Alana Shilling-Janoff at Boston Review:

But melancholy jeremiads about the decay of prominent art museums and the evils of trading ideals for profit are tiresome. There is, moreover, hope elsewhere. Another kind of museum offers the public what commercialized counterparts might—and often more cheaply and effectively. Ironically these museums are sheltered under the aegis of institutions perceived as so exclusionary that they are collectively labeled the “ivory tower,” a synecdoche that suggests an improbable wedding of spun-sugar fantasy and contemptuous anti-intellectualism.

Counter-intuitively, university art museums are proving capable of realizing the ideals that other art museums espouse in facile mission statements polished to a gleam by publicists—primarily a “commitment” to serve as cultural resources for the public and to make art education accessible. Though university museums employ their own public relations corps, their fundamental concern with education makes their ambitious missions less rhetorical, more a matter of praxis. In a certain sense, university museums are in business as surely as are their public counterparts. However, by virtue of their academic affiliations, theirs is a commerce of the mind, of making art available and comprehensible.

more here.

Almantas Samalavicius talks to Sajay Samuel at Eurozine:

Sajay Samuel: The anthropologist Max Gluckman once noted that the ritual rain-dance had a curious property. The belief in its powers is rarely shaken – should it rain after a dance, that is taken as proof of its efficacy, and when the ground remains parched under unclouded skies, that is a signal to dance even harder, that the dance was badly choreographed. Upon bringing out this set of essays by Illich, I do think the belief in progress and general prosperity through economic growth is less self-evident than it was a generation ago. But this is an uneven phenomenon: in the West (roughly speaking), and particularly after the recent so-called “economic crisis”, many are out of work or working much harder for less, carrying large amounts of debt, and experiencing their daily lives and future prospects as being more fragile and precarious. The ritual dance of work and consumption has been interrupted, and this leads many to examine again their belief, even faith, in progress and economic prosperity. Even the most diehard economists are bewildered about what can be done – though they continue helplessly to whip those tired horses, “more work” and “more consumption”, even while dimly recognizing that these nags will not run much more.

However, the mantra of prosperity and progress through economic growth seems comforting to those recently converted to market economies after decades of Development, Planning or Communism. Faith in the economy seems to have taken hold in the so-called BRIC countries, but also in eastern Europe, Latin America and on the African continent.

more here.

Michael Specter at The New Yorker:

Pavlov’s research originally had little to do with psychology; it focussed on the ways in which eating excited salivary, gastric, and pancreatic secretions. To do that, he developed a system of “sham” feeding. Pavlov would remove a dog’s esophagus and create an opening, a fistula, in the animal’s throat, so that, no matter how much the dog ate, the food would fall out and never make it to the stomach. By creating additional fistulas along the digestive system and collecting the various secretions, he could measure their quantity and chemical properties in great detail. That research won him the 1904 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. But a dog’s drool turned out to be even more meaningful than he had first imagined: it pointed to a new way to study the mind, learning, and human behavior.

“Essentially, only one thing in life is of real interest to us—our psychical experience,” he said in his Nobel address. “Its mechanism, however, was and still is shrouded in profound obscurity. All human resources—art, religion, literature, philosophy, and the historical sciences—all have joined in the attempt to throw light upon this darkness. But humanity has at its disposal yet another powerful resource—natural science with its strict objective methods.”

more here.

Operation Zarb-e-Azb is a military offensive being conducted by Pakistani military forces against various militant groups in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas bordering Afghanistan. Up to 30,000 Pakistani soldiers are involved in Zarb-e-Azb, described as a “comprehensive operation” to flush out all foreign and local militants hiding in North Waziristan.

Wajahat S Khan in The News:

The base throbs with uniforms of regular infantry battalions; yet, it is the human heart of a ghost town. Outside, Mir Ali has changed. North Waziristan has been taken, but at a cost: The entire city of Mir Ali has been depopulated through what Major General Zafarullah Khan Khattak, the General Officer Commanding of the 7th Infantry Division and the man in charge of Operation Zarb-e-Azb (“Strike of the Prophet’s Sword”), calls “an organised exodus”.

Earlier in the summer, when the operation was launched, weeks of air strikes, ground attacks and penetrating local militant networks with human and signals intelligence were not enough. Nor were the “strangulation operations” that had kicked off before the official campaign was launched on the 30th of June. ‘NWA’ was a different challenge from Swat, assessed the brass. The local population was “entrenched in a decade-long economy of terror” that made them “invested in the anarchy” that was North Waziristan, says General Khattak.

Since then, some 700,000 civilians have been displaced. Around 1,800 terrorists have been killed or captured. Around 200 tons of IEDs and ordnance have been found, “enough for the militants to keep on conducting five IED attacks per day, at a rate of three casualties per attack, for 14 and half years, anywhere in Pakistan or the region”, says the general. As for sheer firepower, the GOC assesses that “there were enough arms and ammunition in the area to raise an entire infantry brigade.”

To date, the army has lost 45 men in the campaign and sustained 155 casualties. Three would be killed on the same night that this correspondent was in North Waziristan, over the last weekend, when Operation Zarb-e-Azb would be completing its 138th day. Naturally, standing on the perimeters of the base, the junior officers are watchful.

“That’s Shahbaz Top. We still take rockets and sniper fire from there,” says Brigadier Azhar Abbasi of the 313 Brigade, sipping tea while wearing his armour, his radio set crackling, looking over the bombed out town, pointing to a peak. “They’re not civilised, the Tangos [army code for Taliban], but they are bloody good shooters. I’ve lost three men from shots that came from over 1,100 yards. All head shots, two of them in the nose. Dragunovs are their weapon of choice…Excellent weapons. But terrible men.”

Read the full article here.

Neela Debnath in The Independent:

The eagerly anticipated companion guide to George RR Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series has finally arrived. While it may not be as chunky as the original novels, The World of Ice & Fire: The Untold History of Westeros and A Game of Thrones, it is just as rich and comprehensive. Martin, along with his co-authors, offers readers a breathtakingly detailed history of Westeros preceding the events in the novels. From the Dawn Age all the way through to the Glorious Reign, every entry is like embarking on a new journey through Martin's world. It's safe to say that Martin's world is more fully realised than JK Rowling's magical universe of Harry Potter and even JRR Tolkien's Middle-earth. In fact, many of the chapters could form their own series of equally weighty books. Both die-hard fans of the HBO adaptation, Game of Thrones, and A Song of Ice and Fire purists can appreciate this guide. Saying this, it is probably a little bit too geeky and information-overload for fans of the TV show.

Those who have already devoured Martin's monstrous novels will find this guide easier to digest. Subjects that are touched upon in the original books are explored here more thoroughly. The colourful chapters on the monarchs of Westeros read like something from the annals of long-dead tyrannical British monarchs – and it's great. For instance, Maegor the Cruel has a whole entry devoted to his life and reign. From the number of mistresses he had (each one has their own profile) to his mysterious death, Maegor's entry is certainly thorough. There are also smaller nuggets. Tywin Lannister is a looming presence in the novels but here he is shown in a new light. Yes, he's a schemer seeking power but he has a softer side when it comes to his wife, Joanna.

More here.

From KurzweilAI:

Queen Mary University of London researchers have developed a Google Play app called Phoney based on a mind-reading card trick, part of a research exploration into what can be achieved when human intelligence is replaced or assisted by machine intelligence.

The app arranges a deck of playing cards in such a way that a specific card picked by an audience member can be identified (and dramatically displayed on the phone) with the least amount of information from the audience possible. To create the app, they “taught” AI software how a mind-reading card trick works and how humans understand magic tricks. The software then created completely new variants on those tricks that could be delivered by a magician. The research also suggests questions about how superintelligent AI systems might be programmed to manipulate people and how such algorithms might even be developed accidentally. For example, an AI might gain power by making people believe it was supernatural.

More here.

Steve Landsburg in The Big Questions:

I never met Grothendieck. I was never in the same room with him. I never even saw him from a distance. But whenever I think about math — which is to say, pretty much every day — I feel him hovering over my shoulder. I’ve strived to read the mind of Grothendieck as others strive to read the mind of God.

Those who did know him tend to describe him as a man of indescribable charisma, with a Christ-like ability to inspire followers. I’ve heard it said that when Grothendieck walked into a room, you might have had no idea who he was or what he did, but you definitely knew you wanted to devote your life to him.

And people did. In 1958, when Grothendieck (aged 30) announced a massive program to rewrite the foundations of geometry, he assembled a coterie of brilliant followers and conducted a seminar that met 10 hours a day, 5 days a week, for over a decade. Grothendieck talked; others took notes, went home, filled in details, expanded on his ideas, wrote final drafts, and returned the next day for more. Jean Dieudonne, a mathematician of quite considerable prominence in his own right, subjugated himself entirely to the project and was at his desk every morning at 5AM so that he could do three hours of editing before Grothendieck arrived and started talking again at 8:00. (Here and elsewhere I am reporting history as I’ve heard it from the participants and others who followed developments closely as they were happening. If I’ve got some details wrong, I’m happy to be corrected.) The resulting volumes filled almost 10,000 pages and rocked the mathematical world. (You can see some of those pages here).

I want to try to give something of the flavor of the revolution that unfolded in that room, and I want to do it for an audience with little mathematical background. This might require stretching some analogies almost to the breaking point. I’ll try to be as honest as I can. In the first part, I’ll talk about Grothendieck’s radical approach to mathematics generally; after that, I’ll talk (in a necessarily vague way) about some of his most radical and important ideas.

Read the rest here.

Sarah-Jayne Blakemore, Molly Crockett, Jennifer Jacquet, Michael McCullough, Hugo Mercier, L.A. Paul, David Rand, Lawrence Ian Reed, and Simone Schnall over at Edge.org:

In September a group of social scientists gathered for HEADCON '14, an Edge Conference at Eastover Farm. Speakers addressed a range of topics concerning the social (or moral, or emotional) brain: Sarah-Jayne Blakemore: “The Teenager's Sense Of Social Self”; Lawrence Ian Reed: “The Face Of Emotion”; Molly Crockett: “The Neuroscience of Moral Decision Making”; Hugo Mercier: “Toward The Seamless Integration Of The Sciences”; Jennifer Jacquet: “Shaming At Scale”; Simone Schnall: “Moral Intuitions, Replication, and the Scientific Study of Human Nature”; David Rand: “How Do You Change People's Minds About What Is Right And Wrong?”; L.A. Paul: “The Transformative Experience”; Michael McCullough: “Two Cheers For Falsification”. Also participating as “kibitzers” were four speakers from HEADCON '13, the previous year's event: Fiery Cushman, Joshua Knobe, David Pizarro, and Laurie Santos.

More here.

Cynthia Haven at The Book Haven:

In 1991, Nobel laureate Joseph Brodsky was asked what American poets he admired. Of the two or three he shortlisted, he mentioned Melissa Green for “tremendous intensity and tremendous intelligence.” He continued: “In the case of Ms. Green, I think it’s a tremendous facility. She’s a tremendous rhymer. There’s a collection of hers called Squanicook Eclogues, wonderful eclogues, I think. Virgil would be proud of those. Tremendous rhyming, tremendous texture.”

Then she disappeared. Her 1987 Squanicook Eclogues, which received awards from the Poetry Society of America and the Academy of American Poets, looked to be a solo product of a brilliant woman. Then, a decade later, a memoir of mental illness, Coloring Is the Suffering of Light, then, a decade after that, another collection of poems, Fifty-Two (try finding it anywhere, just try), and now, the next installment of her memoirs, The Linen Way, excerpted in the current Parnassus.

For my money, my favorite passage is a description of her Boston University class with Nobel poet Derek Walcott, which, in fact, brings back memories of his Russian friend’s classes. Walcott made his students memorize “Lycidas” – a suggestion that was met with “tittering and mumbled derision – most of the students seemed to resent having to memorize such a long, boring poem.”

more here.

Massimo Pigliucci in Aeon:

[E.O] Wilson claims that we can engage in a process of ‘consilience’ that leads to an intellectually and aesthetically satisfactory unity of knowledge. Here is how he defines two versions of consilience: ‘To dissect a phenomenon into its elements … is consilience by reduction. To reconstitute it, and especially to predict with knowledge gained by reduction how nature assembled it in the first place, is consilience by synthesis’.

Despite the unfamiliar name, this is actually a standard approach in the natural sciences, and it goes back to Descartes. In order to understand a complex problem, we break it down into smaller chunks, get a grasp on those, and then put the whole thing back together. The strategy is called reductionism and it has been highly successful in fundamental physics, though its success has been more limited in biology and other natural sciences. The overall image that Wilson seems to have in mind is of a downward spiral wherein complex aspects of human culture — literature, for example — are understood first in terms of the social sciences (sociology, psychology), and then more mechanistically by the biological sciences (neurobiology, evolutionary biology), before finally being reduced to physics. After all, everything is made of quarks (or strings), isn’t it?

Before we can see where Wilson and his followers go wrong, we need to make a distinction between two meanings of reductionism. There is ontological reduction, which has to do with what exists, and epistemic reduction, which has to do with what we know. The first one is the idea that the bottom level of reality (say, quarks, or strings) is causally sufficient to account for everything else (atoms, cells, you and me, planets, galaxies and so forth). Epistemic reductionism, on the other hand, claims that knowledge of the bottom level is sufficient to reconstruct knowledge of everything else. It holds that we will eventually be able to derive a quantum mechanical theory of planetary motions and of the genius of Shakespeare.

More here.

Lindsay Beyerstein in the New York Observer:

You’d think This American Life’s true crime podcast, Serial, would be a show you could enjoy with a clear conscience. It’s exhaustively reported, skillfully produced, and engaging to the point of being addictive — the Wall Street Journal just called it a “global phenomenon.”

What’s more, Serial might end up exposing a real-life miscarriage of justice. Even if host Sarah Koenig doesn’t manage to exonerate Adnan Syed for the 1999 murder of his ex-girlfriend Hae Min Lee, she has already made a convincing case that prosecutors used anti-Muslim stereotypes to bolster their weak case against Syed.

So, why is there a cottage industry of think pieces dedicated to making us feel guilty about liking Serial?

Because it’s “problematic” and its host is “privileged.”

Jay Caspian Kang leads the “privilege” charge against Ms. Koenig in the Awl. He claims to have no problem in principle with a white reporter covering communities of color, but he thinks Koenig is doing it wrong.

Mr. Kang, who just joined the New York Times Magazine as a contributor, offers this snippet of Koenig’s dialogue as proof of her egregious white privilege: “[Hae's] diary, by the way—well I’m not exactly sure what I expected her diary to be like but—it’s such a teenage girls diary.”

Mr. Kang jumps to the conclusion that Koenig expected Hae’s diary to be different because she was Korean. Cue self-righteous indignation: “Wait, what did you expect her diary to be like?” or “Why do you feel the need to point out that a Korean teenage girl’s diary is just like a teenage girl’s diary?” and perhaps, most importantly, “Where does your model for ‘such a teenage girl’s diary’ come from?”

There’s nothing in Serial that suggests that Ms. Koenig’s mild surprise at Hae’s boy-crazy diary stems from any assumption about what Korean people’s diaries are like. Absolutely nothing. It’s a total non sequitur.

More here.

Marc Mewshaw at The Millions:

Seven years after taking on military intelligence in the National Book Award-winning novel Tree of Smoke, Johnson returns to the subject once again. But The Laughing Monsters is a much slighter affair, a fizzy alcopop compared to that kaleidoscopic work’s dark, bitter brew. Still, it leaves a poisonous aftertaste and grapples with existential queries far above its pay grade — questions of grace, theodicy, and unknowability.

Leave it to Johnson, variously hailed as a visionary in the Blakean mold and a “junkyard angel,” to twist the slender frame of the “spy thriller” into a shape that can bear such hefty cosmic freight. Indeed, much of the novel’s charm lies in its disregard for the limitations of the genre. By breaking all the rules, The Laughing Monsters becomes something new — a seriocomic spy novel that’s both timely and universal.

Just as the novel is no conventional thriller, Nair is no conventional international man of mystery. He’s a crazy patchwork of identities, divided loyalties, and conflicts of interest, a spook expert in laying fiber-optic communication cables who’s also dabbled in drugs and diamonds. Equal parts dissipated opportunist and vulnerable coward, he’s inflamed above all with a lust for “cheap adventure,” whoring and buccaneering his way across the continent.

more here.

J. C. Hallman at Bookforum:

Even though the essays here are divided into thematic sections, the feel of the book that emerges as the two D’Ambrosios converge is something like the impact of a powerful memoir: It recounts how one of the most profound essayists at work today found his vision, while presenting a selection of what his broad range of experiences has led him to believe about our world, our nature, and our literature.

There’s an interesting backstory to Loitering, as well. About ten years ago, D’Ambrosio published a collection of nonfiction pieces called Orphans with the little-known Clear Cut Press. Even though Orphans reprinted work that had first appeared in the New Yorker andHarper’s Magazine, not many readers knew of D’Ambrosio’s nonfiction; most of it originally appeared in more local venues like Seattle’s The Stranger and the interesting but short-lived magazine Nest. But if you were following D’Ambrosio’s career closely, you couldn’t help but notice that the right people seemed to know about Orphans. It was a handsome little paperback, about the size of a wallet, with one of those little bookmark ribbons attached to its spine to suggest that you wouldn’t just read this volume but study it. For a few years there, once the first run sold out and no more printings were forthcoming, Orphans was like a piece of street art or samizdat: It was rare, and even knowing it existed made you serious.

more here.

Alison Flood in The Guardian:

This was the year of vaping, according to Oxford Dictionaries, which has chosen “vape” – the act of inhaling from an electronic cigarette – as its word of 2014 after use of the term more than doubled over the last year. Vape – defined as to “inhale and exhale the vapour produced by an electronic cigarette or similar device” – beat contenders including slacktivism, bae and indyref to be chosen as Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year 2014. The shortlist is compiled from scanning around 150m words of English in use each month, applying software to identify new and emerging usage. Dictionary editors and lexicographers, including staff from the Oxford English Dictionary, then pinpoint a final selection and an eventual winner, which is intended to be a word judged “to reflect the ethos, mood, or preoccupations of that particular year and to have lasting potential as a word of cultural significance”.

The concept of slacktivism also took off this year, said the publisher, defining it as “actions performed via the internet in support of a political or cosocial cause but regarded as requiring little time or involvement”, and pointing to the Ice Bucket challenge, the no make-up selfie and the hashtag #bringbackourgirls as three examples of the trend. “It was inevitable that vocabulary around the subject of the Scottish independence referendum would make its mark on the lexicon,” it said of the word indyref, while bae is a form of endearment which “originated in African American English and has been propelled into global usage through social media and lyrics in hip-hop and R&B music”.

More here.

Liza Gross in The New York Times:

Dara Satterfield hadn’t planned to conduct experiments at the Texas State Fair, but that is where her study subjects showed up last month. She was still in Georgia when they arrived, so she hurriedly packed her car, then drove all night. As she pulled into the fairgrounds in Dallas the next morning, they were feasting on nectar-filled blossoms of frostweed alongside the Wild West Pet Palooza. The hungry travelers, like most monarch butterflies that migrate from breeding grounds in the northern United States and southern Canada, had stopped in Texas to consume enough calories to power the last leg of their flight to the oyamel fir forests of central Mexico and survive five months overwintering there. So many monarchs blanketed the frostweed that Ms. Satterfield, a 27-year-old doctoral student at the Odum School of Ecology at the University of Georgia, allowed herself to hope that one of the world’s most celebrated migrations could be revived.

Less than 20 years ago, a billion butterflies from east of the Rocky Mountains reached the oyamel firs, and more than a million western monarchs migrated to the California coast to winter among its firs and eucalypts. Since then, the numbers have dropped by more than 90 percent, hitting a record low in Mexico last year after a three-year tailspin. Preliminary counts of migrants this fall are encouraging. “But we’re definitely not out of the woods,” said Ms. Satterfield, who studies human effects on migratory behavior. “One good year doesn’t mean we’ve recovered the migration.” To make matters worse, she and her graduate adviser, Sonia Altizer, a disease ecologist at Georgia, fear that well-meaning efforts by butterfly lovers may be contributing to the monarch’s plight.

More here.

Update 22 Dec: Winners announced here.

Update 01 Dec: Finalists have been announced here.

Update 26 Nov: Voting round now closed, semifinalists announced here.

Update 20 Nov: Voting round now open, will close on 25 Nov 11:59 pm EST. Go here to vote.

Dear Readers, Writers, Bloggers,

We are very honored and pleased to announce that Huw Price has agreed to be the final judge for our 5th annual prize for the best blog and online-only writing in the category of philosophy. Details of the previous four philosophy (and other) prizes can be seen on our prize page.

Huw Price is Bertrand Russell Professor of Philosophy and a Fellow of Trinity College at the University of Cambridge. He was previously ARC Federation Fellow and Challis Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sydney, where from 2002—2012 he was Founding Director of the Centre for Time. In Cambridge he is co-founder, with Martin Rees and Jaan Tallinn, of the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk.

His publications include Facts and the Function of Truth (Blackwell, 1988; 2nd. edn. OUP, forthcoming), Time's Arrow and Archimedes' Point (OUP, 1996), Naturalism Without Mirrors (OUP, 2011) and a range of articles in journals such as Nature, Science, Philosophical Review, Journal of Philosophy, Mind and British Journal for the Philosophy of Science. He is also co-editor (with Richard Corry) of Causation, Physics, and the Constitution of Reality: Russell's Republic Revisited (OUP, 2007). His René Descartes Lectures (Tilburg, 2008) have recently appeared as Expressivism, Pragmatism and Representationalism (CUP, 2013), with commentary essays by Simon Blackburn, Robert Brandom, Paul Horwich and Michael Williams.

He is a Fellow of the British Academy, a Fellow and former Member of Council of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, and a Past President of the Australasian Association of Philosophy. He was consulting editor for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy from 1995–2006, and is an associate editor of The Australasian Journal of Philosophy and a member of the editorial boards of Contemporary Pragmatism, Logic and Philosophy of Science, the Routledge International Library of Philosophy, and the European Journal for Philosophy of Science.

As usual, this is the way it will work: the nominating period is now open. There will then be a round of voting by our readers which will narrow down the entries to the top twenty semi-finalists. After this, we will take these top twenty voted-for nominees, and the editors of 3 Quarks Daily will select six finalists from these, plus they may also add up to three wildcard entries of their own choosing. The three winners will be chosen from these by Huw Price.

The first place award, called the “Top Quark,” will include a cash prize of 500 dollars; the second place prize, the “Strange Quark,” will include a cash prize of 200 dollars; and the third place winner will get the honor of winning the “Charm Quark,” along with a 100 dollar prize.

(Welcome to those coming here for the first time. Learn more about who we are and what we do here, and do check out the full site here. Bookmark us and come back regularly, or sign up for the RSS Feed.)

The schedule and rules:

November 10, 2014:

• The nominations are opened. Please nominate your favorite blog entry by placing the URL for the blog post (the permalink) in the comments section of this post. You may also add a brief comment describing the entry and saying why you think it should win. Do NOT nominate a whole blog, just one individual blog post.
• Blog posts longer than 4,000 words are strongly discouraged, but we might make an exception if there is something truly extraordinary.
• Each person can only nominate one blog post.
• Entries must be in English.
• The editors of 3QD reserve the right to reject entries that we feel are not appropriate.
• The blog entry may not be more than a year old. In other words, it must have been first published after November 9, 2013.
• You may also nominate your own entry from your own or a group blog (and we encourage you to).
• Guest columnists at 3 Quarks Daily are also eligible to be nominated, and may also nominate themselves if they wish.
• Nominations are limited to the first 100 entries.
• Prize money must be claimed within a month of the announcement of winners.

November 17, 2014

• The nominating process will end at 11:59 PM (NYC time) of this date.
• The public voting will be opened soon afterwards.

November 25, 2014

• Public voting ends at 11:59 PM (NYC time).

December 1, 2014

• The finalists are announced.

December 22, 2014

• The winners are announced.

One Final and Important Request

If you have a blog or website, please help us spread the word about our prizes by linking to this post. Otherwise, post a link on your Facebook profile, Tweet it, or just email your friends and tell them about it! I really look forward to reading some very good material, and think this should be a lot of fun for all of us.

Best of luck and thanks for your attention!

Yours,

Abbas

Tarek Montasser. Gentlemen Joking. 2014.

Watercolor on paper.

More here and here.

Jody Rosen in NYTimes' T Magazine Blog:

McCabe had spent the last three years of his life thinking about London’s roads and landmarks, and how to navigate between them. In the process, he had logged more than 50,000 miles on motorbike and on foot, the equivalent of two circumnavigations of the Earth, nearly all within inner London’s dozen boroughs and the City of London financial district. He was studying to be a London taxi driver, devoting himself full-time to the challenge that would earn him a cabby’s “green badge” and put him behind the wheel of one of the city’s famous boxy black taxis.

Actually, “challenge” isn’t quite the word for the trial a London cabby endures to gain his qualification. It has been called the hardest test, of any kind, in the world. Its rigors have been likened to those required to earn a degree in law or medicine. It is without question a unique intellectual, psychological and physical ordeal, demanding unnumbered thousands of hours of immersive study, as would-be cabbies undertake the task of committing to memory the entirety of London, and demonstrating that mastery through a progressively more difficult sequence of oral examinations — a process which, on average, takes four years to complete, and for some, much longer than that. The guidebook issued to prospective cabbies by London Taxi and Private Hire (LTPH), which oversees the test, summarizes the task like this:

To achieve the required standard to be licensed as an “All London” taxi driver you will need a thorough knowledge, primarily, of the area within a six-mile radius of Charing Cross. You will need to know: all the streets; housing estates; parks and open spaces; government offices and departments; financial and commercial centres; diplomatic premises; town halls; registry offices; hospitals; places of worship; sports stadiums and leisure centres; airline offices; stations; hotels; clubs; theatres; cinemas; museums; art galleries; schools; colleges and universities; police stations and headquarters buildings; civil, criminal and coroner’s courts; prisons; and places of interest to tourists. In fact, anywhere a taxi passenger might ask to be taken.

If anything, this description understates the case. The six-mile radius from Charing Cross, the putative center-point of London marked by an equestrian statue of King Charles I, takes in some 25,000 streets. London cabbies need to know all of those streets, and how to drive them — the direction they run, which are one-way, which are dead ends, where to enter and exit traffic circles, and so on. But cabbies also need to know everything on the streets. Examiners may ask a would-be cabby to identify the location of any restaurant in London. Any pub, any shop, any landmark, no matter how small or obscure — all are fair game. Test-takers have been asked to name the whereabouts of flower stands, of laundromats, of commemorative plaques. One taxi driver told me that he was asked the location of a statue, just a foot tall, depicting two mice sharing a piece of cheese. It’s on the facade of a building in Philpot Lane, on the corner of Eastcheap, not far from London Bridge.

If you go to LTPH headquarters, where the examinations are conducted, you will behold a grim bureaucratic scene, not much different than the one you might find in an office devoted to tax audits: nervous test-takers, dressed in suits, shuffling into one-on-one sessions with stone-faced examiners. But for more than a century, since the first green badge was issued to a hackney cabman piloting a horse-drawn carriage, the test has been known by a name that carries a whiff of the occult: the Knowledge of London.

Read the full article here.