites every time they needed an easy scapegoat. Anti-Iranian and anti-Shiite sentiments have long existed among religious extremists in the kingdom, but today they are at the heart of Saudi Arabia’s national identity. This development is dangerous for Saudi Arabia’s Shiite community, estimated at 10 to 15 percent of the population, and for the entire Middle East. This is hardly the first time Saudi Arabia’s Shiites have come under fire. Sectarianism under Saudi rule dates back to the early 20th century. But until recently, the kingdom’s leaders have balanced strong-armed tactics with efforts to accommodate community leaders, seeking to minimize the dangers of sectarianism.

More here.

Can we agree Kevlar
backpacks shouldn’t be needed

for children walking to school?
Those same children

also shouldn’t require a suit
of armor when standing

on their front lawns, or snipers
to watch their backs

as they eat at McDonalds.
They shouldn’t have to stop

to consider the speed
of a bullet or how it might

reshape their bodies. But
one winter, back in Detroit,

I had one student
who opened a door and died.

It was the front
door to his house, but

it could have been any door,
and the bullet could have written

any name. The shooter
was thirteen years old

and was aiming
at someone else. But

a bullet doesn’t care
about “aim,” it doesn’t

distinguish between
the innocent and the innocent,

and how was the bullet
supposed to know this

child would open the door
at the exact wrong moment

because his friend
was outside and screaming

for help. Did I say
I had “one” student who

opened a door and died?
That’s wrong.

There were many.
The classroom of grief

had far more seats
than the classroom for math

though every student
in the classroom for math

could count the names
of the dead.

A kid opens a door. The bullet
couldn’t possibly know,

nor could the gun, because
“guns don’t kill people,” they don’t

have minds to decide
such things, they don’t choose

or have a conscience,
and when a man doesn’t

have a conscience, we call him
a psychopath. This is how

we know what type of assault rifle
a man can be,

and how we discover
the hell that thrums inside

each of them. Today,
there’s another

shooting with dead
kids everywhere. It was a school,

a movie theater, a parking lot.
The world

is full of doors.
And you, whom I cannot save,

you may open a door

and enter a meadow, or a eulogy.
And if the latter, you will be

mourned, then buried
in rhetoric.

There will be
monuments of legislation,

little flowers made
from red tape.

What should we do? we’ll ask
again. The earth will close

like a door above you.
What should we do?

And that click you hear?
That’s just our voices,

the deadbolt of discourse
sliding into place.
.
by Matthew Olzmann
originally published January 5, 2016,
by the Academy of American Poets.

Sarah Hill in Boston Review:

Before there was salt, there was sugar. Before there was coal, ice, and bananas, there was sugar. Before there was a long list of one-word, bestselling histories about globe-shaping commodities, there was Sidney Mintz’s ur text of the ur commodity of the modern world, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History. With it, Mintz’s accomplishments went far beyond launching a new mode of history writing; the book also contributed to a sea change that placed human agency at the center of anthropology and offered a profound correction to how we understand modern history. Published in 1985, Sweetness and Power accounted for New and Old World histories, the rise of Atlantic slavery and industrialism, and more than five hundred years of elite and plebian tastes, folding them into one easily digestible confection. Sweetness and Power explained how we live—how world market systems shape taste and vice versa—in ways that no previous book had managed. It became a powerful model for how to write history, not through great men or great events, but through fungible, ubiquitous commodities and the freightedness of taste. Without Mintz’s slim volume, it’s hard to imagine the careers of many other writers who have copied Mintz’s mystical formula for revealing the weight of the past on the present: all the world in a grain of sand, sugar, salt. One of the tricks of history is that extraordinary things can, in time, become commonplace; Mintz showed us how to see them as extraordinary again.

Mintz’s history of sugar also joined two academic disciplines—anthropology and history—that have long struggled for compatibility. In Sweetness and Power, he explained:

Though I do not accept uncritically the dictum that anthropology must become history or be nothing at all, I believe that without history its explanatory power is seriously compromised. Social phenomena are by their nature historical, which is to say that the relationship among events in one “moment” can never be abstracted from their past and future setting.

Trained as an anthropologist by Franz Boas’s student Ruth Benedict, Mintz’s investment in the past reflected the concerns of the historically minded Boas more than those of the culturally particularist Benedict. An early reader of Marx, Mintz’s approach to anthropology contained echoes of Marx’s famous statement about history: men make their own, but do not choose how they do so. Mintz turned that phrase into a formula for understanding how people create their own cultures, as Marx said of history, “under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.”

More here.

Andrew Cockburn in Harper's:

One morning early in 1988, Ed McWilliams, a foreign-service officer posted to the American Embassy in Kabul, heard the thump of a massive explosion from somewhere on the other side of the city. It was more than eight years after the Russian invasion of Afghanistan, and the embassy was a tiny enclave with only a handful of diplomats. McWilliams, a former Army intelligence operative, had made it his business to venture as much as possible into the Soviet-occupied capital. Now he set out to see what had happened.

It was obviously something big: although the explosion had taken place on the other side of Sher Darwaza, a mountain in the center of Kabul, McWilliams had heard it clearly. After negotiating a maze of narrow streets on the south side of the city, he found the site. A massive car bomb, designed to kill as many civilians as possible, had been detonated in a neighborhood full of Hazaras, a much-persecuted minority.

McWilliams took pictures of the devastation, headed back to the embassy, and sent a report to Washington. It was very badly received — not because someone had launched a terrorist attack against Afghan civilians, but because McWilliams had reported it. The bomb, it turned out, had been the work of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the mujahedeen commander who received more CIA money and support than any other leader of the Afghan rebellion. The attack, the first of many, was part of a CIA-blessed scheme to “put pressure” on the Soviet presence in Kabul. Informing the Washington bureaucracy that Hekmatyar’s explosives were being deployed to kill civilians was therefore entirely unwelcome.

“Those were Gulbuddin’s bombs,” McWilliams, a Rhode Islander with a gift for laconic understatement, told me recently. “He was supposed to get the credit for this.” In the meantime, the former diplomat recalled, the CIA pressured him to “report a little less specifically about the humanitarian consequences of those vehicle bombs.”

I tracked down McWilliams, now retired to the remote mountains of southern New Mexico, because the extremist Islamist groups currently operating in Syria and Iraq called to mind the extremist Islamist groups whom we lavishly supported in Afghanistan during the 1980s. Hekmatyar, with his documented fondness for throwing acid in women’s faces, would have had nothing to learn from Al Qaeda. When a courageous ABC News team led by my wife, Leslie Cockburn, interviewed him in 1993, he had beheaded half a dozen people earlier that day. Later, he killed their translator.

More here.

Massimo Pigluicci in The Philosophers' Magazine:

I am a biologist and a philosopher of science, which puts me squarely into what in modern philosophical parlance is called the “analytic” tradition, tracing back to the works of Bertrand Russell, G.E. Moore & co. at the beginning of the 20th century. The other major contemporary tradition is often referred to as “Continental,” because it originated with mostly French and German writers, arching back to Nietzsche, then Heidegger, all the way to Foucault and Derrida, just to mention a few.

Even though it is now fashionable to deny the split between analytic and Continental philosophy, it is plainly there for anyone who actually bothers to read the authors in question and their intellectual heirs. Despite some crossover, broadly speaking — and at the cost of a somewhat simplified summary — analytic philosophers tend to be very careful in their use of language and arguments, but also to write about increasingly less interesting minutiae. Continentalists, in contrast, display a marked preference for important social and political issues, yet also write in a more essayistic form, not infrequently getting lost into outright obfuscatory language.

I find this divide to be a highly unfortunate feature of the modern philosophical landscape, and one that at some point needs to be overcome (and, to be fair, a number of people have been trying). Ideally, philosophy ought to get back to its roots and concern itself with commenting clearly and compellingly (following the analytics) about things that actually matter (taking a hint from the Continentalists). Then again, one needs to be careful about wishing a particular offspring to come out of a given coupling. I am reminded of a quip by George Bernard Shaw: apparently, during a dinner party a young and attractive woman suggested marriage on the grounds that their children would have her beauty and his intelligence; to which he responded that it was also possible that they would inherit his beauty and her intelligence…

More here.

George Gillett in Salon:

Reused needles, poorly trained staff and expired medications. The picture Hemley Gonzalez describes to me is not one often associated with adjectives such as “saintly” in the medical profession. Yet as he discusses his experience volunteering at facilities run by Missionaries of Charity, the organization Mother Teresa founded, it becomes increasingly apparent that few of his anecdotes correlate with the reputation she enjoys. “I was shocked to discover the horrifically negligent manner in which the charity operates,” he recalls.

His story is not atypical. Writing in the New Internationalist magazine about her experience working at Missionaries of Charity’s headquarters in Kolkata, another volunteer urged that the organization be “finally held accountable for its actions of abuse and neglect.” Similar concerns were raised in a 1994 UK documentary that featured the story of a 15-year-old patient who had been admitted with a “relatively simple kidney complaint.” His condition had deteriorated soon after the facility had refused to transfer him to a local hospital to undergo surgery.

Criticism of Mother Teresa’s mission has also come from the medical profession. Dr. Robin Fox, former editor of the medical journal the Lancet, described the Missionaries of Charity facilities as “haphazard” as early as 1994, recounting how he witnessed a young man with malaria be treated with only ineffective antibiotics and paracetamol. “Along with the neglect of diagnosis, the lack of good analgesia marks Mother Theresa’s approach,” he wrote in an article for the journal.

More here.

From Science Blogs:

Several years ago, Harriet Hall coined a term that is most apt: Tooth fairy science. The term refers to clinical trials and basic science performed on fantasy. More specifically, it refers todoing research on a phenomenon before it has been scientifically established that the phenomenon exists. Harriet put it this way:

You could measure how much money the Tooth Fairy leaves under the pillow, whether she leaves more cash for the first or last tooth, whether the payoff is greater if you leave the tooth in a plastic baggie versus wrapped in Kleenex. You can get all kinds of good data that is reproducible and statistically significant. Yes, you have learned something. But you haven’t learned what you think you’ve learned, because you haven’t bothered to establish whether the Tooth Fairy really exists.

There’s a lot of tooth fairy science out there right now. It’s been increasing in quantity ever since the rise of so-called “complementary and alternative medicine” (CAM), now known as “integrative medicine” over the last two decades. “Energy healing,” acupuncture, homeopathy, craniosacral therapy, reflexology, even faith healing, there’s no pseudoscience too ridiculous to be excluded from pointless clinical trials. What all these clinical trials share in common is that they are tooth fairy science. They study a phenomenon without its ever having been established that the phenomenon actually exists. Worse, because of the vagaries of he clinical trial process, bias, and even just the random noise in clinical trial results that produce seemingly positive trials by random chance alone, advocates of these pseudoscientific treatments can always point to evidence that their treatment “works.” The overall body of existing research on a treatment like homeopathy is negative, but homeopaths can always cherry pick individual studies and sound convincing doing it.

More here.

Talmiz Ahmad in The Wire:

The new year has commenced with the execution of Saudi Arabia’s firebrand Shia cleric, Sheikh Nimr Baqir al-Nimr, the attack on the Saudi embassy in Tehran, and the Saudi decision to break diplomatic ties with Iran by asking its ambassador to leave Riyadh in 48 hours.

These events mark the culmination of the steady deterioration in relations between these two Islamic giants over the last five years, poisoned by the infection of sectarianism that has divided West Asia since the Islamic revolution but which has gained resonance since the US invasion of Iraq in 2003.

In Saudi Arabia, the Shia are said to constitute about 13% of the national population, which makes them a substantial three million or more in the Kingdom. They are concentrated in the oil-rich Eastern Province, where they number 2.6 million in a population of about four million.

The ruling ideology in Saudi Arabia is “Salafism”, a belief-system that demands that all Muslim faith and practice be founded on Islam’s two basic texts, the Koran and the Hadith, the “traditions” of the Prophet. This literalist and restrictive approach sees as kufr (disbelief) all beliefs and practices that are not drawn from these basic texts. Animosity for the Shia and the conviction that they are not Muslim lies at the heart of Salafist doctrine.

More here.

Dynamic Positioning

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Tara Parker-Pope in The New York Times:

A strategy called “design thinking” has helped numerous entrepreneurs and engineers develop successful new products and businesses. But can design thinking help you create healthful habits? Bernard Roth, a prominent Stanford engineering professor, says that design thinking can help everyone form the kind of lifelong habits that solve problems, achieve goals and help make our lives better. “We are all capable of reinvention,” says Dr. Roth, a founder of the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford and author of the book, “The Achievement Habit.” I’ve applied design thinking to my own life the past few months, and it seems to be working. I’ve lost 25 pounds, reconnected with close friends and refocused my energy on specific goals and habits. Design thinking has helped me identify the obstacles that were stopping me from achieving my goals, and it’s helped me reframe my problems to make them easier to solve. In the words of Dr. Roth, design thinking helped me “get unstuck.” To get started, design thinkers focus on five steps, but the first two are the most important. Step 1 is to “empathize” — learn what the real issues are that need to be solved. Next, “define the problem” — a surprisingly tough task. The third step is to “ideate” — brainstorm, make lists, write down ideas and generate possible solutions. Step 4 is to build a prototype or create a plan. The final step is to test the idea and seek feedback from others.

Design thinking is normally applied by people who are trying to create a new product or solve a social problem or meet a consumer need.

More here.

Waseem Ahmed. In the Name of Faith. 2015.

Pigment colors on archival wasli paper.

More here and here.

Adrian Chen in the New York Times Book Review:

For all the talk of Donald Trump’s unpresidential behavior, the Republican enfant terrible does share one notable trait with that paragon of presidentiality, George Washington: a fondness for conspiracy theories. Washington once wrote in a letter that he believed an Illuminati conspiracy was at work in America, while Trump is the figurehead of the birther movement, which claims Barack Obama is not a natural-born American citizen. The psychologist and science journalist Rob Brotherton’s new book, “Suspicious Minds: Why We Believe Conspiracy ­Theories,” helps explain why someone with such seemingly outlandish views can gain widespread public support. It turns out we are all conspiracy theorists.

Brotherton attacks the stereotype, which he says was popularized by the historian Richard Hofstadter in his influential essay “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” of conspiracy theorists as a small band of tinfoil-adorned loonies — the paranoid fringe. Brotherton’s main argument is that we all possess a conspiracy mind-set to some extent, because it is hard-wired into our brains. “Suspicious Minds” details the various psychological “quirks and shortcuts” that make us susceptible to conspiracy theories.

For example, psychologists have discovered that we possess an “intentionality bias,” which tricks us into assuming every incidental event that happens in the world is the result of someone’s intention.

More here.

From the Wall Street Journal:

First, worry less about the banking system. Financial institutions today are less fragile than they were a few years ago. This isn’t because they got better at understanding risk (they didn’t) but because, since 2009, banks have been shedding their exposures to extreme events. Hedge funds, which are much more adept at risk-taking, now function as reinsurers of sorts. Because hedge-fund owners have skin in the game, they are less prone to hiding risks than are bankers.

This isn’t to say that the financial system has healed: Monetary policy made itself ineffective with low interest rates, which were seen as a cure rather than a transitory painkiller. Zero interest rates turn monetary policy into a massive weapon that has no ammunition. There’s no evidence that “zero” interest rates are better than, say, 2% or 3%, as the Federal Reserve may be realizing.

I worry about asset values that have swelled in response to easy money. Low interest rates invite speculation in assets such as junk bonds, real estate and emerging market securities. The effect of tightening in 1994 was disproportionately felt with Italian, Mexican and Thai securities. The rule is: Investments with micro-Ponzi attributes (i.e., a need to borrow to repay) will be hit.

Though “another Lehman Brothers” isn’t likely to happen with banks, it is very likely to happen with commodity firms and countries that depend directly or indirectly on commodity prices.

More here.

Pankaj Mishra in The Guardian:

In one of his last interviews, the historian Tony Judt lamented his “catastrophic” Anglo-American generation, whose cossetted members included George W Bush and Tony Blair. Having grown up after the defining wars and hatreds of the west’s 20th century, “in a world of no hard choices, neither economic nor political”, these historically weightless elites believed that “no matter what choice they made, there would be no disastrous consequences”.

A member of the Bush administration brashly affirmed its arrogance of power in 2004 after what then seemed a successful invasion of Iraq: “When we act,” he boasted, “we create our own reality.” A “pretty crappy generation”, Judt concluded, “when you come to think of it.

One cannot but think of the reality it made as mayhem in Asia and Africa reaches European and North American cities. But those of us from countries where many Anglo-American institutions were once admirable models have their own melancholy reasons to reflect on their swift decay.

As another annus horribilis lurched to a close, the evidence of moral and intellectual sloth seemed unavoidable. In the Christmas issue of the Spectator,Rod Liddle described Calais as “a jungle of largely Muslim asylum seekers aching to get into Britain – presumably to be hugged” by “the liberals”.

More here.

Milford Bateman in The Conversation:

[T]he microcredit movement quickly elevated the supposed poverty reducing power of self-help and individual entrepreneurship to almost miracle status. To escape poverty, the poor no longer needed state intervention and other forms of “collective capability” such as trade unions, public ownership and strong regulations.

Only one last hurdle had to be overcome before the global triumph of microcredit. A core aspect of the new neoliberal agenda was its emphasis on the need for all institutions in society to be financially self-sufficient and profit oriented. Subsidies and public investment were bad words.

The heavily subsidised Grameen Bank-style microcredit industry clearly could not survive under the new neoliberal “self-sufficiency” paradigm. Led by USAID and the World Bank, the microcredit model was therefore extensively commercialised, privatised and liberalised.

It was essentially developed into a for-profit private business model. Microcredit was turned into a business, but one imbued with a crucial social goal – poverty reduction. With this important change secured, the microcredit industry began a very rapid expansion.

By the mid-2000s the model was being described as the most effective anti-poverty and “bottom-up” development intervention of all time. With support from both the left and the right of the political spectrum, the UN agreed to nominate 2005 as the UN Year of Microcredit.

And then it all began to go horribly wrong.

More here.