… at the New York Review of Books:

Robinson: I think that in our earlier history—the Gettysburg Address or something—there was the conscious sense that democracy was an achievement. It was not simply the most efficient modern system or something. It was something that people collectively made and they understood that they held it together by valuing it. I think that in earlier periods—which is not to say one we will never return to—the president himself was this sort of symbolic achievement of democracy. And there was the human respect that I was talking about before, [that] compounds itself in the respect for the personified achievement of a democratic culture. Which is a hard thing—not many people can pull that together, you know…. So I do think that one of the things that we have to realize and talk about is that we cannot take it for granted. It’s a made thing that we make continuously.

The President: A source of optimism—I took my girls to see Hamilton, this new musical on Broadway, which you should see. Because this wonderful young Latino playwright produced this play, musical, about Alexander Hamilton and the Founding Fathers. And it’s all in rap and hip-hop. And it’s all played by young African-American and Latino actors.

And it sounds initially like it would not work at all. And it is brilliant, and so much so that I’m pretty sure this is the only thing that Dick Cheney and I have agreed on—during my entire political career—it speaks to this vibrancy of American democracy, but also the fact that it was made by these living, breathing, flawed individuals who were brilliant. We haven’t seen a collection of that much smarts and chutzpah and character in any other nation in history, I think.

more here.

Thomas W. Laqueur at The Paris Review:

When an important nineteenth-century painter takes on the subject of mortality and immortality, the scene is set in a churchyard, not a cemetery. There were no bodies evident in the latter. Henry Alexander Bowler’s The Doubt: ‘Can These Dry Bones Live?’ was painted in 1855 as a meditation on Tennyson’s In Memoriam. A young woman is standing amidst the genteel disrepair of what appears to be a substantial country churchyard (but actually is the churchyard of the London suburb of Stoke Newington). The box tomb on her right has lost its siding, exposing the brick vault beneath; this is the sort of shelter that sparked late eighteenth-century litigation, an effort that went against the nature of the place, that somehow tried to bring order to an individual grave by claiming for it a permanence that some opposed. The stone behind her has sunk almost out of sight; further back, an old-fashioned and short-lived grave board with elaborately carved posts running laterally along the body beneath is visible among a picturesque array of variously angled slabs. She rests her arms on the gravestone of John Faithful and looks onto the disturbed earth of the grave—there is no hint why it is in this condition, but it is almost a trope of churchyard representation. More specifically, she contemplates the skull that is lying there and the femur and bits of ribs that are poking out of the ground. This would have been unthinkable in the new regime of the cemetery. The red brick buttresses and a few windows of the church building itself stand out as if to make the point of a historical continuity of the Christian community of the living and the dead, represented by the field of markers in various stages of decay—its past, by the church that serves the living, and by the visit itself. John Faithful died in 1791, and the woman’s costume makes clear that the scene we are witnessing occurred sixty years later, in the 1850s.

more here.

Eboo Patel and Mary Ellen Giess in The Chronicle of Higher Education:

This time it’s the Muslims at Wichita State University who are in the news. Consigned to praying in stairwells and hallways, they were delighted last month when a Christian minister on the campus proposed making changes in the chapel in a way that would accommodate diverse worship practices. The plan called for replacing the pews with stackable chairs, a step that enraged some alumni and community members. Part of the anger was directed toward the Christian leaders who led the plan. “You call yourself a Christian?” one critic thundered. But the Muslim students experienced the brunt of the backlash, accused of advocating for the Islamic transformation of America. The Wichita State events call to mind a similar incident at Duke University in January. After campus officials provided permission for Muslims to sound the adhan, or call to prayer, from the bell tower of the chapel, Franklin Graham, a prominent Christian evangelist, wrote: “As Christianity is being excluded from the public square and followers of Islam are raping, butchering, and beheading Christians, Jews, and anyone who doesn’t submit to their Sharia Islamic law, Duke is promoting this in the name of religious pluralism.” That inspired a groundswell of protest against Duke, with specific fury directed at its Muslim students. For us, these incidents highlight some disturbing facts.

It is no secret that non-Muslim Americans have generally negative attitudes toward Muslims. A 2014 report by the Pew Research Center, for example, shows that 41 percent of Americans rank Muslims in the lowest third on a scale of “warmth” toward diverse religious traditions. But it may surprise officials in higher education that perceptions in campus environments, generally thought to be more welcoming of diverse identities, bear striking similarities to the national data. The Campus Religious and Spiritual Climate Survey, designed by two professors of higher education, Alyssa Bryant Rockenbach and Matt Mayhew, found that only 46 percent of students surveyed believe that Muslims are accepted in their campus communities.

It has not escaped notice that many of the more aggressive individuals in targeting Muslims are evangelical Christians.

More here.

Stephen Cave in Aeon:

It is often thought that science has shown that there is no such thing as free will. If all things are bound by the same impersonal cosmic laws, then (the story goes) our paths are no freer than those of rocks tumbling down a hill. But this is wrong. Science is giving us a very powerful and clear way to understand freedom of the will. We have just been looking for it in the wrong place. Instead of using an electron microscope or a brain-scanner, we should go to the zoo. There we will find animals using a wide range of skills that give them options for what to do – skills that we share. These abilities have evolved through natural selection because they are essential for survival: animals need to weigh different factors, explore available options, pursue new alternatives when old strategies don’t work. Together these abilities give all animals, including humans, an entirely natural free will, one that we need precisely because we are not rocks. We are complex organisms actively pursuing our interests in a changing environment. And we are starting to understand the cognitive abilities that underpin this behavioural freedom. Like most evolved capacities, they are a matter of degree. Take, for example, the ability to delay gratification. For a hungry cat, this means being able to hold back from pouncing until it is sure the sparrow is within range and looking the other way. Experimenters measure this ability by testing how long an animal can resist a small treat in return for a larger reward after a delay. Chickens, for example, can do this for six seconds. They can choose whether to wait for the juicier titbit or not – but only if that titbit comes very soon. A chimpanzee, on the other hand, can wait for a cool two minutes – or even up to eight minutes in some experiments. I am guessing that you could manage a lot longer.

The chimpanzee therefore has more options: if a juicier treat became available after six seconds, a chimp would be free to choose whether to wait for it, but a chicken would not. If you can delay gratification even longer, you have still more options: whether to turn down dessert because you are on a diet, or to forego all pleasure in this world in the hope of a heavenly reward. As we start to understand, and learn to measure, the capacities that underlie behavioural freedom, we can begin to put this natural free will on a scale. Paralleling the measurement of intelligence, we could call it the freedom quotient: FQ. Such a scale should give us new insights into the factors that hinder or enhance our efforts to shape our lives. In other words, FQ should tell us how free we are – and how we can become even more so.

More here.

Gretchen Reynolds in The New York Times:

For those of us who don’t know every portion of our cells’ interiors, telomeres are tiny caps found on the end of DNA strands, like plastic aglets on shoelaces. They are believed to protect the DNA from damage during cell division and replication. As a cell ages, its telomeres naturally shorten and fray. But the process can be accelerated by obesity, smoking, insomnia, diabetes and other aspects of health and lifestyle. In those cases, the affected cells age prematurely. However, recent science suggests that exercise may slow the fraying of telomeres. Past studies have found, for instance, that master athletes typically have longer telomeres than sedentary people of the same age, as do older women who frequently walk or engage in other fairly moderate exercise.

But those studies were relatively narrow, focusing mostly on elderly people who ran or walked. It remained unclear whether people of different ages who engaged in a variety of exercises would likewise show effects on their telomeres. So for the new study, which was published this month in Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise, researchers from the University of Mississippi and University of California, San Francisco, decided to look more broadly at the interactions of exercise and telomeres among a wide swath of Americans. To do so, they turned to the immense trove of data generated by the ongoing National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, for which tens of thousands of adults answer questions annually about their health, including their exercise habits, and complete an in-person health exam, providing a blood sample. In recent years, those blood samples have been tested for, among other markers of health, telomere length in the participants’ white blood cells. The researchers gathered the data for about 6,500 of the participants, ranging in age from 20 to 84, and then categorized them into four groups, based on how they had responded to questions about exercise. Those questions in this survey tended to be broad, asking people only if, at any time during the past month, they had engaged in weight training, moderate exercise like walking, more vigorous exercise like running, or have walked or ridden a bike to work or school. If a participant answered yes to any of those four questions, he or she earned a point from the researchers. So, someone who reported walking received a point. If he also ran, he earned another, and so on, for a maximum of four points. The researchers then compared those tallies to each person’s telomere length.

And there were clear associations. For every point someone gained from any type of exercise, his or her risks of having unusually short telomeres declined significantly.

More here.

How rain arrives

This morning you called
long before the sky slipped
on her sunrise shirt:
early stars blinked quietly
the way a heart beats
beneath the covers of sleep.
When the phone rang
the whole house seized awake.

She died in the night,
was the first thing you said.
I listened to you described
her fall, nodded my grief
into a phone gone suddenly
hard and cold.

You didn’t hear her go.

You couldn’t have known
how you’d sewn guilt
into your end of the conversation,
scratchy and strange the way
a mended sheet rubs
on a bare foot at dawn.

By the time my bed was made,
clouds shrouded the sky’s face.
When I started the car,
rain had already stained
the road dark and wet.
.

by Christine Klocek-Lim
from How to Photograph a Heart
The Lives You Touch Publications, 2009
.

Sughra Raza. Self Portrait at Whispering Bayou, Houston, 2015.

Digital photograph.

“The Contemporary Arts Museum Houston presents Whispering Bayou, an immersive multi-media installation that consists of a video triptych and a multi-channel soundscape composed of the sounds, voices, and images of Houstonians and their city. The project is a collaboration between Houston-based filmmaker, interactive multimedia producer, and community activist Carroll Parrott Blue; French composer and multimedia artist Jean-Baptiste Barrière; and New York-based composer and computer interactive artist George Lewis.”

More on this installation here and here.

Eric Fish in The Atlantic:

Since the collapse of several authoritarian regimes in the 1980s and 1990s—most notably the Soviet Union—conventional wisdom in political science has held that dictatorships inevitably democratize or stagnate. This wisdom has even been applied to China, where the Communist Party (CCP) has presided over 26 years of economic growth since violently suppressing protests at Tiananmen Square. In 2012, the political theorist and Tsinghua University philosophy professor Daniel A. Bell aroused controversy among many China-watchers for challenging this idea. In several op-eds published in prominent Western publications, Bell argued that China’s government, far from being an opaque tyranny, actually presented a “meritocratic” alternative to liberal, multiparty democracy. In a new book titledThe China Model: Political Meritocracy and the Limits of Democracy, Bell expands on that idea.

“I disagree with the view that there’s only one morally legitimate way of selecting leaders: one person, one vote,” Bell said at a recent debate hosted by ChinaFile at Asia Society in New York.

Bell is under no illusion that China has already perfected its political recipe, admitting that the ideal “China model” is still very theoretical. This involves a “vertical democratic meritocracy,” as he puts it, with open democratic elections at the local level, meritocratic assessment (like China’s civil-service exam) to choose top national leaders, and experimentation in the middle. In this system, local leaders—who handle relatively basic issues—are still accountable to voters. But national leaders, who must handle more complex issues and make tough decisions that may not be popular (like enacting serious climate-change measures), can be chosen based on experience and knowledge without American-style political gridlock or susceptibility to populist approval.

More here.

Chrissie Giles in Mosaic:

Everyone in alcohol research knows the graph. It plots the change in annual consumption of alcohol in the UK, calculated in litres of pure alcohol per person. (None of us drinks pure alcohol, thankfully; one litre of pure alcohol is equivalent to 35 pints of strong beer.) In 1950, Brits drank an average of 3.9 litres per person. Look to the right and at first the line barely rises. Then, in 1960, it begins to creep upward. The climb becomes more steady during the 1970s. The upward trajectory ends in 1980, but that turns out to be temporary. By the late 1990s consumption is rising rapidly again. Come Peak Booze, in 2004, we were drinking 9.5 litres of alcohol per person – the equivalent of more than 100 bottles of wine.

It’s impossible to untangle the forces behind the graph’s every rise and fall, but I’ve talked to researchers who have studied our relationship with alcohol. They told me how everything from recessions to marketing to sexism has shaped the way Brits drink. This is the story of that research, and of what it tells us about the ascent to Peak Booze. In many ways it is not a story about how much we drink, but about who drinks what, and where. It begins well over half a century ago, in the pub.

More here.

Laura D'Olimpio at the Australian Broadcast Corporation:

Some people may wonder if young people can do philosophy. In his Nicomachean Ethics, the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle writes that the young—and not necessarily the young in age—are not suitable students of ethics and politics because they lack experience and because they tend to follow feelings rather than reason.

Furthermore, in Socrates’ day, there was a concern that teaching the youth critical thinking skills would result in them being less obedient. If we teach students philosophy, will they simply argue for whatever they like, and be able to justify their arguments? Is the study of philosophy corrupting or empowering?

Philosophy for Children (P4C) is a program that takes philosophy out of the academy and into the classrooms of primary and high schools. P4C started at Montclair State University, New Jersey in the 1970s, when Matthew Lipman and Ann Sharp decided that a pragmatic approach to doing philosophy was needed. Their vision was to train children to think critically, creatively and collaboratively so that they would be better democratic citizens.

Influenced by the pragmatism of the philosopher John Dewey, Lipman applied the term ‘community of inquiry’ to the pedagogy that is central to conducting philosophical dialogue with children.

More here.

Jon Stone in The Independent:

Greece’s former finance minister is in the process of setting up a pan-European movement to reform the EU’s institutions, he has revealed.

Yanis Varoufakis said his experience in Eurogroup meetings had left him with the conclusion that the EU was not democratic.

“What is going on in Greece is simply a reflection – an echo – of a far deeper crisis throughout the eurozone, which cannot be solved at any national or member-state level,” told the Open Democracy website.

“The obvious conclusion one must draw from this is that either you argue for a dissolution of the monetary union, and then you can talk about national politics again quite sensibly. Or you should be talking about a pan-European movement for change throughout the eurozone.”

Mr Varoufakis, who is an economist, said the new movement would have “one very simple, but radical, idea: to democratise Europe”.

“A pan-European movement is the only solution. It sounds utopian, but this idea cemented in my mind in August when I started travelling across Europe, and realised that there was a great deal of hunger and thirst everywhere I went for such an idea.”

More here.

After Apple Picking

My long two-pointed ladder’s sticking through a tree
Toward heaven still,
And there’s a barrel that I didn’t fill
Beside it, and there may be two or three
Apples I didn’t pick upon some bough.
But I am done with apple-picking now.
Essence of winter sleep is on the night,
The scent of apples: I am drowsing off.
I cannot rub the strangeness from my sight
I got from looking through a pane of glass
I skimmed this morning from the drinking trough
And held against the world of hoary grass.
It melted, and I let it fall and break.
But I was well
Upon my way to sleep before it fell,
And I could tell
What form my dreaming was about to take.
Magnified apples appear and disappear,
Stem end and blossom end,
And every fleck of russet showing clear.
My instep arch not only keeps the ache,
It keeps the pressure of a ladder-round.
I feel the ladder sway as the boughs bend.
And I keep hearing from the cellar bin
The rumbling sound
Of load on load of apples coming in.
For I have had too much
Of apple-picking: I am overtired
Of the great harvest I myself desired.
There were ten thousand thousand fruit to touch,
Cherish in hand, lift down, and not let fall.
For all
That struck the earth,
No matter if not bruised or spiked with stubble,
Went surely to the cider-apple heap
As of no worth.
One can see what will trouble
This sleep of mine, whatever sleep it is.
Were he not gone,
The woodchuck could say whether it’s like his
Long sleep, as I describe its coming on,
Or just some human sleep.

.
by Robert Frost

Johanna Hedva in Two Serious Ladies:

Everything Is Erotic Therefore Everything Is Exhausting is an attempt to catalog everything erotic in the world. It was composed in a participatory performance, and will never be complete. Begun in 2010, the text was originally 100 entries, handwritten one entry per page, by the artist. During performances, participants are invited to take away pages. In return, they had to offer their own entries by speaking into the ear of the artist. The artist serves as scribe and devoted keeper of the text. The following text comprises the complete encyclopedia to date, as it’s been written by the artist and participants.

Abscesses.

The act of, the sound of, spanking.

After something exhausting.

All of your lover at once.

Androgyny.

Ankles, when they peek out.

Ants on cake.

Any kind of slow dripping, like water from a faucet and honey from a spoon.

Anything wrapped in plastic wrap, and then unwrapping it.

The appearance of blood on something clean.

The arch of a slender foot.

The young arms of lean black men.

More here.

Lewis H. Lapham in Lapham's Quarterly:

Fashion lives only in a perpetual round of giddy innovation and restless vanity…it is haughty, trifling, affected, servile, despotic, mean and ambitious, precise and fantastical, all in a breath.

—William Hazlitt

Alone on the shore of Walden Pond, safely removed from the threat of crowdsourced infection, Henry David Thoreau in 1854 holds to the view that men and women in fancy dress are “sailing under false colors,” with the result “that there is greater anxiety, commonly, to have fashionable, or at least clean and unpatched, clothes than to have a sound conscience. It would be easier for [most people] to hobble to town with a broken leg than with a broken pantaloon.” Thoreau’s Puritan antecedents didn’t countenance the flying of false flags. They took offense at the sight of “people of mean condition” (i.e., anybody valued at a net worth of less than two hundred British pounds) dressed in a manner above their station “by the wearing of gold or silver lace or buttons, or points at their knees, [or] to walk in great boots.” The effrontery was punished with severe fines, as were the ambitions of servant girls seen wearing “silk or tiffany hoods or scarves, which though allowable to persons of greater estates, or more liberal education, yet we cannot but judge it intolerable.”

The judgment was uncharitable. Also hypocritical and ungrateful. The inspectors of souls in the Massachusetts wilderness depended for their existence on the market in London for luxurious bodily adornment, the shining city on the hill beholden for its daily bread to temptations of the flesh and the work of the devil. In the 1950s the teaching at Yale didn’t dwell on the point. Little time was left for class discussion of the Pilgrim colony as a financial speculation floated by venture capitalists intent on extracting a shameless profit from the wholesale slaughter of beavers. Beaver pelts sold in Jacobean England at the prices paid to rent nine acres of farmland. The fashionable nobility delighted in velvet and lace, but most extravagantly in the splendid magnificence of the mousquetaire, a beaver hat low-crowned and wide-brimmed, banded in silk, mounted with ostrich feathers. Prince Charles bought forty-three such hats in 1624, the year before he became king, his expenditure on clothing at one point equivalent to the cost of building and outfitting a pair of ships six times the size of the Mayflower.

More here.

James Gleick in the New York Review of Books:

Of the many institutions suffering through the world’s metamorphosis from analog to digital (real to virtual, offline to online), few are as beleaguered as that bedrock of our culture, the public library. Budgets are being slashed by state and local governments. Even the best libraries are cutting staff and hours. Their information desks are seemingly superseded by Google, their encyclopedias are gathering dust. And their defining product, the one that lines their shelves, now arrives in the form of a weightless doppelgänger that doesn’t require shelves.

In the technocracy, all the world’s information comes to us on screens—desk, pocket, wrist, goggles—and no one trudges through wind and rain with library card in hand to find a single worn object. After all, when you want the text of Magna Carta, you don’t track down the original. Same with books? “Libraries are screwed,” said Eli Neiburger, a Michigan library director, in a much-quoted presentation at a Library Journalconference in 2010. “Libraries are screwed because we are invested in the codex, and the codex has become outmoded.”

So is the library, storehouse and lender of books, as anachronistic as the record store, the telephone booth, and the Playboy centerfold? Perversely, the most popular service at some libraries has become free Internet access. People wait in line for terminals that will let them play solitaire and Minecraft, and librarians provide coffee. Other patrons stay in their cars outside just to use the Wi-Fi. No one can be happy with a situation that reduces the library to a Starbucks wannabe.

More here.

Colin Nissan in The New Yorker:

At the end of a quiet road, behind a veil of twisted black oak trees, there was a house. A woman lived there. On bitter nights like this one, she sat by the fire and read until she grew tired enough for sleep. But on this night, as her lids grew heavy, she was startled by a sound. A sound she wasn’t accustomed to hearing these days. Who could be calling, she wondered? And this late? She rose from her chair and picked up the phone.

“I’m going to kill you,” a man with a deep voice said.

“Who is this?” she asked.

No answer.

“Who is this?” she repeated, her hand trembling.

There was a click. Silence. She quickly dialled the police and explained what had happened. The officer told her to wait while he traced the call. After a few moments he said, “The call is coming from . . . inside your house.”

More here.