Over at the Boston Review, a forum on Ira Katznelson's piece on democracy, with responses from Larry Kramer, David M. Kennedy, Mark Schmitt, Rick Perlstein, Mohammad Fadel, Michael C. Dawson, Hélène Landemore, Michael Gecan, Martin O’Neill, Nadia Urbinati, Melissa S. Williams, Alex Gourevitch, and Richard Trumka:

Since the late eighteenth century, liberal constitutional regimes have recurrently collided with forms of autocratic rule—including fascism and communism—that claim moral superiority and greater efficacy. Today, there is no formal autocratic alternative competing with democracy for public allegiance. Instead, two other concerns characterize current debates. First, there is a sense that constitutional democratic forms, procedures, and practices are softening in the face of allegedly more authentic and more efficacious types of political participation—those that take place outside representative institutions and seem closer to the people. There is also widespread anxiety that national borders no longer define a zone of security, a place more or less safe from violent threats and insulated from rules and conditions established by transnational institutions and seemingly inexorable global processes.

These are recent anxieties. One rarely heard them voiced in liberal democracies when, in 1989, Francis Fukuyama designated the triumph of free regimes and free markets “the end of history.” Fukuyama described “the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government,“ a “victory of liberalism” in “the realm of ideas and consciousness,” even if “as yet incomplete in the real or material world.” Tellingly, the disruption of this seemingly irresistible trend has recently prompted him to ruminate on the brittleness of democratic institutions across the globe.

Perhaps today’s representative democracies—the ones that do not appear to be candidates for collapse or supersession—are merely confronting ephemeral worries. But the challenge seems starker: a profound crisis of moral legitimacy, practical capacity, and institutional sustainability.

More here.

The author, most recently, of “Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights” says that more or less everything by Christopher Hitchens makes him laugh: “The laughter is what I miss most about the Hitch.”

From the New York Times:

What books are currently on your night stand?

“Between the World and Me,” by Ta-Nehisi Coates, which I just finished and which impressed me; “Genghis Khan,” by Jack Weatherford, which is next up; “The White Album,” by Joan Didion, which is great to rediscover, and as good as I remembered it being; “The Heart of a Goof,” by P. G. Wodehouse, which can actually make me care about the game of golf, at least while reading it; and “Humboldt’s Gift,” by Saul Bellow, which seems to be on the night stand more or less permanently.

Who is your favorite novelist of all time?

“Of all time” is a long time. There are days when it’s Kafka, in whose world we all live; others when it’s Dickens, for the sheer fecundity of his imagination and the beauty of his prose. But it’s probably Joyce on more days than anyone else.

More here.

Nathan Halverson at PRI:

The springs fed the lush oases depicted in the Bible and Quran, and as the water disappeared, these verdant gardens of life were returning to sand.

“I remember flowing springs when I was a boy in the Eastern Province. Now all of these have dried up,” the head of the country’s Ministry of Water told The New York Times in 2003.

The springs had bubbled for thousands of years from a massive aquifer that lay underneath Saudi Arabia. Hydrologists calculated it was one of the world’s largest underground systems, holding as much groundwater as Lake Erie.

So farmers were puzzled as their wells dried, forcing them to drill ever deeper. They soon were drilling a mile down to continue tapping the water reserves that had transformed barren desert into rich irrigated fields, making Saudi Arabia the world’s sixth-largest exporter of wheat.

But the bounty didn’t last. Today, Saudi Arabia’s agriculture is collapsing. It’s almost out of water. And the underlying cause doesn’t bode well for farmers in places like California’s Central Valley, where desert lands also are irrigated with groundwater that is increasingly in short supply.

So what what happened? And what can the United States, China and the rest of the world learn from Saudi Arabia?

More here. [Thanks to Azeem Azhar.]

Sam Thielman in The Guardian:

As robotics advances, scientists continue to take cues from the natural world, whether it’s by building robots out of material from animals, like cloned rat muscle or jellyfish matter, or building them in imitation of dogs or cats. And now, those scientists are learning to simulate intelligence by imitating a swarm.

“Swarm robotics”, beyond being one of the scariest terms outside of a Terminator film, is the name roboticists give to robots that can coordinate behavior between multiple bodies, acting as a group. Thomas Schmickl of the Artificial Life Laboratory at the University of Graz in Austria, points out that robots as complex as humans or even dogs are a long way off, but the possibility in the insect world for simple animals to behave in ingenious ways as a group can provide some insight into how to simulate intelligence.

Schmickl’s current crop of robots work mostly underwater – his swarm of as many as 20 swimming robots, all named Jeff, imitates a shoal of fish. With the EU-supported Collective Cognitive Robots project, he hopes to develop not just hardware but algorithms and other software to make group behavior smarter.

“[M]onolithic, non-scaling technology is currently hitting the wall everywhere,” Schmickl said. He points out that computers now often have multiple central processing units, and says that swarms are not necessarily armies of robot bugs. “[W]e talk about the ‘internet of things’ – that might also be perceived as another kind of swarm.”

More here.

Iason Athanasiadis in Al Jazeera:

Two articles that appeared on the same day last month illuminated wildly differing aspects of daily life in contemporary Istanbul. The first appeared in the Turkish newspaper Milliyet titled Beaten, exploited and locked in a room, and described how the police discovered a man, referred to as TM, one of the tens of thousands of Syrian refugees flooding the city, locked up in a textile factory by his Turkish employers in between shifts. When he dared to request a pay-raise, he was beaten.

On the same day, the Wall Street Journal ran a beautifully-photographed feature titled The Discreet Charm of Istanbul, about a Turkish businesswoman, Asli Tunca, and her Belgian husband, Carl Vercauteren, who purchased a 19th century, five-story, 7,000sqr ft building with a garden in Istanbul's posh Beyoglu district and renovated it. The lady of the house called the house Hazz, Ottoman for “Enchantment”. The article concluded with Vercauteren saying that, “If there's a place on earth where God lives, it's Istanbul. The whole city has an energy and rich contrasts.”

After his cruel ordeal, TM would struggle to agree with the first part of Vercauteren's quote, but he might sympathise with his conclusion. TM and the Vercauterens inhabit the same city, yet they live in different worlds. Already an urban behemoth of 14 million, Istanbul continues its vertiginous ascent towards reclaiming its former cosmopolitan status.

More here.

Jenny Gathright in Harvard Magazine:

Guess who was the most photographed American of the nineteenth century.” Fletcher University Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., director of the Hutchins Center for African and African-American Studies, prepares for the surprise on my face. As it turns out, the answer is Frederick Douglass. Researchers have found at least 160 photographs of Douglass, who praised the medium of photography for enabling him to counter the racial caricatures so frequent in artistic representation of black people at the time. It should not be wholly surprising that one of the most prominent American figures of his era would also be the most photographed—yet black history is often marginalized in the history of the West.

…In his 1861 address at Boston’s Tremont Temple, Frederick Douglass said, “Pictures, like songs, should be left to make [their] own way in the world. All they can reasonably ask of us is that we place them on the wall, in the best light, and for the rest allow them to speak for themselves.” The exhibit (which has minimal text accompanying the photos) seems to heed Douglass’s advice. Mussai wrote me, “The notion of the sitters’ gaze and a sense of agency, dignity, and beauty emanating from the portraits is crucial in the curatorial organization of the exhibition: especially as you sit in the final gallery, surrounded by the different members of the African Choir, each engaging the viewer directly.” To Mussai, the final gallery is a “space of transformative encounters, and a kind of sanctuary to appreciate, reflect, and imagine what their lives might have been like…and what our lives are like today.”

More here.

Max Liu in The Independent:

Orhan Pamuk is becoming that rare author who writes his best books after winning the Nobel Prize for Literature. Whereas many writers, such as Alice Munro and VS Naipaul, received the top honour near the ends of their careers, Pamuk was only 54 when, in 2006, he became Turkey’s first Nobel Laureate. That left him plenty of time to add to his achievements, and his subsequent output, which includes his epic novel The Museum of Innocence (2008), is warmer, funnier and more beautiful than the works that preceded it. And yet I still know a surprising number of readers who find Pamuk’s writing dense and emotionally cold. I read him for the first time on a visit to Istanbul and admit that, at first, I was more enchanted by the city than by the prose. I’m glad I persevered, though, because Pamuk reminds me that the truly rewarding writers aren’t necessarily the ones we like immediately. When I learned three years ago that Pamuk was writing a long novel about 40 years of history, witnessed through the eyes of an Istanbul street vendor, the prospect sounded as delicious as a glass of Turkish tea. Now I’m pleased to report that the results are magnificent. If you haven’t enjoyed Pamuk’s books in the past then A Strangeness in My Mind might well be the one that wins you over.

Like James Joyce, Pamuk holds a looking-glass up to his city. Set between 1969 and 2012, his new novel describes the dizzying period when Istanbul’s population increased from three to 13 million. Weaving his way through this mutating landscape, where old meets new and east meets west, is Mevlut Karata, who, aged 12, migrates with his father from rural Anatolia. Mevlut sells yogurt, rice and boza (“a traditional Asian beverage made of fermented wheat, with a thick consistency, a pleasant aroma, a dark, yellowish colour, and low alcohol content”). He wanders “the poor and neglected cobblestone streets on winter evenings crying ‘Boo-zaa,’ reminding us of centuries past, the good old days that have come and gone.” At his cousin Korkut’s wedding, Mevlut is transfixed by the bride’s sister.

More here.

Sonnet 15

When I consider every thing that grows
Holds in perfection but a little moment,
That this huge stage presenteth nought but shows
Whereon the stars in secret influence comment;
When I perceive that men as plants increase,
Cheered and checked even by the self-same sky,
Vaunt in their youthful sap, at height decrease,
And wear their brave state out of memory;
Then the conceit of this inconstant stay
Sets you most rich in youth before my sight,
Where wasteful Time debateth with decay
To change your day of youth to sullied night,
And all in war with Time for love of you,
As he takes from you, I engraft you new.
.

Shakespeare

Hello,

The editors of 3QD have made their decision. The twenty-three semifinalists have been winnowed down to six, and three wildcard entries added. Thanks again to all the participants. Details of the prize can be found here.

On the right is a “trophy” logo that our finalists may choose to display on their own blogs.

So, here it is, the final list that I am sending to Nick Lane, who will select the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd prize winners from these: (in alphabetical order by blog or website name here)

1. 3 Quarks Daily: On Optimal Paths & Minimal Action
2. Curious Wavefunction: The fundamental philosophical dilemma of chemistry
3. Nautilus: The Sound So Loud That It Circled the Earth Four Times
4. No Place Like Home: When Hubble Stared at Nothing for 100 Hours
5. Nova Next: From Discovery to Dust
6. Roots of Unity: The Saddest Thing I Know about the Integers
7. Scicurious: Serotonin and the science of sex
8. Starts With A Bang: CONFIRMED: The Last Great Prediction Of The Big Bang!
9. Thinking of Things: The Pain in the Brain Game

We'll announce the three winners on September 28, 2015.

Good luck!

Abbas

P.S. The editors of 3QD will not be making any comments on our deliberations, or the process by which we made our decision, other than to simply say that we picked what we thought were the best six posts out of the semifinalists, and added three others which we also liked.

The voting round of our science prize (details here) is over. Thanks to the nominators and the voters for participating.

So here they are, the top 23 (there was a tie for the last six places), in descending order from the most voted-for:

1. Invariance: 3 myths of physics, especially in textbooks
2. Nova Next: From Discovery to Dust
3. Bekka S. Brodie: How Blow Flies find Corpses
4. Thinking of Things: The Pain in the Brain Game
5. Roots of Unity: The Saddest Thing I Know about the Integers
6. Thinking of Things: All I Didn't Know About Cancer
7. Companion Animal Psychology: How Does a Dog's Brain Respond to the Smell of a Familiar Human?
8. 3 Quarks Daily: On Optimal Paths & Minimal Action
9. Space Age Archaeology: Shadows on the Moon: an ephemeral archaeology
10. 3 Quarks Daily: Artificially Flavored Intelligence
11. 3 Quarks Daily: Fearing Artificial Intelligence
12. Curious Wavefunction: The fundamental philosophical dilemma of chemistry
13. Social Pulses: The public subsidy of scientific publishing monopolies
14. Wired: When a Giant Asteroid Impact Created Its Own Magma
15. Excursion Set: Destiny's Child
16. Wired: Glowing Tampons Help Detect Sewage Leaks
17. Nautilus: The Sound So Loud That It Circled the Earth Four Times
18. Empirical Zeal: How a 19th Century Math Genius Taught Us the Best Way to Hold a Pizza Slice
19. Los Angeles Review of Books: Three Physicists Try Philosophy
20. No Place Like Home: When Hubble Stared at Nothing for 100 Hours
21. Science: Ants have group-level personalities, study shows
22. The Loom: Editing Human Embryos: So This Happened
23. Wait But Why: The AI Revolution: The Road to Superintelligence

The editors of 3 Quarks Daily will now pick the top six entries from these, and after possibly adding up to three “wildcard” entries, will send that list of finalists to Nick Lane for final judging. We will post the shortlist of finalists tomorrow.

George Saunders and Ben Marcus in Granta:

Since his first book appeared in 1995, Ben Marcus has been an essential, radical and incendiary presence in American letters. What distinguishes his work is the way it uses a sacred awe for language to seek the emotionally resonant new. The effect on a reader (this one, anyway) is to rejuvenate one’s relation to language – which is to say, one’s relation to life. In addition to writing short story collections (The Age of Wire and String, and Leaving the Sea), a novella (The Father Costume) and novels (Notable American Women and The Flame Alphabet), Marcus is an important editor and anthologist. His 2004 anthology, The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories, has now been followed with New American Stories, published this year by Vintage in the US and Granta Books in the UK. These anthologies are essential, important, and often controversial – Marcus is as original, thoughtful, and passionate an anthologist as he is a writer – a radical chooser, we might say. I had a chance to talk with Ben about the anthology and the ways that compiling it has affected his views on the short story, and on American culture.

George Saunders: I thought your introduction to the anthology was so good – should be required reading for any workshop of young short-story writers. One of the things I admired about it is how succinctly you stated an essential and, I think, undervalued idea: that the primary storytelling goal is magic, achieved by mysterious means – that what we do isn’t ultimately an analytical or linear thing. And that its goal is . . . delight. You describe wrapping your young son up in a blanket and giving him a wild ride around the house and the pleasure he takes in this game: ‘he is asking to be amazed and afraid in this situation we’ve contrived’ – a perfect description of why we read fiction, and also a description that is very useful for writers – sort of freeing, to be given a charge like that (‘Go forth and delight!’). So I guess what I wanted to ask was: Did you always feel this way about fiction? That it is a sort of experiential machine, designed to do something to us? If not, how did you used to feel about it, and how did your current understanding of it evolve?

More here.

Ed Yong in The Atlantic:

This is a story about viruses that became domesticated by parasitic wasps, which use them as biological weapons for corrupting the bodies of caterpillars, which in turn can steal the viral genes and incorporate them into their own genomes, where they protect the caterpillars from yet more viruses. Evolution, you have outdone yourself with this one.

The wasps in question are called braconids. There are more than 17,000 known species, and they're all parasites. The females lay their eggs in the bodies of still-living caterpillars, which their grubs then devour alive.

As early as 1967, scientists realised that the wasps were also injecting the caterpillars with some kind of small particle, alongside their eggs. It took almost a decade to realise that those particles were viruses, which have since become known as bracoviruses. Each species of braconid wasp has its own specific bracovirus, but they all do the same thing: They suppress the caterpillar’s immune system and tweak its metabolism to favour the growing wasp. Without these viral allies, the wasp grubs would be killed by their host bodies.

So, the viruses are essential for the wasps—but the reverse is also true. Unlike most other kinds of virus, these bracoviruses cannot make copies of themselves. They are only manufactured in the ovaries of the wasps, and once they get into the caterpillars, their life cycle ends. Some might say they’re not true viruses are all. They're almost like secretions of the wasp’s body.

More here.

Tracy K. Smith at the New York Times:

In her new memoir, Margo Jefferson, a former critic at The New York Times, chronicles a lifetime as a member of Chicago’s black elite, a world she celebrates and problematizes by christening it (and her book) Negroland. “Negroland,” she writes, “is my name for a small region of Negro America where residents were sheltered by a certain amount of privilege and plenty. Children in Negroland were warned that few Negroes enjoyed privilege or plenty and that most whites would be glad to see them returned to indigence, deference and subservience. Children there were taught that most other Negroes ought to be emulating us when too many of them (out of envy or ignorance) went on behaving in ways that encouraged racial prejudice.”

That warning — that manner of instilling in children the understanding that with privilege comes responsibility — strikes me as the true impetus for Jefferson’s book. For once we become accustomed to delicious glimpses of Negroland’s impeccable manners and outfits, the meticulously orchestrated social opportunities and fastidiously maintained hairstyles, what we begin to notice is the cost and weight of this heavy collective burden.

Jefferson’s memoir pushes against the boundaries of its own genre. Yes, it begins with a scene from the author’s childhood. And yes, we learn about Jefferson’s older sister, Denise, and their parents: a father who was the longtime head of pediatrics at Provident, once the nation’s oldest black hospital; and a mother who was an impeccably dressed socialite. But it quickly swerves into social history; a good 30 pages of the book’s opening are dedicated to defining and chronicling the rise of America’s black upper class.

more here.

David L. Ulin at the LA Times:

Patrick Modiano opens his most recent novel, “So You Don't Get Lost in the Neighborhood,” with an epigraph from Stendhal: “I cannot provide the reality of events, I can only convey their shadow.” It's an almost perfect evocation of the book, not to mention Modiano's career.

The French writer, who won the Nobel Prize last year for a body of work as deft and beautiful as any in postwar European literature, is an excavator of memory — not only his own or those of his characters (many of whom bear, as J.D. Salinger once observed of his fictional alter ego Seymour Glass, “a striking resemblance to — alley oop, I'm afraid — myself”), but also that of Paris.

AN Wilson at the Financial Times:

In The White Road, de Waal turns his attention to porcelain — from its Chinese origins to Meissen, Wedgwood and the present day — and to humanity’s obsession with producing whiter than white ceramics. As with the earlier book, this becomes a scorchingly personal story. Every stage in the material’s history becomes a pilgrimage, as de Waal follows in the footsteps of the potters and travellers who discovered the clay and stone that porcelain is made of, and celebrates the beautiful objects that humanity has fashioned from this ingenious conjunction.

Readers who had only heard of, but not read, The Hare with Amber Eyes might have wondered what was so interesting about how a collection of little bibelots moved from pillar to post; those who had read the book could reply that what made it a page-turner was de Waal’s skill at explaining human passion as it survives in objects. Likewise the new book is no dry history of old pots. It is a story about — well, about skills and artistry, certainly, and about politics too. It is also a disquisition on whiteness, and its different meanings. “I’ve read Moby-Dick,” de Waal writes. “So I know the dangers of white. I think I know the dangers of an obsession with white, the pull towards something so pure, so total in its immersive possibility that you are transfigured, changed, feel you can start again.”

more here.