Nathaniel Comfort at The Point:

The notion that your genes are your essential self—genetic essentialism—is fairly recent. Although the idea that heredity contributes to our health and identity is ancient, the idea that for practical purposes it is all that matters dates only to the nineteenth century. The English statistician Francis Galton conceived of heredity as a subterranean stream of “germ plasm,” flowing down the generations, isolated and insulated from the environment’s buffeting of any individual body. In determining who we are, Galton wrote, nature was “far more important than nurture.”

That stream was increasingly polluted, Galton was convinced. Vexed by the fact that people paid more attention to breeding their cattle than themselves, in 1883 he proposed a scheme of hereditary improvement he called “eugenics,” meaning “well-born.” The stream of British germ plasm could be socially filtered, and even enriched, by persuading the “fittest” people (borrowing loosely from Darwin) to have more children; the “unfit,” fewer. A techno-optimist to the core, Galton believed that, given proper instruction, people would see the logic of this scheme and participate voluntarily.

more here.

Esther Inglis-Arkell in io9:

Instead of committing to intimidation, the scientists decided to commit to whimsy, and devised a weird, wonderful set of experiments with fake blind people asking math questions and police whistles distracting people on the road.

The police whistle made an early appearance in the series of experiments. A researcher simply sat by a road and waited until a person jaywalked across it. One loud whistle had that person spinning around, sure they were going to be fined or ticketed. When they saw the whistle being wielded by a civilian, they continued on their way.

But they found their way blocked by those most-feared of all street predators, the clipboard people. These clipboard people had a collection box and one of three spiels. The first spiel was a simple “Excuse me, would you please give me money?” The second was,”We are collecting money. Would you please give us some because we need to collect as much as possible.” The last spiel included an actual reason; they were collecting for a holiday camp for mentally disabled children. People who had been allowed to peacefully cross the road only got their wallets out for the last pitch. People who had experienced whistle-induced fear, then relief, were more likely to hand their money to whoever asked for it, regardless of justification.

Then the scientists decided to get theatrical. One of the researchers was outfitted with a white cane and a pair of dark glasses, so he looked like a blind man. They put him near the exit to a covered marketplace, watching people come out. He was to let four people walk by him, but when every fifth person emerged he was to dramatically grab their shoulder, because some experiments are conducted like jump-scares in horror movies. Once the innocent member of the public had jumped out of their skin and turned around, they saw a blind man. The experimenters thought this would fill them with relief. Half the time, that would be it — the man would apologize, and the unwitting subject would keep moving, only to be approached by more clipboard people asking them to fill out a survey about life in Poland.

The other half of the time, things got crazy. Once the person had seen the “blind man” and felt relieved, the blind man would ask them a math question. He would ask how many minutes he had until an upcoming appointment. Adding up the minutes in their head would cause them to re-engage their critical thinking, at which point they'd walk on and also be accosted by the clipboard people with a survey about life in Poland.

More here.

Robert Pogue Harrison in the NYRB blog:

The Pope spoke not of dogs but of all of God’s creatures. Where does that leave humankind? To call us a species among others is both correct and misleading, for whether by divine design or nature’s random ways, Homo sapiens has extended its dominion over everything that walks, crawls, swims, or flies. This makes us a singular, unearthly kind of creature. From the extinctions we cause, to the alteration and destruction of animal habitats, to the daily mass slaughters that feed our collective Cerberus-like appetite for meat, poultry, and fish, our species terrorizes the animal world in ways that could only offend, if not outrage, a God who loves his creatures enough to open the prospect of heaven to them…

From a quantitative point of view our species guilt is more aggravated today than it ever was in the past, when Plutarch or Pythagoras cried out against animal murder and the consumption of animal flesh. As the French philosopher and biologist Jean Rostand put it, “Science has made us gods even before we are worthy of being men.” While the scale of animal death has increased exponentially, the main issue today is no longer death but the coercive reproduction and perpetuation of animal lifeunder infernal conditions of organic exploitation. Industrialized farming today, in its manipulation of the biological processes of genesis, growth, and multiplication, forces animals like cows, calves, turkeys, pigs, ducks, and geese into artificial, barely endurable forms of existence. Far more demonic than the slaughters and animal sacrifices of the past, our relegation of these creatures to a standing reserve of consumable stock reduces their “lives” to a worldless, merely mechanical process of flesh production. In his Letter to the Romans, Saint Paul wrote of the malaise of the earth: “the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time.” That creaturely groaning has gotten a lot louder of late, and if God indeed loves his creatures enough to open heaven to them, it is highly likely that, when our pets get there, they will find themselves on their own.

Read the rest here.

Spiegel Staff in Spiegel International (AP/Kirsty Wigglesworth):

Predator drones and Eurofighter jets equipped with sensors were constantly searching for the radio signals from known telephone numbers tied to the Taliban. The hunt began as soon as the mobile phones were switched on.

Britain's GCHQ and the US National Security Agency (NSA) maintained long lists of Afghan and Pakistani mobile phone numbers belonging to Taliban officials. A sophisticated mechanism was activated whenever a number was detected. If there was already a recording of the enemy combatant's voice in the archives, it was used for identification purposes. If the pattern matched, preparations for an operation could begin. The attacks were so devastating for the Taliban that they instructed their fighters to stop using mobile phones.

The document also reveals how vague the basis for deadly operations apparently was. In the voice recognition procedure, it was sufficient if a suspect identified himself by name once during the monitored conversation. Within the next 24 hours, this voice recognition was treated as “positive target identification” and, therefore, as legitimate grounds for an airstrike. This greatly increased the risk of civilian casualties.

Probably one of the most controversial decisions by NATO in Afghanistan is the expansion of these operations to include drug dealers. According to an NSA document, the United Nations estimated that the Taliban was earning $300 million a year through the drug trade. The insurgents, the document continues, “could not be defeated without disrupting the drug trade.”

According to the NSA document, in October 2008 the NATO defense ministers made the momentous decision that drug networks would now be “legitimate targets” for ISAF troops. “Narcotics traffickers were added to the Joint Prioritized Effects List (JPEL) list for the first time,” the report reads.

In the opinion of American commanders like Bantz John Craddock, there was no need to prove that drug money was being funneled to the Taliban to declare farmers, couriers and dealers as legitimate targets of NATO strikes.

More here.

Invisible Waiter

Maitreya Bodhisattva, raising a bite of rare steak to his mouth, said,
“Even we sometimes get hungry.
Mere peace of mind doesn’t satisfy the flesh,
though, on the contrary, the sense of fullness at times does lead to peace of mind.”

“Each of us is aware that we should avoid eating unbalanced meals.
Our calling requires nothing but the capital of soul and body.
The American way of taking nutritional pills, however,
is severely prohibited by Buddha.”

Maitreya Bodhisattva, using knife and fork quite adeptly,
talked on and on with the accent of Pure Land Buddhism.
“I had a very hard time learning European table manners.
Anyway we had to master all at once
in a three-night training session
what Europeans had developed over hundreds of years.”

“Of course even we are not perfect.
Like you, we have our troubles.
There are some anorexic ascetics and some depressive goddesses of mercy.”
A Bodhisattva I met the other day in a Laundromat has insomnia,
so at night he seems to read by reading lamp
Romance of the Three Kingdoms.
He said he hadn’t slept for an entire month
and had now read 3,000 pages.

“And a nirvana incarnation I know well
who seems to be categorized by the present administration
as ‘a bed-ridden old man’
was high-handedly removed
to a special old folks’ home in Shibuya.
I saw him for the first time ever crying, ‘No! No!’”

It was already late at night.
All the waiters had gone home.
All that remained was people’s sighs,
like the laughter of the Cheshire cat.

In front of Maitreya Bodhisattva now fallen silent,
I put a non-existent cigarette in my mouth. Just then,
a transparent waiter appeared
and gently lighted it for me.
.

by Inuo Taguchi
from Armadillogic
publisher: Shichosha, Tokyo, 2002
translation: William I. Elliott and Kazuo Kawamura

Original Japanese

Sukhdev Sandhu in The Guardian:

In 2010, Mohsin Hamid was asked by Granta to contribute to a piece entitled “How to write about Pakistan”. Other poets or novelists might have railed against accounts littered with mullahs, military generals, secret agencies and American drones. Hamid, characteristically droll, drew up a list of 10 commandments of which the first three were: “Must have mangoes”; “Must have maids who serve mangoes”; “Maids must have affairs with man servants who should occasionally steal mangoes.” In Discontent and Its Civilizations, a collection pulling together essays and reviews from the past 15 years, he talks about the way in which Pakistan “plays a recurring role as villain in the horror sub-industry within the news business”. In his eyes, the nation in which he grew up, and to which he returned in 2009 after lengthy stints living in cities on both sides of the Atlantic, is less diabolical; he loves the “out-of-character Pakistan, Pakistan without its makeup and plastic fangs, a working actor with worn-out shoes, a close family, and a hearty laugh”.

…In one essay, Hamid says he’s in “self-exile from the United States”. His reflections on that country are pointed. Discussing “the Great American Novel”, he observes that “‘the’ is needlessly exclusionary, and ‘American’ is unfortunately parochial. The whole, capitalised, seems to speak to a deep and abiding insecurity, perhaps a colonial legacy.” Rather too many pieces – on fatherhood, ebooks, Obama’s election – feel dated or too short. Then again, as he proved in The Reluctant Fundamentalist, brevity has its virtues. Writing about Antonio Tabucchi’s Pereira Maintains, he claims: “Novels are like affairs, and small novels are affairs with less history, affairs that involved just a few glances across a dinner table or a single ride together, unspeaking, on a train, and therefore affairs still electric with potential, still heart-quickening, even after the passage of all these years.” It’s a lovely notion and Discontent and Its Civilizations has just enough others to make it worth spending time with.

More here.

Denise Grady in The New York Times:

It may sound flippant to say that many cases of cancer are caused by bad luck, but that is what two scientists suggested in an article published last week in the journal Science. The bad luck comes in the form of random genetic mistakes, or mutations, that happen when healthy cells divide. Random mutations may account for two-thirds of the risk of getting many types of cancer, leaving the usual suspects — heredity and environmental factors — to account for only one-third, say the authors, Cristian Tomasetti and Dr. Bert Vogelstein, of Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. “We do think this is a fundamental mechanism, and this is the first time there’s been a measure of it,” said Dr. Tomasetti, an applied mathematician. Though the researchers suspected that chance had a role, they were surprised at how big it turned out to be. “This was definitely beyond my expectations,” Dr. Tomasetti said. “It’s about double what I would have thought.” The finding may be good news to some people, bad news to others, he added. Smoking greatly increases the risk of lung cancer, but for other cancers, the causes are not clear. And yet many patients wonder if they did something to bring the disease on themselves, or if they could have done something to prevent it. “For the average cancer patient, I think this is good news,” Dr. Tomasetti said. “Knowing that over all, a lot of it is just bad luck, I think in a sense it’s comforting.”

Among people who do not have cancer, Dr. Tomasetti said he expected there to be two camps. “There are those who would like to control every single thing happening in their lives, and for those, this may be very scary,” he said. “ ‘There is a big component of cancer I can just do nothing about.’ “For the other part of the population, it’s actually good news. ‘I’m happy. I can of course do all I know that’s important to not increase my risk of cancer, like a good diet, exercise, avoiding smoking, but on the other side, I don’t want to stress out about every single thing or every action I take in my life, or everything I touch or eat.’ ”

More here.

Vivian Gornick in The Nation:

There she was: a girl, a Jew, a cripple—possessed of an electrifying intelligence, a defensively arrogant tongue and an unaccountable passion for social justice, which, in her teens, led her to the illegal socialist organizations then abounding among university students in Warsaw. In the city’s radical underground, she opened her mouth to speak and found that thought and feeling came swiftly together through an eloquence that stirred those who agreed with her, and overwhelmed those who did not. The experience was exhilarating; more than exhilarating, it was clarifying; it centered her, told her who she was.

At 18—already on the Warsaw police blotter—Rosa was sent to Zurich to study, and never went home again. Although she was registered at the university as a student in natural sciences, it was at the German socialist club—with its library, reading room and lecture hall—that she got her education. There, in the autumn of 1890, she met Leo Jogiches, a Lithuanian Jew three years her elder and already a student revolutionary of local reputation. A self-styled hero of Russian radical literature, Leo was brooding, angry, remote, enamored of Bakunin’s famous definition of the revolutionary as a man who “has no interests of his own, no cause of his own, no feelings, no habits, no belongings, he does not even have a name. Everything in him is absorbed by a single, exclusive interest, a single thought, a single passion—the revolution.” Rosa was enraptured. Leo, in turn, was aroused by her adoration. They became lovers in 1891; but, from the start, theirs was a misalliance.

From earliest youth, Rosa had looked upon radical politics as a means of living life fully. She wanted everything: marriage and children, books and music, walks on a summer evening and the revolution. Personal happiness and the struggle for social justice, she said, shouldn’t be mutually exclusive. If people gave up sex and art while making the revolution, they’d produce a world more heartless than the one they were setting out to replace. Leo, on the other hand, withdrawn and depressed—he hated daylight, sociability and his own sexual need—told her this was nonsense; all that mattered was the Cause. Yet Rosa’s longing for intimacy with him did not abate.

More here.

Monument Valley. A video game. 2014.

More here, here, and here.

Thanks to Ryan Moritz.

Christopher Glazek in the New York Times Magazine:

Since 2007, [Stefan] Simchowitz has sponsored and promoted roughly two dozen young artists. In addition to arranging sales for their work, Simchowitz often provides them with a studio, purchases their materials, covers their rent and subsidizes their living expenses. Perhaps most consequentially, he also posts photos of them and their work on his influential Instagram account, thereby creating what he calls “heat” and “velocity” for the artists he supports, who have included market darlings like the Colombian Oscar Murillo, the Japanese-American Parker Ito and the Brazilian Christian Rosa, all under the age of 35. But Simchowitz’s methods call down the opprobrium of art-world stalwarts, who are contemptuous of his taste, suspicious of his motives and fearful of his network’s potential to subvert the intricate hierarchies that have regulated art for centuries.

Reputations in the art world are forged over many years across countless fairs, openings, reviews and dinners. Although laypeople may look at a $30 million Richter and compare it to splatters from a second grader, Richter’s prices are determined not by chance but by the elaborate academic, journalistic and institutional infrastructure the art world has built to mete out prizes and anoint the next generation of cultural torchbearers. The collector class has traditionally come from the very top of the wealth spectrum and has included people looking to trade money for social prestige by participating in the art world’s stately rituals. Over the last few years, though, a new class of speculators has emerged with crasser objectives: They are less interested in flying to Basel to attend a dinner than in riding the economic wave that has caused the market for emerging contemporary art to surge in the past decade.

More here.

Ben Montgomery in Miami Herald:

The pressure on Kimmerle, 40, was intense. The associate professor of forensic anthropology was scorned by some academics, watched by Panhandle lawmakers. County officials complained about the bad publicity. The local newspaper publisher called her work “this greed motivated waste of money.” Some locals even wanted her arrested.

In town, she noticed the sideways glances. Her colleague swore somebody was following her. They didn’t know whom they could trust.

Kimmerle knew the risks. What if she didn’t find anything? What if it was a waste of money?

They started with shovels, then trowels. The first hole they’d dug was empty, nothing but Jackson County clay. But, now, on the third day of digging, a graduate student got Kimmerle’s attention. Her eyes were wide.

“Want to come take a look?”

Kimmerle descended into the open grave.

The months to come would bring protests and press conferences, more threats and a massive search for a second cemetery. Kimmerle would come close to breaking. She’d find more bodies than anybody expected. She’d find an empty casket. She’d find a hundred more questions.

Now, though, in early September 2013, at the bottom of the grave, she brushed away the earth.

There in the dirt was a perfect set of baby teeth.

Steven Rosenfeld in AlterNet:

What a difference six years makes! When Barack Obama was elected president in 2008, people were literally dancing in the streets—as was the case in Philadelphia. Today, as Obama appears to be finding new muscles to flex in office, a great many of his earliest enthusiasts, who have been disappointed for years, are wondering if the candidate they believed in is coming to life. “High office shouldn’t be about putting points on the electoral scoreboard, it should be about changing the country for the better,” wrote economist Paul Krugman in Rolling Stone,in a high-profile piece reconsidering and defending Obama's presidency. “Has Obama done that? Do his achievements look likely to endure? The answer to both questions is yes.” Krugman’s judgment came before Obama announced sweeping executive actions on immigration, protecting from deportation 40 percent of undocumented immigrants and single-handedly overturning five decades of anti-Cuba policy. Other positive assessments have ensued, causing speculation about a new and more powerful Obama.Obama seized the agenda, saw his initiative dominating the front pages and television news discussions and sent Republicans in Congress scrambling,” wrote the Washington Post’s Paul Waldman, about the Cuba initiative. “This could well be the template for much of the next two years.”

While many pundits are focusing on the future, a more pressing question arises. Have progressives been missing the boat on Obama’s accomplishments in office?

More here.

Conor Meleady in HistoryToday:

When the organisation known as Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) announced at the end of June 2014 that it was seeking to restore the Islamic caliphate, with its leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, as caliph, it set off a wave of debate both among jihadists and western analysts. The debate concerned the legitimacy of al-Baghdadi’s claim and the likelihood of ISIS securing the support of the Islamic world for its project. Some analysts declared it to be the first time since Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s abolition of the Ottoman Empire in March 1924 that any group or individual had been bold enough to make such a claim. In fact, just days after Atatürk’s action, the Hashimite Sharif Husayn of Mecca, King of the Hijaz, proclaimed himself caliph, inititating a controversy similar to that which al-Baghdadi’s declaration provoked. It was a controversy in which the officials charged with formulating Britain’s postwar policy in the Near East were deeply implicated.

Husayn’s claim was a decade in the making. Since the late 19th century, Arab intellectuals in Syria and Egypt had sought to reform the Ottoman Empire through a top-down process of Arabisation, with the Sharif of Mecca touted as a possible caliph. In the context of deteriorating Ottoman-British relations, these ideas were encouraged by orientalists such as Wilfrid Blunt, author of the anti-Ottoman tract, The Future of Islam, in which he argued that the revival of the Arabs was a historical inevitability in which Britain must play its part.

More here.

I See You Dancing, Father
.
No sooner downstairs after the night’s rest

In the middle of the kitchen floor.

And as you danced
You whistled.
You made your own music
Always in tune with yourself.

Well, nearly always, anyway.
You’re buried now
In Lislaughtin Abbey
And whenever I think of you

I go back beyond the old man
Mind and body broken
To find the unbroken man.
It is the moment before the dance begins,

Your lips are enjoying themselves
Whistling an air.
Whatever happens or cannot happen
In the time I have to spare
I see you dancing, father.
.

by Brendan Kennelly
from A Time for Voices, Selected Poems 1960-1990
publisher: Bloodaxe, Newcastle upon Tyne, 1990

A Conversation with Chiara Marletto over at Edge.org:

I’ve been thinking about constructor theory a lot in the past few years. Constructor theory is this theory that David Deutsch proposed—a proposal for a new fundamental theory to formulate science in a completely different way from the prevailing conception of fundamental physics. It has the potential to change the way we formulate science because it’s a new mode of explanation.

When you think about physics, you usually describe things in terms of initial conditions and laws of motion; so what you say is, for example, where a comet goes given that it started in a certain place and time. In constructor theory, what you say is what transformations are possible, what are impossible, and why. The idea is that you can formulate the whole of fundamental physics this way; so, not only do you say where the comet goes, you say where it can go. This incorporates a lot more than what it is possible to incorporate now in fundamental physics.

David and I have been working on this together for the past three years, and we’ve been applying it to many different problems. So far, the two completed parts of our trying out constructor theory to see whether it can solve problems are: a fundamental theory of information within physics1; and the constructor theory of life2, which applies this new theory of information to a fundamental problem that's at the boundary between physics and biology, and has to do with how certain features of living things, such as the ability to self-reproduce very accurately, are compatible with the laws of physics as we know them.

In these two cases, you can see how switching to this new mode of explanation allows one to change the perspective and address the problems in a much more effective way. These are two examples where switching to this new mode of explanation makes all the difference.

Take information, for example. Information is something we use in our everyday speaking; also we use it in physics a lot. For instance, we assume that information has certain properties, e.g. that it can be copied from one physical system to another. So far, we did not have a fundamental theory telling us what are the regularities in nature that allow the existence of information in this sense. But whenever we talk about information we refer to those regularities. We assume, for example, that the laws of physics allow copy processes. In constructor theory you can express these regularities, and this is what our theory does. Our way of incorporating information in fundamental physics is by formulating what are these regularities in nature that allow the existence of information.

More here.