From Kurzweil AI:

Computerized fabrics that change their color and shape in response to movement are being developed by Joanna Berzowska, professor and chair of the Department of Design and Computation Arts at Concordia University. The interactive electronic fabrics harness power directly from the human body, store that energy, and then use it to change the garments’ visual properties. “Our goal is to create garments that can transform in complex and surprising ways. That’s why the project is called Karma Chameleon,” says Berzowska. The fibers consist of multiple layers of polymers, which, when stretched and drawn out to a small diameter, begin to interact with each other.

Matt Karp in Jacobin:

“The tradition of all the dead generations,” Marx wrote a 150 years ago, “weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.” Today, with our politics trapped in capitalism’s endless fugue state, the nightmare that troubled Marx may seem to contemporary left-wingers like a pleasant dream of days gone by.

At least the dead generations took Marx seriously. At least they had a powerful labor movement and center-left parties that believed in the welfare state. And at least Ralph Miliband, the dead leftist whose son is the living leader of Britain’s Labour Party, would never have answered a question about capitalism with a grudging obeisance to the creative power of BlackBerry.

It’s easy to get nostalgic.

A longer glance back into the past should cure us of this sentimentalism. The British historian Eric Hobsbawm and the American critic Irving Howe, both eminent socialist members of Ralph Miliband’s dead generation, can help. Hobsbawm, born in the red year of 1917, remained a defiant communist all his life. Howe, arriving three years later, devoted his own career to defending the socialist idea against Stalin’s Soviet Union. But taken together, their memoirs — Howe’s A Margin of Hope, published in 1982, and Hobsbawm’sInteresting Times, in 2002 — form as poignant a record as exists of the courageous hopes and constant sorrows of the twentieth century Anglo-American left.

These memoirs remain valuable today — both as vivid portraits of a previous century’s problems, and as bracing reminders to the contemporary left that those problems are not our own. “The central experience of the twentieth century,” as Howe once quoted Theodore Draper, “was communism,” and this was as true for the left-wingers who resisted it as it was for those who succumbed to its chilly embrace.

The central experience of the twenty-first century, of course, cannot yet be reckoned. But whatever it is, we can be grateful that all our dreams and arguments about a just, egalitarian future will not be defined — or distracted, or divided, or destroyed — by the fate of a particular Russian dictatorship.

Over at Philosophy Bites:

Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan, published in 1651, is one of the great works of political philosophy. Noel Malcolm has recently published a 3 volume scholarly edition of the book (reviewed here in The Economist) based on decades of research. In this episode of thePhilosophy Bites podcast he discusses Leviathan's historical context with Nigel Warburton.

Listen to Noel Malcolm on Hobbes' Leviathan in Context

Philosophy Bites is made in association with the Institute of Philosophy.

Rafia Zakaria in Guernica [h/t: Vijay Prashad]:

Attacks in America are far more indelible in the world’s memory than attacks in any other country. There may be fewer victims and less blood, but American tragedies somehow seem to occur in a more poignant version of reality, in a way that evokes a more sympathetic response. Within minutes American victims are lifted from the nameless to the remembered; their individual tragedies and the ugly unfairness of their ends are presented in a way that cannot but cause the watching world to cry, to consider them intimates, and to stand in their bloody shoes. Death is always unexpected in America and death by a terrorist attack more so than in any other place.

It is this greater poignancy of attacks in America that begs the question of whether the world’s allocations of sympathy are determined not by the magnitude of a tragedy—the numbers dead and injured—but by the contrast between a society’s normal and the cruel aftermath of a terrorist event. It is in America that the difference between the two is the greatest; the American normal is one of a near-perfect security that is unimaginable in many places, especially in countries at war. The very popularity of the Boston Marathon could be considered an expression of just this. America is so secure and free from suffering that people have the luxury of indulging in deliberate suffering in the form of excruciating physical exertion; this suffering in turn produces well-earned exhilaration, a singular sense of physical achievement and mental fortitude. The act of running a marathon is supposed to be simple, individual—a victory of the will over the body, celebrated by all and untouched by the complicated questions of who in the world can choose to suffer and who only bears suffering.

When terror hits the site of such faith in human fortitude, the impact is large.

When Rousseau fled to the Île Saint-Pierre in the autumn of 1765, he was already on the verge of utter physical and mental exhaustion. Between 1751 and 1761, in his fifth decade and in ever more precarious health, he had, first in Paris and then in the Ermitage at Montmorency, committed to paper thousands upon thousands of pages. The Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts, which earned him the prize of the Académie de Dijon, the treatise On the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men, the opera Le Devin du village, the letters on French music and on Providence, to Voltaire and to D’Alembert, the fairytale La Reine fantasque, the novel La Nouvelle Héloïse; Émile, and The Social Contract – all this and more was written during this period alongside the extremely copious correspondence which Rousseau always maintained. When one considers the extent and diversity of this creative output, one can only assume that Rousseau must have spent the entire time hunched over his desk in an attempt to capture, in endless sequences of lines and letters, the thoughts and feelings incessantly welling up within him. Scarcely had he reached the apogee of literary fame for his passionate epistolatory novel proclaiming the natural rights of lovers, than the state of nervous exhaustion resulting from this manic productivity was further exacerbated when Émile and The Social Contract were banned and confiscated by the parlement in Paris, thus making of the celebrated author an outcast, ostracised and banished from France on pain of arrest. Nor does Rousseau fare any better in his native city of Geneva. Here too he is condemned as a godless and seditious person, and his writings consigned to the flames.

more from WG Sebald at The Guardian here.

In “The Undivided Past,” David Cannadine challenges those who believe that all history is the history of conflict, whether over class, as Marx and Engels proclaimed, or over religion, nationality, race, gender or civilization. The fact is, mankind’s divisions may not be the most important part of the story. As Cannadine succinctly puts it, “humanity is still here.” This is so hopeful a book, and so authoritative in its coverage of history, that a reader wants to believe its thesis. I do, but only in part. Of all the texts that map the world into hopelessly hostile camps, “The Communist Manifesto” no doubt sold the most copies. Its authors argued that two features of class conflict would make it especially significant: class would trump all other forms of division, and the ­differences between classes would prove so profound that their strife could be resolved only through revolution.

more from Alan Wolfe at the NY Times here.

A sympathetic reader of these books will end up with the slightly exasperated feeling that Occupy wasted its chance as a political movement. It had friends with great influence on policy making – economists Joseph Stiglitz and Andrew Haldane, to mention just two. Occupy could have put its “people power” behind a few clear, concrete, policy proposals such as student or mortgage debt restructuring, higher bank capital ratios or specific tax reforms – more progressive direct tax rates, for example, or the elimination of such outrageous loopholes as the tax discount on carried interest. The success of Tobin tax campaigners in Europe shows that politicians are responsive to anti-finance sentiment. Granted, campaigns such as Strike Debt have grown out of OWS but they no longer have the numbers in the street to make themselves heard. A greater willingness to engage could have secured the movement a more permanent voice – a voice that would carry weight when decisions are made, rather than a voice merely talking to itself. Those of us who think that the system is ours to reform will see this as a missed opportunity to fix the problems that brought people to Zuccotti Park in the first place.

more from Martin Sandbu at the FT here.

From Nature:

King Charles II of Spain was physically and mentally disabled, infertile — and extremely inbred. When he died in 1700, aged 38, so did the male line of the Spanish Habsburg royal family, as famous for their pointed jaws as for their extreme consanguinity. A provocative analysis now suggests that the Habsburg royal family might have evolved under natural selection over three centuries to blunt the worst effects of inbreeding. Evolutionary theory predicts such a 'purging' process, and researchers have documented the effect in animals and plants. But evidence among humans is scant — in part because of the dearth of data on inbred families spanning many generations.

Royal families such as the Habsburgs are an ideal place to look, says Francisco Ceballos, a geneticist at the University of Santiago de Compostela in Spain, who led the research. He and colleague Gonzalo Álvarez used written records to track the marriages, births and deaths of 4,000 individuals across more than 20 generations. “The royal dynasties of Europe are a lab of inbreeding for human populations,” says Ceballos. The team's study is published this month in Heredity¹. The Habsburg pedigree resembles the organizational flowchart of a dysfunctional government agency. Inbred marriages, such as those between first cousins or between uncles and nieces, were the rule rather than exception. Such pairings, which include the marriage between Philip II of Spain — Charles II's great-grandfather — and his niece Anna of Austria, were used to keep titles in the family and to forge political alliances.

More here.

Fred Kaplan in The New York Times:

It seems far-fetched that “The Reluctant Fundamentalist,” Mohsin Hamid’s 2007 best-selling novel, would be turned into a movie. First, there’s its narrative structure. A young man greets an American tourist in a cafe in the Pakistani city of Lahore and proceeds to tell his life story. That’s the entire book; we never hear from the American or anyone else. But also, the young man, Changez Khan, is a bearded Pakistani radical, not a sympathetic type on American screens. Finally, as the tale unfolds, clues mount that he might be a terrorist and the American might be a spy who has come to kill him, although this remains ambiguous — a literary trait hard to capture on film. And yet the movie is opening on Friday, directed by Mira Nair, who may also seem an odd choice — “an Indian director making a Pakistani film in America,” as she puts it.

From another angle, though, Ms. Nair is a natural fit. Her father was raised in Lahore before the partitioning that carved out Pakistan as a separate nation. Later, as a lawyer in New Delhi, he helped found the India-Pakistan Friendship Society. Ms. Nair first visited Lahore only in 2004, when she was 47, as a result of a speaking invitation. (Her films are popular in Pakistan as well as in her native India.) “The trip had a big impact on me,” she recalled in an interview in her apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. “There was this incredible feeling of familiarity — the hospitality, the music, the artistic expression: modern paintings are everywhere. We never see this aspect of contemporary Pakistan on our screens.” She resolved to change that. Two years later she read Mr. Hamid’s novel in galleys, saw it as an ideal vehicle and arranged to meet the author in London, where he was living. A fan of her films, he sold her the rights and helped with some early drafts of the screenplay.

More here. (Note: Saw the film, loved it, recommend it strongly)

Two Souls
.
My cat cries when I enter the garden, as
if I have aroused her from winter’s dream
or as if she wants to sing to me, her name.

What do cats dream of, Lord Krishna?
A coconut shell of milk or a glittering fish?
Now her slender limbs complete their asanas.

Now her neck arches, her jaw, an elastic.
The sharp eye constricts, discerns wind
in the quivering grass from a grasshopper’s

camouflage. But there’s no mistaking Maya.
My cat rehearses the accurate lunge of her paw.
She cries as one compelled, hungry, yet not.

Perhaps my being here deserves an answer.
For weeks I too have watched her, how
she hunts. I’ve heard the moan of her catch

at dusk, which is your hour, Lord Krishna.
Then, no bird sings and only a cat with two souls
dreams of death, her stigma left on a lizard

or on a butterfly, whatever moves towards
the shadow of meaning. As I am born of fire
I burn, my Lord, but I sleep in your arms.

I am one Upanishad moon on fragrant nights.
By day I am the consort of oceans, rice fields,
pale and invisible to you as the sky’s temple.
.

Alex Pareene in Salon:

Yesterday, a Reddit user posted a new, startlingly clear image of the aftermath of the explosion, that shows, on the far left, what looks very much like one of the FBI’s suspects fleeing the scene. After Philip Bump, an Atlantic Wire writer and Photoshop expert,explained why he believed the image was genuine the New York Times confirmed the photo’s authenticity.

So: The Internet actually found a new, much clearer photo of one of the FBI’s suspects. Amazing! It could’ve taken ages, before the Internet, for this evidence to surface and be sent to law enforcement. Immediately after the Internet did this admirable thing, of course, it took it to a dark and irresponsible place.

Remember how thousands of Reddit users and 4chan people spent the days after the bombing combing through every available photo and frame of video of the site of the bombings, searching for the perpetrators, and they found a bunch of guys with backpacks— so many guys they made a spreadsheet! — and (inadvertently) allowed the New York Post to identify, on the front page, two innocent people as the bombers? And remember how when the FBI released images of the actual suspects, neither of them had been spotted by Reddit or 4Chan or any other online sleuth? Well, armed with this new, clearer photo, and giddy from having uncovered it, the message board investigative geniuses then determined that “suspect two” was a missing college student.

Ben Ehrenreich in the LA Review of Books:

PITY THE BOOK. IT'S DEAD AGAIN. Last I checked, Googling “death of the book” produced 11.8 million matches. The day before it was 11.6 milion. It's getting unseemly. Books were once such handsome things. Suddenly they seem clunky, heavy, almost fleshy in their gross materiality. Their pages grow brittle. Their ink fades. Their spines collapse. They are so pitiful, they might as well be human.

The emphasis shifts with each telling, but every writer, editor, publisher, bookseller, and half-attentive reader knows the fundamental story. After centuries of steady climbing, book sales leveled off towards the end of the 1900s. Basic literacy began to plummet. As if television and Reaganomics were not danger enough, some egghead lunatics went and built a web — a web! — out of nothing but electrons. It proved a sneaky and seductive monster. Straight to our offices and living rooms, the web delivered chicken recipes, weather forecasts, pornography, the cutest kitten videos the world had ever seen. But while we were distracted by these glittering gifts, the internet conspired to snare our friend the book, to smother it.

The alarm at first built gradually. In 1999, Robert Darnton, writing in The New York Review of Books, consoled his readers that, all the grim prophecies notwithstanding, “the electronic age did not drive the printed word into extinction.” The book seemed safe enough for a few years, in more danger from the avarice of the carbon-based conglomerates that ate up all the publishers, than from anything in silicon. Safe until the fall of 2007, when lady Amazon released her hounds. Within a month of the Kindle's debut, the New Yorker was writing of the “Twilight of the Books.” (Cue soundtrack: all minor keys, moody cello.) The London Times worried that “the slow death of the book may be with us.”

Last summer Amazon announced that it was selling more e-books than the paper kind. The time to fret had passed. It was Kindle vs. kindling. MIT Media Lab co-founder Nicholas Negroponte — whose name is frequently preceded by the word “futurist” — declared that the demise of the paper book should be written in the present tense. “It's happening,” Negroponte said, and gave the pulpy artifacts just five years to utterly expire.

Morgan Meis in The Smart Set (image from Wikimedia Commons):

By the time the Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe died late last month he'd taken on an official title: “Father of Modern African Literature.” Achebe received this title mostly because of his novel, Things Fall Apart, published in 1958. Things Fall Apart is often called the archetype of the African novel. It's a story of the Igbo peoples of southeastern Nigeria and British colonials who arrived to the area in the late 19th century. The Igbo people were trying to preserve their way of life. The British were trying to replace the Igbo way of life with their own. And that's how things fall apart.

Being dubbed the Father of Modern African Literature has its consequences. One consequence is that people start listening to what you have to say. So, when Chinua Achebe gave a lecture in which he said that Joseph Conrad was a “bloody racist,” the world took note. Well, the literary world did, anyway. Achebe's lecture was entitled “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness.” He delivered the lecture at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 1975.

Achebe's charge against Conrad is a serious one. He considered Conrad's short novel to be an instance of the Western desire to set up Africa as “a place of negations at once remote and vaguely familiar, in comparison with which Europe's own state of spiritual grace will be manifest.” Achebe thought that Conrad had two basic metaphors for Africa, which Conrad returns to over and over again. The first is silence. The second is frenzy. Achebe takes two quotes from Heart of Darkness to illustrate the point. The “stillness of an implacable force brooding over an inscrutable intention.” And, “The steamer toiled along slowly on the edge of a black and incomprehensible frenzy.”

After Achebe delivered his lecture, the literary world delivered its hysteria. Articles were published. Books were written. Conferences were organized. Conrad was defended. Conrad was further denounced. Conrad was declared essential. Conrad was declared unreadable. In the end, both sides largely agreed upon two conclusions. Conrad was discovered to have been more or less a racist in his personal views. Heart of Darknesswas discovered to be a tremendous piece of writing. Those two facts may sit uncomfortably together. But no one has yet figured out how to resolve them.

In all the hoopla over Conrad's racism, a strange irony went unnoticed. Conrad wrote a racist book that denounces the values of the civilization that produced racism. Achebe, on the other hand, attacked a racist writer using the values of the civilization that had created racism and which Conrad had denounced.

“It is inevitable,” Stephanie Bernhard wrote in The New Inquiry in January, “that our fictional landscapes will evolve in tandem with our physical landscapes.” A changing climate, she argued, will change the way we write: the ravages of a warming world “will soon be ubiquitous enough that novelists will make them a central concern.” Climate change literature will become the war literature of our generation—its central concern so “painfully known to readers that it will hardly need to be named.” Inevitable perhaps … but how “soon” really? Last fall, I posed the question “Where is all the climate change fiction?” in an article in the Guardian. And yet, since then only Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior has offered itself up as a mainstream, non-genre response. Perhaps, this lack of climate change fiction reflects what’s going on in the world: we know how serious a problem we face, but do we engage with it directly? Perhaps tomorrow, we say to ourselves. Aren’t other people looking into it? We are not too concerned about our relationship with climate change, and neither, it seems, are the characters in most published novels.

more from Daniel Kramb at The Point Magazine here.

Fifty years ago this month, Martin Luther King Jr. drafted a letter from a cramped cell in Birmingham, Alabama. King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” Jonathan Rieder says in his new book Gospel of Freedom, reveals a more complex King, tough and tender, in equal measure. Rieder’s narrative reflects a major shift in the way many historians now understand the African American freedom struggle. The new scholarship challenges the division of black activism into integrationism and separatism, blurring the previously sharp lines between non-violence and violence, civil rights and black power. Rieder aims to replace the “sunny view of King” as a quixotic champion of the American dream and interracial brotherhood with a fiercer and more uncompromising King, a man who consistently preached a doctrine of black self-sufficiency. Martin, in other words, wasn’t that far from Malcolm. While Rieder succeeds in showing us a more multifaceted King, he neglects the long history of African American rhetorical dissent that shaped King’s message.

more from Jeffrey Aaron Snyder at TNR here.

We often speak poetically of the ‘flow’ of ‘the river of time’. This is clearly wrong, because rivers, unlike the water in them, do not flow – otherwise maps would be continually out of date, with all rivers disappearing into the ocean. But couldn’t time move like the water in the river? Let’s leave aside the question – not as daft as may seem – of whether ‘water’ here means all the water in the river or the water at a specific place, and focus on the more obvious problems. If time flows, what does it flow in? Stuff such as water flows in space, relative to other stuff in space (such as banks) that flow not at all, or more slowly. This is clearly not something that time could manage: time could not flow in or relative to time in the way that spatially-extended, located matter such as water flows between other bits of spatially-extended matter. Besides, how quickly would it flow? The obvious answer, one second per second, demonstrates the vacuity of the very notion of ‘time on the move’. Velocity or rate cannot have the same dimension on both the numerator and the denominator. Nevertheless, the idea of temporal flow is irresistible. It gets a bit of a boost from the way the calendar makes us think of time in lumps. On Friday at noon, my doctor’s appointment next Wednesday noon is five days away. On Saturday at noon, Wednesday noon will be four only days away. Wednesday, it seems, is coming nearer, bearing the dreaded appointment in its belly.

more from Raymond Tallis at Philosophy Now here.

From New Statesman:

Beatrice and Sidney Webb founded the New Statesman in a spirit of optimism. They were outraged by the plight of the poor and the way the unfettered market had created monstrous inequality at a time of great technological advance. (Does this sound familiar?) They wanted their new weekly review of politics and the arts to be a reforming journal as well as a vehicle for their ideas. They believed in the rational, scientific method and in the “world movement towards collectivism”. Theirs was a socialism of experts: technocratic, centralising, bureaucratic. Through their research – they co-founded the London School of Economics and William Beveridge worked for them as a young researcher – they helped to lay the foundations of the welfare state. Yet their socialism of experts was flawed and often wrongheaded and its worst excesses have been deeply sedimented in the Labour tradition of “the man in Whitehall knows best”: command and control, tax and transfer. The Webbs were fellow-travellers of the Soviet Union and they were imperialists. Statists rather than liberals, they were insufficiently interested in personal freedom. Very quickly, the journal they created broke free of their influence. In 1922, Sidney Webb resigned as NS chairman, unhappy that the “paper” was too free in its criticisms of the Labour Party. “A melancholy ending to our one journalistic adventure,” Beatrice Webb wrote in her diary.

Fifteen months after the first issue of the NS appeared, Europe was plunged into the imperial slaughter of the First World War. The twin evils of Stalinism and fascism and then the long cold war would follow. However, for the British, at least, the 20th century was broadly one of progress. In common with many countries, Britain incrementally became both a more liberal and a more equal society. Universal suffrage was introduced. The National Health Service was created and a universal welfare state was established. The UK surrendered its colonial possessions and Europe was transformed from a continent of war into one of peace. Capital punishment was abolished and homosexuality was decriminalised. Laws were passed against discrimination on the basis of race, sex or disability. Through decades of struggle, the left bent the arc of history towards justice.

More here.

From Nature:

Because all the workers in an ant colony look the same, tracking their movements and interactions by eye is fiendishly difficult. Instead, Danielle Mersch and her colleagues tagged every single worker in entire colonies and used a computer to track them, accumulating what they say is the largest-ever data set on ant interactions. The biologists, based at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland, have found that the workers fall into three social groups that perform different roles: nursing the queen and young; cleaning the colony; and foraging for food. The different groups move around different parts of the nest, and the insects tend to graduate from one group to another as they age, the researchers write in a paper published today in Science¹.

The team reared six colonies of carpenter ants (Camponotus fellah) in the lab and tagged each worker with paper containing a unique barcode-like symbol. The colonies — each comprising more than 100 ants — lived in flat enclosures filmed by overhead cameras. A computer automatically recognized the tags and recorded each individual’s position twice per second (see video below). Over 41 days, the researchers collected more than 2.4 billion readings and documented 9.4 million interactions between the workers. The researchers found that around 40% of the workers were nurses, which almost always stayed with the queen and her brood. Another 30% were foragers, which gathered most of the colony’s food and were found near the entrance to the nest. The rest were cleaners, and these were more likely to visit the colony’s rubbish heaps. The workers move between jobs as they get older — nurses are generally younger than cleaners, which are younger than foragers. Honeybees go through similar transitions from young nurses to older foragers, but this study provides the clearest evidence yet that ants do the same.

More here.

Dwight Garner in the NYT:

On a recent Saturday morning in February, two dozen or so scent hounds streamed through the streets of St. Buryan, a small village in Cornwall, England. Behind them drifted a loose formation of men and women perched atop well-groomed horses and wearing boots, breeches and hunting coats. As the fox hunt clopped through town, John le Carré, the pre-eminent spy writer of the 20th century, sipped from a paper cup of warm whiskey punch, doled out by a local pub to riders and spectators.

At 81, he remains an enviable specimen of humanity: tall, patrician, cleanlimbed, ruddy-complected. His white hair is floppy and well cut, so much so that the actor Ralph Fiennes, who starred in the 2005 film version of le Carré’s novel “The Constant Gardener,” badgered him for the name of his barber.

Le Carré is not a hunter himself, but he nodded at the people he knew and mounted a casual and running defense of fox hunting, as if he were doing color commentary from the 18th hole at the Masters. It’s an ancient part of the rural culture, he said. It’s egalitarian in this area (some 300 miles west-southwest of London), not an upper-class diversion. It’s also largely futile: an actual fox is rarely cornered. When one is, a trained eagle owl is brought in to kill it.

As the final horse strode past, le Carré swallowed the dregs of his punch and crumpled his cup. His eyebrows, so thatchy and animated that they seem ready to leap off his forehead and start nibbling the shrubbery, rose as he turned toward me, his blue eyes alight, and happily declared, “At least they aren’t hunting that poor goddamn thing with drones.”

Also see Emma Hogan in More Intelligent Life:

KEY DECISION

To use the jargon of spycraft. Smiley’s people are lamplighters, scalphunters and talent-spotters. Secretaries are “mothers”; spies on your side are “part of the family”. To be blackmailed is to be “burned”, a style of spying is “handwriting” and a failed mission is “being sent home in your socks”. Like boarding school, the secret service runs on nicknames and catchphrases. Le Carré’s skill stops this being irritating, and lets us join the club.