John Gray at Literary Review:

Isaiah Berlin had no very high opinion of his contribution to human thought. Writing in 1978 to the psychoanalyst Anthony Storr, he confessed, ‘Every line I have ever written and every lecture I have ever delivered seems to me of very little or no value.’ Nor did Berlin attach any great importance to the publication of his ideas. Partly this indifference reflected an academic culture – now barely remembered – in which the ‘publish or perish’ imperative did not exist. In the Oxford Berlin knew as a student and as a young fellow at New College and All Souls, building up a large corpus of published work tended to be seen as testimony to careerism or vanity rather than commitment to scholarship. Something of this attitude lasted into the Seventies, and it was only in the Eighties and Nineties that a cult of productivity fully took hold. Today, with universities labouring under a regime in which research and publication are monitored continuously, it is doubtful whether someone like Berlin would be able to find and keep an academic position in Britain.

Henry Hardy became Berlin’s editor in 1974. There can be no doubt that, without Hardy’s stimulus and more than forty years of tireless dedication, few of the twenty-odd volumes of Berlin’s writings that are in print would ever have seen the light of day. Certainly Berlin’s letters would not have been published. That would have been a pity since, as Hardy and his coeditor, Mark Pottle, write in the preface to this fourth and final volume, Berlin’s correspondence is an ‘integral part of hisoeuvre’. Extending up to the days before his death, this collection shows Berlin responding to a succession of world events: the rise of Thatcher and Reagan, IRA terrorism, the Islamic Revolution in Iran, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the Falklands War, the formation of Solidarity in Poland, the emergence of Gorbachev and the fall of the Berlin Wall, among others.

more here.

Ryan Gilbey at The New Statesman:

In his varied career, Willem Dafoe has played Jesus Christ (inThe Last Temptation of Christ) and the Nosferatu actor Max Schreck (in Shadow of the Vampire). He brings elements of both to the title role of Pasolini. Dafoe is as close a physical fit to the Italian poet, writer and film-maker as is possible without recourse to CGI. The craggy face, noble yet reptilian, is lined with deep bedsheet creases; the cheekbones could double as bookshelves. He also wears Pier Paolo Pasolini’s actual glasses (thick frames, tinted lenses), which transform him into something part-mechanical. We can only nod in agreement when he delivers one of his gospels to a journalist: “There are no more human beings, only strange machines colliding towards each other.”

He is referring to consumerism, which has turned people into personifications of appetite. We have, he claims, become “sinister gladiators trained to have, possess and destroy”. Pasolini is rightly remembered for his films, which located spiritual salvation in lives that would otherwise be considered unremarkable, even coarse – the pimps and petty hoods of Accattone, the former prostitute trying to save her wayward son in Mamma Roma. Those who have never seen a frame of his work may still be familiar with the circumstances of his death: beaten savagely on a beach in Ostia by a 17-year-old rent boy and unidentified others, who proceeded to run him over with his own car.

more here.

Holly Black in theFword:

Hidden away from the Royal Geographical Society’s main gallery site, a modest exhibition depicting the fascinating history of India’s tawa’if is prefaced by gorgeous sound recordings made by Fred Gaisberg, one of the first North Americans to travel to India in the early 20th century and document its diverse musical cultures. As talented vocalists, dancers and usually multi-instrumentalists, tawa’ifs enjoyed unsurpassable fame, socio-economic standing and political leverage as members of a cultural elite reserved for the entertainment of the royal courts. Such a position allowed these women to elude normal patriarchal dominance, but fell victim to new moral constraints imposed by colonial rule which considered such practices to have dangerous, sexually charged motivations. Nowadays, the term tawa’if is more likely to be considered synonymous with prostitution.

The Royal Geographical Society seeks to present the rise and fall of these women over the course of 300 years, from the Mughal period to present day, which is an incredible ask for even the most comprehensive exhibition programme. This display is small, featuring a number of informative texts that attempt to present anecdote alongside complex explanations of various artistic styles and their provenance and evolution over several centuries. Although the content itself is fascinating, there appears to be no clear narrative overview, resulting in a frustrating and slightly incomprehensible patchwork that often leaves you darting from one wall text to another in the hope of unravelling this complex web of information.

More here.

Frans de Waal in The New York Times:

ATLANTA — WHEN I learned last week about the discovery of an early human relative deep in a cave in South Africa, I had many questions. Obviously, they had dug up a fellow primate, but of what kind? The fabulous find, named Homo naledi, has rightly been celebrated for both the number of fossils and their completeness. It has australopithecine-like hips and an ape-size brain, yet its feet and teeth are typical of the genus Homo.

The mixed features of these prehistoric remains upset the received human origin story, according to which bipedalism ushered in technology, dietary change and high intelligence. Part of the new species’ physique lags behind this scenario, while another part is ahead. It is aptly called a mosaic species. We like the new better than the old, though, and treat every fossil as if it must fit somewhere on a timeline leading to the crown of creation. Chris Stringer, a prominent British paleoanthropologist who was not involved in the study, told BBC News: “What we are seeing is more and more species of creatures that suggests that nature was experimenting with how to evolve humans, thus giving rise to several different types of humanlike creatures originating in parallel in different parts of Africa.” This represents a shockingly teleological view, as if natural selection is seeking certain outcomes, which it is not. It doesn’t do so any more than a river seeks to reach the ocean. News reports spoke of a “new ancestor,” even a “new human species,” assuming a ladder heading our way, whereas what we are actually facing when we investigate our ancestry is a tangle of branches. There is no good reason to put Homo naledi on the branch that produced us. Nor does this make the discovery any less interesting.

More here.

Browse the nominees in the list below and then go to the bottom of the post to vote.

Alphabetical list of nominated blog names followed by the blog post title:

(Please report any problems with links in the comments section below.)

For prize details, click here.

1. 3 Quarks Daily: Artificially Flavored Intelligence
2. 3 Quarks Daily: Fearing Artificial Intelligence
   
3. 3 Quarks Daily: On Optimal Paths & Minimal Action
4. 3 Quarks Daily: Randomness: the Ghost in the Machine?
5. 3 Quarks Daily: The Monarch Butterflies
6. Activist Teacher: Self-Image-Incongruence Theory of Individual Health
7. Andrew Silver: Mo'orea Scavenger Hunt
8. Bekka S. Brodie: How Blow Flies find Corpses
9. Collide-a-Scape: No Love in Boulder for Colorado’s GMO Labeling Proposition
10. Companion Animal Psychology: How Does a Dog's Brain Respond to the Smell of a Familiar Human?
11. Curious Wavefunction: The fundamental philosophical dilemma of chemistry
12. Earth Touch News: What Other Animals Have Taught Us About Human Uniqueness
13. Empirical Zeal: How a 19th Century Math Genius Taught Us the Best Way to Hold a Pizza Slice
14. European Geosciences Union: The Oldest Eurypterid
15. Excursion Set: Destiny's Child
16. ImaGeo: New NASA Visualization Shows Carbon Dioxide Emissions Swirling Around the World
17. Invariance: 3 myths of physics, especially in textbooks
18. IO9: Your Guide to Pluto: Everything We've Learned From New Horizons So Far
19. Los Angeles Review of Books: Three Physicists Try Philosophy
20. Nautilus: Intemperate Planet: How Natural Systems Magnify the Effects of Global Warming
21. Nautilus: The Sound So Loud That It Circled the Earth Four Times
22. Neurobabble: Masters of deception: how spiders trick ants
23. No Place Like Home: When Hubble Stared at Nothing for 100 Hours
24. Nova Next: From Discovery to Dust
25. One Universe at a Time: Another Brick in the Wall
26. Preposterous Universe: Why Is There Dark Matter?
27. Psych Central: Feeling Bipolar Disorder In Your Gut
28. PsySociety: Decoding Trump-Mania (scroll down after following link for parts 2 and 3)
29. Roots of Unity: The Saddest Thing I Know about the Integers
30. Rosin Cerate: Bezoars are gross bits of gunk that get stuck in your guts
31. Scicurious: Serotonin and the science of sex
32. Science: Ants have group-level personalities, study shows
33. Science Friday: Sunshine Recorder
34. Science Sushi: Four-Legged Snake Shakes Up Squamate Family Tree – Or Does It?
35. Scientist Sees Squirrel: Two creatures named “merianae”
36. Skulls in the Stars: Infinite hotels in swirling beams of light
37. Social Pulses: The public subsidy of scientific publishing monopolies
38. Space Age Archaeology: Shadows on the Moon: an ephemeral archaeology
39. Starts With A Bang: CONFIRMED: The Last Great Prediction Of The Big Bang!
40. Starts With A Bang: Is the Multiverse Science?
41. The Loom: Editing Human Embryos: So This Happened
42. Thinking of Things: All I Didn't Know About Cancer
43. Thinking of Things: The Pain in the Brain Game
44. Tycho's Nose: The Kilogram turns 125
45. Tycho's Nose: The largest dinosaur ever found – and subsequently lost again
46. Wait But Why: The AI Revolution: The Road to Superintelligence
47. Why Evolution Is True: A gynandromorph moth comes to the light – and tells a story about science
48. Wired: Glowing Tampons Help Detect Sewage Leaks
49. Wired: Tambora 1815: Just How Big Was The Eruption?
50. Wired: When a Giant Asteroid Impact Created Its Own Magma

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Voting ends on September 18th at 11:59 pm NYC time.

Results of the voting round (the top twenty most-voted-for posts) will be posted on the main page on September 19th. The finalists will be announced soon after and winners of the contest will be announced on September 28th, 2015.

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New posts below.

Martin Wehmer. Woman in Green. 2014.

More here and here.

Robert MacFarlane in the New Statesman:

In 1972, Gregory Bateson published Steps to an Ecology of Mind, a collection of his essays from the previous three decades. Bateson was a dazzlingly versatile thinker, whose work shaped the fields of anthropology, linguistics and cybernetics, as well as the movement we now call environmentalism. Near the end of the book, Bateson deplored the delusion of human separation from nature. “We are not,” he warned, “outside the ecology for which we plan.” His remedy for this separatism was the development of an “ecology of mind”. The steps towards such a mind were to be taken by means of literature, art, music, play, wonder and attention to nature – what he called “ecological aesthetics”.

Bateson, who died in 1980, would have been excited by what has happened in the culture of our islands over the past 15 years. An ecology of mind has emerged that is extraordinary in its energies and its diversity. In nurseries and universities, apiaries and allotments, transition towns and theatres, woodlands and festivals, charities and campaigns – and in photography, film, music, the visual and plastic arts and throughout literature – a remarkable turn has occurred towards Bateson’s ecological aesthetics. A 21st-century culture of nature has sprung up, born of anxiety and anger but passionate and progressive in its temperament, involving millions of people and spilling across forms, media and behaviours.

More here.

John Lanchester in the London Review of Books:

Some stories are so well known in outline that we don’t really know them at all. The headline news about the Wright brothers’ invention of powered flight is so familiar that it’s easy to think we know all about it. David McCullough’s excellent biography The Wright Brothers brings the story back to life with facts that the non-specialist either doesn’t know or has blotted out with a misplaced broad brush. Yeah yeah, we get it: the brothers were provincial tinkerers who first flew their invention at Kitty Hawk, then became world-famous. It turns out, though, that there is a lot of devil in the details.

The tinkering, for instance. The Wrights were pioneers in the cycling business who ran a bicycle shop in Dayton, Ohio. Wilbur was born in 1867 and Orville in 1871. They were an unusually close pair who all their lives lived together, worked together, ate together and shared a joint bank account. (McCullough is too respectful of their boundaries to say so, but it seems likely that they were both lifelong virgins.) One of the only things they didn’t do together was fly: that would have been too much of a risk to the irreplaceable knowledge they’d jointly accumulated. Their father, Milton, was a bishop in the United Brethren Church who accepted his sons’ lack of faith with equanimity, and was going on suffragettes’ marches with his only daughter, Katherine, in his eighties. Katherine, a teacher, was the only family member to go to university, and the only sibling to have consummated a relationship, marrying at the age of 52.

‘It isn’t true,’ Wilbur later wrote, ‘to say we had no special advantages … the greatest thing in our favour was growing up in a family where there was always much encouragement to intellectual curiosity.’ Wilbur’s interest in flight began in childhood; it turned into an obsession and then into a practical plan. Other pioneers of flight were focused on the question of power. The Wrights were fascinated by birds, and learned a lot from their study of them. One of Wilbur’s crucial insights was that flying, like cycling, was a question of balance. He saw that bird flight was all about equilibrium: about the bird’s keeping itself in the air with the maximum efficiency and minimum effort.

More here.

Dawn Field in Aeon:

In case you weren’t paying attention, a lot has been happening in the science of genomics over the past few years. It is, for example, now possible to read one human genome and correct all known errors. Perhaps this sounds terrifying, but genomic science has a track-record in making science fiction reality. ‘Everything that’s alive we want to rewrite,’ boasted Austen Heinz, the CEO of Cambrian Genomics, last year.

It was only in 2010 that Craig Venter’s team in Maryland led us into the era of synthetic genomics when they created Synthia, the first living organism to have a computer for a mother. A simple bacterium, she has a genome just over half a million letters of DNA long, but the potential for scaling up is vast; synthetic yeast and worm projects are underway.

Two years after the ‘birth’ of Synthia, sequencing was so powerful that it was used to extract the genome of a newly discovered, 80,000-year-old human species, the Denisovans, from a pinky bone found in a frozen cave in Siberia. In 2015, the United Kingdom became the first country to legalise the creation of ‘three-parent babies’ – that is, babies with a biological mother, father and a second woman who donates a healthy mitochondrial genome, the energy producer found in all human cells.

More here.

William Dalrymple in The Guardian:

For better or for worse, the British empire was the most important thing the British ever did. It altered the course of history across the globe and shaped the modern world. It also led to the huge enrichment of Britain, just as, conversely, it led to the impoverishment of much of the rest of the non-European world. India and China, which until then had dominated global manufacturing, were two of the biggest losers in this story, along with hundreds of thousands of enslaved sub-Saharan Africans sent off on the middle passage to work in the plantations.

Yet much of the story of the empire is still absent from our history curriculum. My children learned the Tudors and the Nazis over and over again in history class but never came across a whiff of Indian or Caribbean history. This means that they, like most people who go through the British education system, are wholly ill equipped to judge either the good or the bad in what we did to the rest of the world.

This matters. We see British diplomats, businessmen and politicians repeatedly wrongfooted as they constantly underestimate the degree to which we are distrusted across the breadth of the globe, and in a few places actively disliked. Because of the wrong-headedly positive spin we tend to put on our imperial past, we often misjudge how others see us, and habitually overplay our hand.

Last month a video went viral in India of the eloquent Congress politician and writer Shashi Tharoor arguing at the Oxford Union that Britain owed India immense reparations for the damage inflicted by the empire: at last count the YouTube video of his speech had around 3m views.

More here.

Ariel Levy in New York Magazine:

Possibly, there are even more naked women at Maureen Dowd’s house today than there were when this place was JFK’s Georgetown bachelor pad in the fifties. They are lounging in the vintage posters, carved into her Deco furniture, painted in huge trompe l’oeil pastorals on the living-room wall. “My girlfriend Michi said, ‘You’ve got to paint clothes on them,’ like you know how they did at the Sistine Chapel?” says Dowd, who is drinking white wine from a goblet with a naked woman carved into its stem. “But I like them. I think they’re kind of campy.” Michi is Michiko Kakutani, one of Dowd’s circle of extremely close female friends at the New York Times, where Dowd is, of course, the only female op-ed columnist. It’s a post she says she is “not temperamentally suited to,” despite the fact she’s been doing it for ten years and has won a Pulitzer and a passionate army of fans in the process, because Dowd doesn’t like “a lot of angst in my life,” and it is specifically her job to provoke. Her natural inclination—her fundamental drive—is, rather, to seduce. But then those two things are not entirely unrelated.

…Dowd says she’s not the “private-plane type. It makes me nervous. I mean, I don’t even like to fly first class.” But her taste for famous men has, from time to time, required it of her. She describes Michael Douglas, whom she dated right before he married Catherine Zeta-Jones, as “a really nice guy, a very romantic guy.” The humor of their romance is not lost on her: “Whether he can handle a woman who wields ice picks? I used to tease him about that. Sometimes actors ask me out, and then I’m worried because they can act like they’re not scared of me, or threatened? But then maybe later they are. I remember him announcing at dinner, like way after we knew each other: ‘I’m not scared of you.’ But it made me nervous that he had to tell me. I also became close with his father, Kirk,” says Dowd. “He told me this funny story once about when he was first discovering his Judaism and he was making The Bad and the Beautiful and he was fasting on certain days, and he looked at me and he goes, ‘Do you have any idea how hard it is to make love to Lana Turner on an empty stomach?’ ”

More here.

A conversation with John Markoff in Edge:

I'm in an interesting place in my career, and it's an interesting time in Silicon Valley. I grew up in Silicon Valley, but it's something I've been reporting about since 1977, which is this Moore's Law acceleration. Over the last five years, another layer has been added to the Moore's Law discussion, with Kurzweil and people like him arguing that we're on the brink of self-aware machines. Just recently, Gates and Musk and Hawking have all been saying that this is an existential threat to humankind. I simply don't see it. If you begin to pick it apart, their argument and the fundamental argument of Silicon Valley, it's all about this exponential acceleration that comes out of the semiconductor industry. I suddenly discovered it was over. Now, it may not be over forever, but it's clearly paused. All the things that have been driving everything that I do, the kinds of technology that have emerged out of here that have changed the world, have ridden on the fact that the cost of computing doesn't just fall, it falls at an accelerating rate. And guess what? In the last two years, the price of each transistor has stopped falling. That's a profound moment.

…Ubiquitous computing, or the Internet of things, is all supposed to disappear. The problem is, is it going to disappear into us? What could possibly go wrong? There is an argument that these machines are going to replace us, but I only think that's relevant to you or me in the sense that it doesn't matter if it doesn't happen in our lifetime. The Kurzweil crowd argues this is happening faster and faster, and things are just running amok. In fact, things are slowing down. In 2045, it's going to look more like it looks today than you think.

More here.

Boy with a Halo at the Farmers Market
.

The metal halo was bolted into his skull,
little drills secured the scaffold,
so his bones could rebuild themselves.
How truly graced he must have been
to survive a broken neck. Someday
he’ll remember how he had to turn
his whole body, caged, to watch
the fruit vendor polish apples. His hair
will cover the evenly spaced scars.
He’ll go to school for architecture,
having learned to appreciate girders.
He’ll come to love the gold leaf halos
of medieval art, the flash of The Savior
in cracked oils. He may carry himself
a little gingerly, he may never ride a horse
again, but he’ll kiss his wife’s neck
in a dark theater, taking leisure, blessing
each vertebra, one lucky break at a time.
.

by Sonia Greenfield
from Boy with a Halo at the Farmer’s Market
© Codhill Press, 2015.

Kathleen Rooney at The Poetry Foundation:

A glance at celebrity websites and magazines serves to confirm that it is possible to make a living by taking photos of very famous people doing very ordinary things: walking dogs, pumping gas, dropping children off at daycare. It might be difficult to identify the precise desire that these images are intended to stoke or satisfy—the thrill of peeking through the regimented scrim of celebrity to glimpse something genuine, maybe, or simply the reassurance that despite their exalted state, these stars’ quotidian concerns are not wholly different from our own. But the rush is clearly widespread, if not universal.

This spring, Wesleyan University Press released Sarah Blake’s debut poetry collection,Mr. West, which achieves its momentum from examining the distant spectacle of celebrities alongside the enduring curiosity about what they might really be like as human beings. This “unauthorized lyric biography,” as Blake calls it, juxtaposes Kanye West’s life as a black male celebrity with Blake’s own as a white female artist and soon-to-be-mother. “You miss her and I miss him but // surely I cannot say if, when you think of death, you, Kanye, think of the / heart,” she writes in “Kanye’s Circulatory System,” writing of the death of her grandfather and of West’s loss of his mother, Donda. By putting their lives in conversation, she provokes her readers to wonder:What are we able to know about superstars, as far as we are from their fabulous orbits? What are we ever able to know definitively about the experience of someone else? Her answer: people have a great deal to learn from their experience of celebrities, particularly the feeling—familiar to all who have ever considered themselves fans—of identifying with a person whom one has likely never seen in person.

Mr. West builds the enigma and inaccessibility of celebrities—and the way their images are mediated—into the text. Presumably for permissions reasons, Blake can’t quote extensively from West’s lyrics. Thus, she replaces quotations with blacked-out bars and attributions so that readers can find them for themselves.

More here.

Sasha Weiss at the New York Times:

Tracy Daugherty, the author of “The Last Love Song,” the first full-length biography of Didion, seems both intimidated by and worshipful of his subject, who chose not to cooperate with his project. He begins his book with a disclaimer: “Does a biography of a living person make sense? . . . Is the proper distance for evaluation possible now?” He attempts to reproduce “her mental and emotional rhythms” and to apply to her work her own literary methods “revealing the bedrock beneath layers of myth, gossip, P.R., self-promotion, cultural politics, competing notions of human nature.” Such a hedge followed by a lofty mission statement is unpromising, but you want to give Daugherty the benefit of the doubt. You want to know who Didion is, precisely because she hides in plain sight.

Didion became known for writing about the world in the first person. Whether her subject is the drifting confusions of the ’60s or the incursions of big industry on the California landscape, she herself is the probe. One of the great pleasures of reading her is watching the way she takes her own point of view as a given. But there is a fundamental unreliability at the center of “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” and “The White Album,” the books that established her reputation: the gap between the natural authority with which she casts judgments and her professed nervous, quarrelsome self. It’s a gap that has always been enticing to Didion’s readers, and one we’d hope her biographer would plumb.

more here.