Harry Cliff at Literary Hub:

The first thing to understand is that all measurements come with “uncertainties” or “errors,” two words often used interchangeably. The uncertainly on a measurement is an expression of the precision with which we think we have measured a particular quantity. Uncertainties come in two key types. There are statistical uncertainties and systematic uncertainties.

Let’s start with statistical uncertainty. To draw on the classic example, imagine I gave you a coin and asked you to determine if that coin is fair, or to put it more formally, if the probability of that coin coming up heads or tails is equal. To test this, you toss the coin twice and get one head and one tail. On the face of it, this might suggest that the coin is fair.

But you probably have the feeling that we can’t really be sure from only two tosses. Indeed, like all measurements, this one comes with an uncertainty, and with only two coin tosses this uncertainly is large. I’ll spare you the math and tell you that it’s around 26 percent.

More here.

Will Glovinsky at Public Books:

It was 1968, and the “battle to feed all of humanity” had already been lost. In the coming 1970s, soaring populations and finite global resources would lead hundreds of millions of people to starve to death. Or so prophesized Paul and Anne Ehrlich in their book The Population Bomb. Paul Ehrlich, a Stanford entomologist, gained unlikely fame as an outrider of the apocalypse. He went on Johnny Carson and declared that “the end” was near.

But, notoriously, the Ehrlichs were wrong. They had predicted that vast swathes of humanity would die, yet by 1990, the human population had added some 1.5 billion people. Moreover, famines became much rarer, malnutrition decreased, and living standards rose across the industrializing world. To top it off, the Ehrlichs’ prognostications of scarcity came with generous servings of first-world environmentalist racism (he suggested food aid to India was pointless). They even inspired, from Mexico to Bangladesh, horrific campaigns of coerced sterilizations. As such, Ehrlich has become a byword for one of environmentalism’s most shortsighted—and morally bankrupt—impulses.

Yet one might also say, in hindsight, that the Ehrlichs were only wrong about which species would starve. In the second half of the 20th century, global human famine was averted by the Green Revolution’s formula of high-yield, semi-dwarf cereal varieties, synthetic fertilizers, chemical pesticides, monocrop agriculture, and intensified irrigation. These advances helped save perhaps two billion lives, yet the planet is strewn with the costs of this miracle. What The Population Bomb failed to predict was that we would largely survive by starving and poisoning countless species and ecosystems to the point of collapse.

More here.

Evan Gurney in The Hedgehog Review:

“You need to work on your face.”

I am neither an actor nor a clown and certainly not a model—I teach literature at a university. Far from friendly advice from a colleague, these were serious instructions from an administrative superior. I was meeting with an academic official after the first few weeks of the semester, having contrived to be the school’s first faculty member whose teaching triggered a new “bias response” system that allowed individual students to register anonymous complaints. It was an anxious experience: After being notified of the accusation, I was compelled to wait a week before meeting with the administrator, who withheld any contextual details of the allegations and chose not to consult any details of my prior teaching record. During sleepless nights I racked my brain for a memory of some potential offense. What was it I had said about Plato? Had I criticized a senator, or worse, a celebrity singer?

So when it turned out that my offense amounted to “exclusionary non-verbal facial cues” (it was never clear if these were the student’s words or the administrator’s), I was relieved, a little frustrated, but mainly confused: I hadn’t slept for a week because a student felt like I looked at them the wrong way?

More here.

Sue Prideaux in The Guardian:

Friedrich Nietzsche, Karl Marx and Charles Darwin are the great triumvirate of 19th-century thinkers whose ideas still have huge impact today. Nietzsche was philosophy’s supreme iconoclast; his sayings include “God is dead” and “There are no facts, only interpretations”. Highly relevant, yet his association with concepts such as the Übermensch, master morality, slave morality and, possibly most dangerous, the will to power, have also contributed to him being widely misinterpreted. There are three myths in particular that need dynamiting: that his politics were on the far right, he was a misogynist and he lacked a sense of humour.

Misappropriation has been rife. Richard Spencer, a leader of America’s “alt-right”, claims to have been “red-pilled by Nietzsche”, while Jordan Peterson quotes extensively from him. But let’s start with the Nazis. Growing up in Bismarck’s reich, there were three things Nietzsche hated: the big state, nationalism and antisemitism. “Deutschland, Deutschland über alles, that is the end of German philosophy,” he wrote, and “I will have all antisemites shot.” His sister Elisabeth held contrasting views. She married a notorious antisemite agitator (Nietzsche refused to go to the wedding), and the couple went off to Paraguay to found a New Germany of “pure-blooded” Aryan colonists. By the time the colony failed in 1889, Nietzsche had lost his reason. Elisabeth returned to Germany, where she took charge of her brother, gathered up all his papers and founded the Nietzsche Archive.

More here.

The Blessings of Eve

The toe
of the dancer’s
bright body
sustains
the weight
of her descent.
What use
would be rising
if we did not
fall? So Eve
in the garden,
tired of
the spirit
voices of
Adam
and God
discussing
hermeneutics,
gravely
watches
the apple
drop,
then fills
her mouth
with
the “prodigious
materiality
of the things
of the earth.”

by Nils Peterson
and here.

So Eve gave us spring. She gave us the blessing of recurrence instead of the,
should I say curse?, of eternity. —Nils Peterson

Suzanne Schneider in Aeon:

I am sitting in my daughter’s hospital room – she is prepping for a common procedure – when the surgeon pulls up a chair. I expect he will review the literal order of operations and offer the comforting words parents and children require even in the face of routine procedures. Instead, he asks us which of two surgical techniques we think would be best. I look at him incredulously and then manage to say: ‘I don’t know. I’m not that kind of doctor.’ After a brief discussion, my husband and I tell him what, to us, seems obvious: the doctor should choose the procedure that, in his professional opinion, carries the greatest chance of success and the least risk. He should act as if our daughter is his.

In truth, this encounter should not have surprised me. I have for several years been working on a book about risk as a form of social and political logic: a lens for apprehending the world and a set of tools for taming uncertainty within it. It is impossible to tell the contemporary story of risk without considering what scholars call responsibilisation or individuation – essentially, the practice of thrusting increasing amounts of responsibility onto individuals who become, as the scholar Tina Besley wrote, ‘morally responsible for navigating the social realm using rational choice and cost-benefit calculations’. In the United States, business groups and politicians often call offloading more responsibilities onto citizens ‘empowering’ them. It’s maybe telling that this jargon prevails in the private healthcare sector, just as moves to privatise social security in the US are cast as empowering employees to invest their retirement savings however they see fit.

In Individualism and Economic Order (1948), F A Hayek wrote: ‘if the individual is to be free to choose, it is inevitable that he should bear the risk attaching to that choice,’ further noting that ‘the preservation of individual freedom is incompatible with a full satisfaction of our views of distributive justice.’

More here.

Hans Kundnani in The Ideas Letter:

The idea of a “Blob” goes back to Ben Rhodes, President Barack Obama’s foreign-policy adviser–or “amanuensis,” as Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic magazine called him. The term first comes up in a profile of Rhodes in The New York Times Magazine in May 2016, in which he was said to use the term to refer to the American foreign-policy establishment. In The World As It Is, Rhodes’s memoir of his time working for Obama, he explained that what he had in mind was the “groupthink that always seemed to lead inexorably to more military intervention in the Middle East, to ‘bomb something’.”

Although Rhodes set himself up in opposition to the Blob, he was actually more a part of it than he seemed to realize. Not only did he make the case for air strikes in Syria in 2013 – which, as Rhodes himself recalls in The World As It Is, led Obama’s chief of staff Denis McDonough to refer to him and Vice-President Joe Biden’s national security advisor Jake Sullivan as “Cheney and Rumsfeld” – but he also shared the broader Washington consensus around the idea of liberal hegemony. Nevertheless, his term stuck and has now come to be used more generally to refer to a foreign-policy establishment that shares a set of assumptions and reflexes.

If we take the term “Blob” to refer to the problem of foreign-policy groupthink in this way, we can also apply it to other national capitals, where foreign policy is made inside a similarly closed world of officials, think tankers and journalists who also share a set of assumptions and reflexes – though they are often somewhat different assumptions and reflexes than the ones that define the Blob in Washington. Some Blobs are blobbier than others – and it seems to me that the Berlin Blob may be the blobbiest of them all.

More here.

Rajan Menon in Boston Review:

n Friday, March 22, gunmen toting assault rifles stormed Crocus City Hall, west of Moscow in the Krasnogorsk district, shot the guards and, as graphic videos show, opened fire on the concert audience without restraint. More than 6,000 tickets had been sold for the performance by the famed Russian rock band Piknik. At least 137 people were killed and many more wounded, some critically; the final death tally could be higher. That even more people were not shot may owe to the perpetrators’ plan to decamp before Russian security forces arrived on the scene. In a move that seemed calculated to maximize the terror, generate publicity, and broadcast the Russian government’s ineptitude, the assailants set parts of the building ablaze. According to some reports, 90 minutes elapsed before Russian special forces arrived. Putin waited until Saturday afternoon before addressing the Russian people in a televised address. By then, an offshoot of the Islamic State, Islamic State–Khorasan (IS-K), had already claimed responsibility.

The attack reverberated through Russian society, but also rattled the government, which was caught unaware and unprepared. For Putin, the attack came at a particularly bad time. He had been basking in his recent electoral victory—no surprise, since any candidate with even a slight chance to garner votes of a meaningful magnitude had been declared ineligible to run—and talking up the Russian army’s capture of the Ukrainian town of Avdiivka and its grinding westward advance. Putin has always presented himself as a leader to whom Russians can confidently entrust their safety.

More here.

David Shariatmadari and Percival Everett at The Guardian:

Everett has spoken in the past with frustration about Erasure looming so large in his body of work. Does he still feel that way? “The only thing that ever pissed me off is that everyone agreed with it. No one took issue, or said: ‘It’s not like that.’” Why was that annoying? “I like the blowback. It’s interesting. There’s nothing worse than preaching to the choir, right?” Erasure came out in 2001, but people have taken American Fiction as a satire of modern publishing. Are the double standards he satirised still as pervasive? “There is a much greater range of work [now], and that was what I was addressing. So in some ways, there’s been a lot of change. The problem I had wasn’t with particular works, just with the fact that those were the only ones available.”

On the other hand, the thinking that led to that narrow range still very much exists. “For example, I have a friend, a director, who had some success with a film. And the next call he got was someone wanting him to direct a biopic of George Floyd. Why? Because he’s black.”

more here.

Jennifer Szalai at the NYT:

Despite its notoriously opaque prose, Butler’s best-known book, “Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity” (1990), has been both credited and blamed for popularizing a multitude of ideas, including some that Butler doesn’t propound, like the notions that biology is entirely unreal and that everybody experiences gender as a choice.

So Butler set out to clarify a few things with “Who’s Afraid of Gender?,” a new book that arrives at a time when gender has “become a matter of extraordinary alarm.” In plain (if occasionally plodding) English, Butler, who uses they/them pronouns, repeatedly affirms that facts do exist, that biology does exist, that plenty of people undoubtedly experience their own gender as “immutable.”

What Butler questions instead is how such facts get framed, and how such framing structures our societies and how we live.

more here.

Nicholas Cannariato in Slate:

Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, pen name Lewis Carroll, is best known as the Victorian-era author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Now, out of obscurity, comes Lewis Carroll’s Guide for Insomniacs, a charmingly odd little book. From reasoning problems to poetry writing to how to greet a ghost—all activities for what Carroll calls insomnia’s “wakeful hours”—it’s composed of fun, or fun-ish, recommendations for ways to pass your sleep-deprived time. Insomnia, Carroll tries to convince us from beyond the grave, is an opportunity, rather than an affliction.

Writer, broadcaster, and former British Member of Parliament Gyles Brandreth, who compiled the book in the 1970s, writes in the new introduction to this second edition that he first learned of Carroll’s insomnia when he was commissioned to write a play based on the author’s life and work. The revelation shaped Brandreth’s approach to the project. “In the first act of my one-man play,” he writes, “the great man was in his Oxford college rooms talking to himself as he tried (and failed) to get to sleep. In the second act, he was in bed having dreams (and nightmares) peopled by the characters he had created, from the Mad Hatter to the Frumious Bandersnatch.”

Otherwise

I got out of bed
on two strong legs.
It might have been
otherwise. I ate
cereal, sweet
milk, ripe, flawless
peach, It might
have been otherwise.
I took the dog uphill
to the birch wood.
All morning I did
the work I love.

At noon I lay down
with my mate. It might
have been otherwise.
We ate dinner together
at a table with silver
candlesticks. It might
have been otherwise.
I slept in a bed
in a room with paintings
on the walls, and
planned another day
just like this day.
But one day, I know,
it will be otherwise.

by Jane Kenyon
from Poetry 180
Random House, 2003

Meg Bernhard at Hazlitt:

In the fall of 2004, Frank came up with an idea for a project. After he finished delivering documents for the day, he’d drive through the darkened streets of Washington, D.C., with stacks of self-addressed postcards—three thousand in total. At metro stops, he’d approach strangers. “Hi,” he’d say. “I’m Frank. And I collect secrets.” Some people shrugged him off, or told him they didn’t have any secrets. Surely, Frank thought, those people had the best ones. Others were amused, or intrigued. They took cards and, following instructions he’d left next to the address, decorated them, wrote down secrets they’d never told anyone before, and mailed them back to Frank. All the secrets were anonymous.

Initially, Frank received about one hundred postcards back. They told stories of infidelity, longing, abuse. Some were erotic. Some were funny. He displayed them at a local art exhibition and included an anonymous secret of his own. After the exhibition ended, though, the postcards kept coming. By 2024, Frank would have more than a million.

More here.

Dennis Overbye in the New York Times:

On Thursday, astronomers who are conducting what they describe as the biggest and most precise survey yet of the history of the universe announced that they might have discovered a major flaw in their understanding of dark energy, the mysterious force that is speeding up the expansion of the cosmos.

Dark energy was assumed to be a constant force in the universe, both currently and throughout cosmic history. But the new data suggest that it may be more changeable, growing stronger or weaker over time, reversing or even fading away.

“As Biden would say, it’s a B.F.D.,” said Adam Riess, an astronomer at Johns Hopkins University and the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore. He shared the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics with two other astronomers for the discovery of dark energy, but was not involved in this new study. “It may be the first real clue we have gotten about the nature of dark energy in 25 years,” he said.

More here.