A poem may have more than one mind and whatever was on Alberto Rios' mind when he wrote this it might just as well have been called “A Small Story About Fukushima“.

Andrew Sullivan in The Daily Dish:

Readers know I have been grappling for a while with the vexing question of the balance between the surveillance state and the threat of Jihadist terrorism. When the NSA leaks burst onto the scene, I was skeptical of many of the large claims made by civil libertarians and queasily sympathetic to a program that relied on meta-data alone, as long as it was transparent, had Congressional buy-in, did not accidentally expose innocent civilians to grotesque privacy loss, and was watched by a strong FISA court.

Since then, I’ve watched the debate closely and almost all the checks I supported have been proven illusory. The spying is vastly more extensive than anyone fully comprehended before; the FISA court has been revealed as toothless and crippled; and many civilians have had their privacy accidentally violated over 3000 times. The president, in defending the indefensible, has damaged himself and his core reputation for honesty and candor. These cumulative revelations have exposed this program as, at a minimum, dangerous to core liberties and vulnerable to rank abuse. I’ve found myself moving further and further to Glenn’s position.

What has kept me from embracing it entirely has been the absence of any real proof than any deliberate abuse has taken place and arguments that it has helped prevent terror attacks. This may be too forgiving a standard. If a system is ripe for abuse, history tells us the only question is not if such abuse will occur, but when. So it is a strange and awful irony that the Coalition government in Britain has today clinched the case for Glenn.

More here.

Sukant Khurana in Counter Currents:

It is very rare that individuals are institutions in themselves. Such individuals are genuine visionaries who start a wave, who create a school of thought and like a banyan tree keep extending inspiring branches through offshoots much beyond when they are gone. The late Obaid Siddiqi, who many rightly consider the father of modern Indian biology and the last of the giants of the South Asian science scene, was one such rare individual. While risking the shallow deification of the late protagonist of this article, I write this piece, hoping that a few people would understand that it is not the person but the vision that this is a personal tribute to and they would strive to pick up the torch where the last generation left it.

Obaid Siddiqi, who strove to transform the life sciences in South Asia recently died of a freak road accident. True to his dream of a peaceful, considerate, educated and scientific society, his family decided to not press charges on the young careless driver that hit him, as it would ruin his career and education.

My article is far from a perfect tribute to my first scientific mentor as it deals solely with my personal interactions with him in order to bring forth his ideas that continue to inspire me, instead of details of his tremendously long list of achievements or his interactions with hundreds of other very well accomplished students that continue to contribute to science and society world over. The greatest biologist that South Asian soil has sprung so far, Obaid Siddiqi, despised personal publicity and his motto was simply to just do your job quietly without worrying about the results.

More here.

Robert T. Gonzalez in Salon:

1. Sigmund Freud — Cocaine

To Freud, cocaine was more than a personal indulgence; he regarded it as a veritable wonder drug, and for many years was a huge proponent of its use in a wide array of applications. In a letter written to his fianceé, Martha, Freud wrote: “If all goes well, I will write an essay [on cocaine] and I expect it will win its place in therapeutics by the side of morphine and superior to it … I take very small doses of it regularly against depression and against indigestion and with the most brilliant of success.”

Freud published such a review, titled “Uber Coca” in 1884. Interestingly, Freud’s paper was one of the first to propose drug substitution as a therapeutic treatment for addiction. While replacing morphine with cocaine is something we now know to be counterproductive to recovery, the concept of substitution therapies persists to this day. (For a great overview of Freud’s relationship with cocaine, check out this post by Scicurious.)

More here.

Mirabeau Bridge

Under Mirabeau Bridge the
river slips away

Mark Edmundson in The Chronicle of Higher Education:

An English major is much more than 32 or 36 credits including a course in Shakespeare, a course on writing before 1800, and a three-part survey of English and American lit. That's the outer form of the endeavor. It's what's inside that matters. It's the character-forming—or (dare I say?) soul-making—dimension of the pursuit that counts. And what is that precisely? Who is the English major in his ideal form? What does the English major have, what does he want, and what does he in the long run hope to become? The English major is, first of all, a reader. She's got a book pup-tented in front of her nose many hours a day; her Kindle glows softly late into the night. But there are readers and there are readers. There are people who read to anesthetize themselves—they read to induce a vivid, continuous, and risk-free daydream. They read for the same reason that people grab a glass of chardonnay—to put a light buzz on. The English major reads because, as rich as the one life he has may be, one life is not enough. He reads not to see the world through the eyes of other people but effectively to become other people. What is it like to be John Milton, Jane Austen, Chinua Achebe? What is it like to be them at their best, at the top of their games?

English majors want the joy of seeing the world through the eyes of people who—let us admit it—are more sensitive, more articulate, shrewder, sharper, more alive than they themselves are. The experience of merging minds and hearts with Proust or James or Austen makes you see that there is more to the world than you had ever imagined. You see that life is bigger, sweeter, more tragic and intense—more alive with meaning than you had thought. Real reading is reincarnation. There is no other way to put it. It is being born again into a higher form of consciousness than we ourselves possess. When we walk the streets of Manhattan with Walt Whitman or contemplate our hopes for eternity with Emily Dickinson, we are reborn into more ample and generous minds. “Life piled on life / Were all too little,” says Tennyson's “Ulysses,” and he is right. Given the ragged magnificence of the world, who would wish to live only once? The English major lives many times through the astounding transportive magic of words and the welcoming power of his receptive imagination. The economics major? In all probability he lives but once. If the English major has enough energy and openness of heart, he lives not once but hundreds of times. Not all books are worth being reincarnated into, to be sure—but those that are win Keats's sweet phrase: “a joy forever.”

More here.

From Science:

What if a psychiatrist could tell whether someone was about to commit suicide simply by taking a sample of their blood? That’s the promise of new research, which finds increased amounts of a particular protein in the bloodstream of those contemplating killing themselves. The test was conducted on only a few people, however, and given that such “biomarkers” often prove unreliable in the long run, it’s far from ready for clinical use. Suicide isn’t like a heart attack. People typically don’t reveal early symptoms to their doctor—morbid thoughts, for example, instead of chest pain—and there’s no equivalent of a cholesterol or high blood pressure test to identify those at most risk of killing themselves. “We are dealing with something more complex and less accessible,” says Alexander Niculescu III, a psychiatrist at the Indiana University School of Medicine in Indianapolis. So some researchers are eager to find physical signs, called biomarkers, that can be measured in the bloodstream to signal when a person is at a high likelihood of committing suicide.

Over the past decade, Niculescu and his colleagues have been refining a method for identifying biomarkers that can distinguish psychological states. The technique depends on blood samples taken from individuals in different mental states over time—for example, from people with bipolar disorder as they swing between the disorder’s characteristic high and low moods. The researchers test those samples for differences in the activity, or expression, of genes for of different proteins. After screening the blood samples, the scientists “score” a list of candidate biomarker genes by searching for related results in a large database of studies by other groups using a program that Niculescu compares to the Google page-ranking algorithm. In previous published studies, Niculescu and other groups have used the technique to probe for biomarkers in disorders such as bipolar disorder, psychosis, and alcoholism. In the new study, the team tested whether the approach could be used to identify people experiencing suicidal “ideation”—thoughts ranging from feelings of worthlessness to specific plans or attempts at suicide. The study required finding a rare group of people who switch dramatically from zero to high levels of suicidal ideation, Niculescu says. Because those with bipolar disorder are at a far higher risk of suicide than the general population—one in three patients attempt it—the team recruited 75 men with that diagnosis. Many were war veterans in their mid-20s to late 60s, receiving care at the Indianapolis VA Medical Center, he says.

More here.

Thomas Nagel in the NYT's in The Stone:

The scientific revolution of the 17th century, which has given rise to such extraordinary progress in the understanding of nature, depended on a crucial limiting step at the start: It depended on subtracting from the physical world as an object of study everything mental – consciousness, meaning, intention or purpose. The physical sciences as they have developed since then describe, with the aid of mathematics, the elements of which the material universe is composed, and the laws governing their behavior in space and time.

We ourselves, as physical organisms, are part of that universe, composed of the same basic elements as everything else, and recent advances in molecular biology have greatly increased our understanding of the physical and chemical basis of life. Since our mental lives evidently depend on our existence as physical organisms, especially on the functioning of our central nervous systems, it seems natural to think that the physical sciences can in principle provide the basis for an explanation of the mental aspects of reality as well — that physics can aspire finally to be a theory of everything.

However, I believe this possibility is ruled out by the conditions that have defined the physical sciences from the beginning. The physical sciences can describe organisms like ourselves as parts of the objective spatio-temporal order – our structure and behavior in space and time – but they cannot describe the subjective experiences of such organisms or how the world appears to their different particular points of view.

Teju Cole in The New Yorker:

Religion is close to theatre; much of its power comes from the effects of staging and framing. And in a play about a preacher, theatre easily becomes religion. The performance of Wole Soyinka’s 1964 farce “The Trials of Brother Jero,” which I saw recently in Lagos, was not dissimilar to my experience at a Pentecostal church about two weeks later. “The Trials of Brother Jero” centers on a prophet, one of the many freelance Christian clerics of dubious authority that have proliferated in Nigeria. Charlatans are not charlatans all the way through: if they didn’t believe at least a little in what they were selling, it would be difficult for them to persuade others. “In fact, there are eggs and there are eggs,” Brother Jero proclaims in his first soliloquy of the play. “Same thing with prophets. I was born a prophet.”

This element of make-believe is true of both prophets and actors, and so in a play like “Brother Jero” the point is doubled: both acting and religion have an imprecise relationship with the truth. The performance I saw was at a beautiful independent theatre called Terra Kulture, on Victoria Island, an upscale neighborhood of the city. Brother Jero—“Velvet-hearted Jeroboam, Immaculate Jero, Articulate Hero of Christ’s Crusade”—was played with slinky, mellifluous deviousness by Patrick Diabuah as equal parts Hamlet and Wile E. Coyote. The play was fast, funny, wordy, and physical, and it sent up deception for the two-way street that it was: an eyes-half-open transaction between the deceiver and the deceived. “Go and practice your fraudulences on another person of greater gullibility,” says one of Jero’s marks shortly before he, too, is flattered—drawn in with sweet words and gleefully defrauded.

A Rationally Speaking podcast on the “science” of matching algorithms of online dating:

Looking for love online? You're not alone — one in five new relationships nowadays begin on a dating site. But just how scientific are the “matching algorithms” sites like eHarmony and OKCupid use? What does cognitive psychology tell us about how this new choice context affects our happiness? Massimo and Julia turn an analytical eye on the math and science of online dating, in this episode of Rationally Speaking.

Poorva Rajaram and Michael Griffith over at Tehelka's blog (via Amitava Kumar):

After a first read, the n+1 article decrying Global Literature strikes a hard blow with its sheer myopia. We then let a response simmer – yes, the article is right to attack the global literary elite, feel-good literary festivals and an ossified market for identity-centric watery works from the Third World. But having (some) common enemies hardly counts when a piece makes us exclaim at every second sentence. The n+1 editors have come up with more than a hasty polemic – they have offered us a straw man called Global Lit (encompassing authors as widespread as Junot Diaz, Salman Rushdie, Teju Cole and Kiran Desai), a woefully partial picture of world literature and a staggeringly onerous idea of what a reader should be.

Throughout the article, we are presented with a dizzyingly megalomaniacal idea of world literature: writers from outside America and Britain irrespective of time or place (writers whose post facto association exists in western literature programmes and the minds of their graduates). This definition of World Literature is then parsed into Global Lit = Bad, International Lit = Good. A basic premise of this piece is that the right kind of literary universalism is missing from today’s world – not that any category of world literature is too cumbersome and unenlightening to use.

If “global capitalism” (a term used often by the authors and clarified with potted Eurocentric histories) is responsible for eliding the local, then so is any cultural criticism that sees the whole world and all its writers as a valuable unit of analysis. This makes comparison all too easy and the many quick thumbs-ups or thumbs-downs give the piece a rancid rather than a reflective core. We get the sense that Junot Díaz should not reference comic books and science fiction—why? “Princeton” should not be the first word of Chimamanda Adichie’s novel Americanah—why? Ngugi wa Thiong’o is not supposed to enjoy a “crucial friendship” with Gayatri Spivak—why not? This slippage in tone inevitably leads to ambiguity: what is being described, what is being criticised and what is being resented for its mere existence?

The editors simply do not account for work that hasn’t been translated, that speaks to local contexts (anti-caste literature, for example) or is out of tune with the tectonics of the global market. Instead, we get a disclaimer: “A list drawn up by a few Americans incapable, unlike the offspring imagined by Leopold in Ulysses, of ‘speaking five modern languages fluently’ can only be drastically incomplete and tentative. Still it’s worth naming a few names.”

Is it really? How can the editors of n+1 find out about writers they haven’t found out about? If they can’t, how can a slate of generalisations substitute?

by Akeel Bilgrami

Realism, it is said by philosophers, is the view that truth and reality is objective, i.e., independent of our mentality. But, of course, such a brief statement leaves things very intuitive and underdescribed. How should we understand it in detail?

The form of realism that I find most plausible is best elaborated in terms that are a combination of Kant's idea of ‘transcendental idealism' (without any commitment to the ‘ding an sich') and ‘pragmatism' of a rather specific kind that can be found in Charles Sanders Pierce's path-breaking paper, ‘The Fixation of Belief' and developed within a complex account of belief revision by Isaac Levi.

In being Kantian, it is a realism that renounces what Hilary Putnam has called ‘metaphysical realism' or what perhaps in an earlier time might have been called ‘transcendental realism'. And in being pragmatist, it renounces, a fallibilist, Cartesian epistemology.

Let me speak to its pragmatist side first.

Pragmatism, at its most general, says: Something that makes no difference to practice makes no difference to Philosophy. What is yielded when we apply this dictum more specifically to epistemological matters in Philosophy? It yields the following thought. A pragmatist epistemology claims that something that makes no difference to the cognitive practice of inquiry makes no difference to epistemology. And so it finds that a fallibilist form of doubt that is found in Cartesian skepticism makes no difference to inquiry and therefore is not a credible epistemology.

Thus let us take Cartesian skepticism about the external world. It claims both that all our beliefs about the external world could be false and that of any particular such belief, we could never be certain of its truth. These are two distinct claims since the latter does not entail the former. It is the latter claim that pragmatism opposes. The basis of its opposition is that if we can never know of any given belief about the world that it is true, then truth cannot be a goal of inquiry. It makes no good sense to say that truth is a goal of inquiry even though we are never sure in any given case that we have achieved the goal. That would mean inquiry would be like sending a message in a bottle out to sea. What kind of epistemological enterprise is that? We would never have any control over its success, and all success would appear to be a sort of bonus or fluke.

Read more »

“Shot by an unknown photographer in the northern coastal city of Mersa Matruh, west of Cairo, the photo below was posted to Twitter by Yahya Diwer, a freelance photojournalist from Alexandria.

As violence rages across Egypt, this perfectly captures the tension between daily life and the chaos engulfing the nation.”

From Huffington Post.

Adam Shatz in the London Review of Books:

So this is how it ends: with the army killing more than 600 protesters, and injuring thousands of others, in the name of restoring order and defeating ‘terrorism’. The victims are Muslim Brothers and other supporters of the deposed president Mohammed Morsi, but the ultimate target of the massacres of 14 August is civilian rule. Cairo, the capital of revolutionary hope two years ago, is now its burial ground.

To each setback they have undergone since the overthrow of Mubarak, Egypt’s revolutionary forces have responded with the reassuring mantra: ‘revolution is a process.’ But so is counter-revolution, which seems to have prevailed for the foreseeable future. It won not only because the army and the feloul (remnants of the old regime) had superior resources at their disposal, but because they had a unified sense of their aims, something the leaderless revolutionaries conspicuously lacked. The revolution has been a ‘process’ in the manner of a 1960s happening, a meeting of different, often bickering forces that shared the stage only to go their own way after Mubarak’s overthrow. While accusing one another of betraying the revolution, both liberals and Islamists, at various intervals, tried to cut deals with the army, as if it might be a neutral force, as if the people and the army really were ‘one hand’, as people had once chanted in Tahrir Square. Neither had the ruthlessness, or the taste for blood, of Khomeini, who began to decapitate the Shah’s army as soon as he seized power. While the old regime reassembled its forces, Egypt’s revolutionaries mistook their belief in the revolution for the existence of a revolution. By the time Abdel Fattah al-Sisi seized power on 3 July, the revolution existed mainly in their imagination.

More here.

Gary Marcus in The New Yorker:

Hector Levesque thinks his computer is stupid—and that yours is, too. Siri and Google’s voice searches may be able to understand canned sentences like “What movies are showing near me at seven o’clock?,” but what about questions—“Can an alligator run the hundred-metre hurdles?”—that nobody has heard before? Any ordinary adult can figure that one out. (No. Alligators can’t hurdle.) But if you type the question into Google, you get information about Florida Gators track and field. Other search engines, like Wolfram Alpha, can’t answer the question, either. Watson, the computer system that won “Jeopardy!,” likely wouldn’t do much better.

In a terrific paper just presented at the premier international conference on artificial intelligence, Levesque, a University of Toronto computer scientist who studies these questions, has taken just about everyone in the field of A.I. to task. He argues that his colleagues have forgotten about the “intelligence” part of artificial intelligence.

Levesque starts with a critique of Alan Turing’s famous “Turing test,” in which a human, through a question-and-answer session, tries to distinguish machines from people. You’d think that if a machine could pass the test, we could safely conclude that the machine was intelligent. But Levesque argues that the Turing test is almost meaningless, because it is far too easy to game.

More here.

Michael Marcusa in The Atlantic:

They were sitting where they always sit: at the far edge of the makeshift, roadside cafe on the outskirts of of Sidi Bouzid — the small, economically marginalized town in central Tunisia where in December 2010, a young street vendor lit himself on fire and changed the world. There were about 20 of them. Some wore long flowing robes and black skullcaps; some wore jeans, t-shirts, and Yankees hats; nearly all of them had thick beards. My friend had called in advance – they must have known I would be coming. As I took my seat in the circle, they all beamed at me. “Welcome, welcome! We are honored!” said one tall youth with glasses and a jovial smile. Another swiftly handed me the cup of ice cream he had ordered for himself, declaring that it was a gift.

“From now on, when you sit with us, you will be brother Michael!” added another. We were all in our 20s no longer boys, but still learning how to be men. They accepted me unconditionally. For the next two weeks, they welcomed me into their world. Nevertheless, we are different. I am an American. Their hero is Osama Bin Laden.

“The brothers,” as they like to call themselves, are zealous followers of the jihadist Salafist movement – an ultra-fundamentalist religio-political current that combines scriptural purism with a rhetorical embrace of Al-Qaeda's vision.

More here.

Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker:

This week, Eric Holder, the Attorney General, announced, essentially by executive decree, that the Obama Administration would no longer enforce the standing rules on mandatory-minimum sentencing for drug offenders—at least, not for otherwise unoffending individuals. This sounded big on its approach, then left a smaller wake on its departure. There seems to be pretty general pleasure at a decision that does something, however small, about the mad scandal of American incarceration, the almost unbelievable extent and scale of which I wrote about last year. No one with a working heart can fail to miss the injustice in, for example, the case of the college-bound kid who was carted off to prison for ten years, against all the wisdom of the presiding judge, crying for his mother, for simply having been found in a car with drugs inside. And such stories were commonplace. They had to be. As I wrote last year, there are more African-American men now incarcerated in America than were held in slavery in 1861, and more Americans under “judicial control” of one kind or another than Stalin held in his Gulag.

But even if this is the first decisive small stone pitched against a national shame, its specific effect on the imprisoned will still be minimal. Most prosecutions are not federal, no one now in prison will be released, and the careful hedge of politic exceptions—no mercy for drug gangs, dealers, etc.—is bound to create many complications. As so often, though, the critics, I suspect, both underestimate the difficulty of big change and the geometric, multiplier effect of small ones.

More here.

Amana Fontanella-Khan in Slate: