From the MIT Technology Review:

One of the curious things about social networks is the way that some messages, pictures, or ideas can spread like wildfire while others that seem just as catchy or interesting barely register at all. The content itself cannot be the source of this difference. Instead, there must be some property of the network that changes to allow some ideas to spread but not others.

Today, we get an insight into why this happens thanks to the work of Kristina Lerman and pals at the University of Southern California. These people have discovered an extraordinary illusion associated with social networks which can play tricks on the mind and explain everything from why some ideas become popular quickly to how risky or antisocial behavior can spread so easily.

Network scientists have known about the paradoxical nature of social networks for some time. The most famous example is the friendship paradox: on average your friends will have more friends than you do.

This comes about because the distribution of friends on social networks follows a power law. So while most people will have a small number of friends, a few individuals have huge numbers of friends. And these people skew the average.

Here’s an analogy. If you measure the height of all your male friends. you’ll find that the average is about 170 centimeters. If you are male, on average, your friends will be about the same height as you are. Indeed, the mathematical notion of “average” is a good way to capture the nature of this data.

But imagine that one of your friends was much taller than you—say, one kilometer or 10 kilometers tall. This person would dramatically skew the average, which would make your friends taller than you, on average. In this case, the “average” is a poor way to capture this data set.

More here.

Secret

I shall make a song like you hair . . .
Gold-woven with shadows green-tinged,
And I shall play with my song
As my fingers might play with your hair.
Deep in my heart
I shall play with my song of you,
Gently. . . .
I shall laugh
At its sensitive lustre . . .
I shall wrap my song in a blanket,
Blue like your eyes are blue
With tiny shots of silver.
I shall wrap it caressingly,
Tenderly. . . .
I shall sing a lullaby
To the song I have made
Of your hair and eyes . . .
And you will never know
That deep in my heart
I shelter a song for you
Secretly. . . .
.

by Gwendolyn Bennett
from Modern American Poetry

Adam Piore in Nautilus:

In the ninth century there was a Norwegian Viking named Kveldulf, so big and strong that no man could defeat him. He sailed the seas in a long-ship and raided and plundered towns and homesteads of distant lands for many years. He settled down to farm, a very wealthy man. Kveldulf had two sons who grew up to become mighty warriors. One joined the service of King Harald Tangle Hair. But in time the King grew fearful of the son’s growing power and had him murdered. Kveldulf vowed revenge. With his surviving son and allies, Kveldulf caught up with the killers, and wielding a double-bladed ax, slew 50 men. He sent the paltriest survivors back to the king to recount his deed and fled toward the newly settled realm of Iceland. Kveldulf died on the journey. But his remaining son Skallagrim landed on Iceland’s west coast, prospered, and had children. Skallagrim’s children had children. Those children had children. And the blood and genes of Kveldulf the Viking and Skallagrim his son were passed down the ages. Then, in 1949, in the capital of Reykjavik, a descendent named Kari Stefansson was born.

Like Kveldulf, Stefansson would grow to be a giant, 6’5”, with piercing eyes and a beard. As a young man, he set out for the distant lands of the universities of Chicago and Harvard in search of intellectual bounty. But at the dawn of modern genetics in the 1990s, Stefansson, a neurologist, was lured back to his homeland by an unlikely enticement—the very genes that he and his 300,000-plus countrymen had inherited from Kveldulf and the tiny band of settlers who gave birth to Iceland. Stefansson had a bold vision. He would create a library of DNA from every single living descendent of his nation’s early inhabitants. This library, coupled with Iceland’s rich trove of genealogical data and meticulous medical records, would constitute an unparalleled resource that could reveal the causes—and point to cures—for human diseases. In 1996, Stefansson founded a company called Decode, and thrust his tiny island nation into the center of the burgeoning field of gene hunting. “Our genetic heritage is a natural resource,” Stefansson declared after returning to Iceland. “Like fish and hot pools.” Stefansson set sail on an epic journey. He and his crew collected DNA from 150,000 of their fellow countrymen (half the population) and constructed a genealogical chart that accounts for the family tree of virtually every member of the small island nation. Next they succeeded in reading the entire 3-billion nucleotide genetic sequences of more than 11,000 Icelanders. They could now infer the individual genomes of the entire Icelandic population.

More here.

Eric Liu in The Atlantic:

Is the culture war over?

That seems an absurd question. This is an age when Confederate monuments still stand; when white-privilege denialism is surging on social media; when legislators and educators in Arizona and Texas propose banning ethnic studies in public schools and assign textbooks euphemizing the slave trade; when fear of Hispanic and Asian immigrants remains strong enough to prevent immigration reform in Congress; when the simple assertion that #BlackLivesMatter cannot be accepted by all but is instead contested petulantly by many non-blacks as divisive, even discriminatory. And that’s looking only at race. Add gender, guns, gays, and God to the mix and the culture war seems to be raging along quite nicely. Yet from another perspective, much of this angst can be interpreted as part of a noisy but inexorable endgame: the end of white supremacy. From this vantage point, Americanness and whiteness are fitfully, achingly, but finally becoming delinked—and like it or not, over the course of this generation, Americans are all going to have to learn a new way to be American. Imagine that this is true; that this decades-long war is about to give way to something else. The question then arises: What? What is the story of “us” when “us” is no longer by default “white”? The answer, of course, will depend on how aware Americans are of what they are, of what their culture already (and always) has been. And that awareness demands a new kind of mirror.

More here.

Stephen Cave at The Financial Times:

Someone must care for the dead, who, as the mortician Caitlin Doughty writes, “have become useless at caring for themselves”. In ancient Egypt, it was the job of the jackal-headed god Anubis, who would usher them to where their hearts would be weighed against the feather of justice. According to Greek legend, the task of ferrying the corpses went to Charon, “a shaggy-jowled, white-haired demon who piloted sinners by boat across the River Styx into hell”. But “at Westwind Cremation”, Doughty tells us, “that job belonged to Chris”.

Death is the point at which the profane and the sacred collide — an event completely natural and yet surrounded by mystery; steeped in the physical realities of bodily processes, yet enwreathed with existential hopes and fears. How therefore should we think about it? Many in the secular west and beyond, who have been unmoored from the spiritual certainties of the past, seem to have concluded that it is best not to think about it at all. For others, averting our gaze from death means stumbling through life half-blind.

more here.

David L. Ulin at The Los Angeles Times:

For about 10 minutes on Sunday morning, I regretted not going to Santa Clara to hear the Grateful Dead. This was after I saw the set list from the first of the five “Fare Thee Well” shows scheduled to conclude July 3, 4 and 5 at Chicago’s Soldier Field.

“Alligator,” “Cream Puff War,” “What’s Become of the Baby?” — these were songs they hadn’t played live, if at all, in close to five decades. And yet, there was no Jerry Garcia. How could it be the Dead without Jerry Garcia, who died in 1995? This was a key reason I’d dismissed these goodbye shows; how could you say goodbye to something that was already gone?

My last Dead show was at the Spectrum in Philadelphia on April 6, 1982. Even then, my relationship with the band was ambivalent; I was an admirer of the intent if not always the execution of the music, the ideal of improvisation, making mistakes in public, but wary of nostalgia, then and now.

more here.

George Packer at the New York Times:

In the absence of any perceptible contractions of revolt, two writers — Charles Murray on the libertarian right, Chris Hedges on the apocalyptic left — have given up waiting and decided to induce labor. Their methods are different: Murray’s “By the People” administers a strong but targeted dose of Pitocin, while Hedges’ “Wages of Rebellion” counsels lots of sex, which is called “sublime madness.” But the most interesting aspect of these two books is where their authors overlap. Both are appalled by the collusion between the federal government and corporations. Both describe the legal system as essentially lawless. Neither has any faith that electoral politics, the three branches of government or the Constitution itself can make a difference. Neither fits with any sizable faction of either of the two parties. Both despise elites. Both are willing, even eager, to see Americans break the law, in nonviolent ways, to force change.

At times Murray and Hedges sound exactly the same. “It is part of our national catechism that government is instituted to protect our unalienable rights, and that when it becomes destructive of those rights, the reason for our allegiance is gone. At that point, revolution is not treason, but the people’s right,” says Murray, though it could be Hedges. “Appealing to the judicial, legislative or executive branches of government in the hope of reform is as realistic as accepting the offer made by the March Hare during the Mad Tea-Party,” writes Hedges, pulling off a pretty good Murray.

more here.

Joseph Stiglitz in The Guardian (Photograph: Sotiris Barbarousis/Sotiris Barbarousis/epa/Corbis):

Why are European Union leaders resisting the referendum and refusing even to extend by a few days the June 30 deadline for Greece’s next payment to the IMF? Isn’t Europe all about democracy?

In January, Greece’s citizens voted for a government committed to ending austerity. If the government were simply fulfilling its campaign promises, it would already have rejected the proposal. But it wanted to give Greeks a chance to weigh in on this issue, so critical for their country’s future wellbeing.

That concern for popular legitimacy is incompatible with the politics of the eurozone, which was never a very democratic project. Most of its members’ governments did not seek their people’s approval to turn over their monetary sovereignty to the ECB. When Sweden’s did, Swedes said no. They understood that unemployment would rise if the country’s monetary policy were set by a central bank that focused single-mindedly on inflation (and also that there would be insufficient attention to financial stability). The economy would suffer, because the economic model underlying the eurozone was predicated on power relationships that disadvantaged workers.

It is hard to advise Greeks how to vote on 5 July. Neither alternative – approval or rejection of the troika’s terms – will be easy, and both carry huge risks. A yes vote would mean depression almost without end. Perhaps a depleted country – one that has sold off all of its assets, and whose bright young people have emigrated – might finally get debt forgiveness; perhaps, having shrivelled into a middle-income economy, Greece might finally be able to get assistance from the World Bank. All of this might happen in the next decade, or perhaps in the decade after that.

By contrast, a no vote would at least open the possibility that Greece, with its strong democratic tradition, might grasp its destiny in its own hands.

More here.

Kim Soffen in the NYT:

Buoyed by a Supreme Court ruling, opponents of gerrymandering want to get more state legislatures out of the business of drawing congressional districts. So it’s worth examining the performance of the independent redistricting commissions validated by the court on Monday.

Arizona, via a ballot initiative in 2000, was one of the first states to entrust congressional boundaries to an independent commission, and California followed suit in 2010. Four other states have their congressional districts drawn by independent panels in an effort to make the process less partisan and yield more competitive districts. But those commissions were formed by their respective state legislatures and were not affected by Monday’s ruling.

Measuring the success of an independent commission is tricky, as it’s impossible to know how a legislature’s lines will have differed from a commission’s in the same year. And other factors like people’s relocations can alter a district’s ideological balance. But the evidence suggests that the commissions yielded more competitive races in Arizona and California.

The Arizona ballot initiative, Proposition 106, directed the commission to make the districts competitive “where to do so would create no significant detriment to the other goals.” Those goals included complying with theVoting Rights Act, equality of population, compactness, contiguity and respect for communities of interest and natural boundaries.

The “no significant detriment” clause, according to Willie Desmond, the lead map drawing consultant hired by the Arizona commission for the 2011 redistricting, “was kind of hard to interpret.” He said in an interview, “The commissioners all viewed that in slightly different ways depending on whether they wanted there to be more competitive districts.”

Even so, the maps resulting from both the 2001 and 2011 redistricting in Arizona were among the most competitive in the nation, as measured by election results. They had an average margin of victory more than 28 percent lower than that of the United States as a whole. Indeed, two of its nine districts were among the 29 in the nation that had margins of victory under 5 percent in 2014.

More here.

Matthew Stevenson in The Critical Flame:

My son Charles and I may have been the last Americans to walk among the Roman ruins at Palmyra.

A classical oasis in the Syrian desert, Palmyra was recently captured by the Islamic State (sometimes called ISIS or ISIL) from a coalition army that included soldiers still loyal to President Bashar al-Assad.

An outpost of the Roman Empire that remains vibrantly intact, the city is about a three-hour drive (134 miles on dodgy roads) east into the Syrian desert from either Homs or Damascus. Carry on another nine or ten hours, and you will arrive in Baghdad.

Dedicated to creating an Islamic state in western Iraq and eastern Syria, ISIS brutalizes the population in its conquered areas and has destroyed unnumbered artifacts from earlier civilizations. Although it has yet to take down the ruins at Palmyra, it has committed shocking atrocities in Iraq against such UNESCO sites such as Nimrud, Hatra, and Nineveh—beheading statues, much as it has the local opposition to its extreme Sunni rule. Erasing historical complexity is as important a weapon in its arsenal as an AK-47.

In recent days around Palmyra, ISIS blew up several Muslim tombs (located just outside the city) and, according to some reports, might have laced land mines in or around the ancient Roman city.

More here.

Arifa Akbar in The Independent:

Sean Elder in Newsweek:

An odd blend of old and new San Francisco turned out to see Gary Snyder at the Nourse Theater one evening in May. Former counterculture standard-bearers such as Michael McClure and Peter Coyote mixed with young tattooed hipsters, curious techies and California Governor Jerry Brown. When I pulled out my reporter’s notebook, the young Indian man sitting next to me said, “Are we supposed to take notes?”

Wouldn’t hurt. Snyder, who turned 85 the week before, is a Pulitzer Prize–winning poet (for the 1975 collection Turtle Island), award-winning essayist, early conservationist, community activist, pioneering bio-regionalist, amateur geologist, avid mountaineer, conscientious omnivore (before the term existed), multi-linguist, Asian art and history expert, Native American story archivist and perhaps the person most responsible for awakening a generation of beatniks and hippies to Buddhism. (A former Zen monk, Snyder translated the ancient Chinese Buddhist poet Han Shan—Cold Mountain Poems—and was the unwitting model for the hero of Jack Kerouac’s 1958 novel, The Dharma Bums.) And he shows little sign of slowing. Though he’ll later tell the assembled that his new collection, This Present Moment, is “the last book of poems I’ll publish,” he has a new book with artist Tom Killion (California’s Wild Edge: The Coast in Prints, Poetry and History) and is gearing up to finish another based on the history of the environment in China—the kind of thing he makes sound like a little side project, the way you might talk about building a treehouse for the kids.

More here.

Abigail Deutsch at Harper's Magazine:

Last Boxing Day, in my annual attempt to figure out what Boxing Day is, I embarked on an Internet expedition from the confines of my chilly bedroom in New York City. Before long, I came across this tidbit on Time magazine’s website: “The Irish still refer to the holiday as St. Stephen’s Day, and they have their own tradition called hunting the wren, in which boys fasten a fake wren to a pole and parade it through town.”

Hunting the wren, I thought. I know what that is. I was sure I’d seen the ceremony before, watched a procession of boys in tunics march over a misty hillock on a cold day, one piping a melancholy tune while the others hoisted a platform woven of branches and reeds. The platform supported a delicate bird—until, quite abruptly, the bird turned into a woman…..

Once the Celtic haze had lifted, I recognized, with some disappointment, that I couldn’t possibly have witnessed this scene. I glanced across the room, toward the low bookshelf that houses my favorite childhood paperbacks. And suddenly I felt certain of the vision’s source. It was a series of fantasy books I’d read and reread between eight and eighteen—a series that transported me from New York City to the foggy shores of Wales, that ushered me into King Arthur’s tent on the eve of the Battle of Badon, that both encouraged and capitalized on my mania for British folklore.

more here.