Julian Baggini in The Guardian:

If we don’t know how to distinguish bad thinking from good, we can end up believing what we shouldn’t, and behaving in ways that are harmful to ourselves, to others, and to the planet.

Philosophers are, of course, the archetypal expert thinkers. Their discipline is often portrayed as a kind of formal method that lists fallacies to be avoided and distinguishes between deductive and inductive reasoning, invalid and sound arguments. These things have their place. But philosophy cannot be reduced to mere technique. Thinking well also requires adopting the right attitudes and being prepared to nurture effective habits. Without these “intellectual virtues” even the cleverest end up merely playing theoretical games.

Throughout history wise men and women have applied themselves to these problems in the service of their own development and that of humankind. Rather than start from scratch, why not draw on thousands of years of experience, and millions of hours of reflection and practice? Here is what some of the greatest philosophers in history can tell us about how to think – and live – well.

More here.

Jessica Parr in Black Perspectives:

In 1852, the Third Avenue Railroad Company was founded. It ran between City Hall and 62nd Street in Manhattan. Its horse-drawn streetcars quickly became the primary mode of transportation in the city. A small number of the cars carried placards indicating that they accepted African American passengers. Additional cars occasionally allowed Black passengers at the discretion of the operator, and with the approval of the white passengers.

As historian Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor’s work emphasizes, freedom of movement was something that white Americans could take for granted. Mobility, which included equal access to transportation, was therefore a major area of focus for early Black activists. Some of the activism in nineteenth-century Black organizations revolved around the creation of networks to guard against the kidnapping of free African Americans into slavery. Black kidnapping victims’ lack of legal rights made it very difficult for them to prove their right to freedom. For example, it took Solomon Northup’s supporters twelve years to locate him and free him following his kidnapping and subsequent enslavement. This legitimate fear was one source of limitation on mobility. Another involved access to transportation or legal documentation that proved African Americans’ right to move around the country—or even across the globe—without restriction. As a result, Black civil rights organizations often initiated legal challenges to segregationist laws and company policies on street cars, trains, and ships. Successful legal challenges were then used as models in other cases throughout the country.

More here. (Note: Throughout February, at least one post will be dedicated to Black History Month. The theme for 2023 is Black Resistance. Please send us anything you think is relevant for inclusion)

Julia Belluz in Vox:

The new class of obesity drugs — referred to as “GLP-1-based,” since they contain synthetic versions of the human hormone glucagon-like peptide-1 — are considered the most powerful ever marketed for weight loss. Since the US Food and Drug Administration approved Wegovy for patients with obesity in 2021, buzz on social media and in Hollywood’s gossip mills has erupted, helping drive a surge in popularity that’s contributed to ongoing supply shortages. While celebrities and billionaires such as Elon Musk and Michael Rubin praise the weight loss effects of these drugs, regular patients, including those with Type 2 diabetes, struggle with access, raising questions about who will really benefit from treatment. But there’s another tension that’s emerged in the GLP-1 story: The medicines have become a lightning rod in an obesity conversation that is increasingly binary — swinging between fat acceptance and fatphobia. “It feels like you have to be like, ‘I love being fat, this is my fat body,’ or, ‘Fat people are evil,’” Juneja told me.

While many clinicians and researchers hail GLP-1-based therapy as a “breakthrough,” and one deemed safe and effective by FDA, critics question its safety and usefulness. They argue the drugs unnecessarily medicalize obesity and dispute that it’s an illness in need of treatment at all. They also say the medicines perpetuate a dangerous diet culture that idealizes thinness and weight loss at all costs.

More here.

(Note: Throughout February, at least one post will be dedicated to Black History Month. The theme for 2023 is Black Resistance. Please send us anything you think is relevant for inclusion)

Man in Space

All you have to do is listen to the way a man
sometimes talks to his wife at a table of people
and notice how intent he is on making his point
even though her lower lip is beginning to quiver,

and you will know why the women in science
fiction movies who inhabit a planet of their own
are not pictured making a salad or reading a magazine
when the men from earth arrive in their rocket,

why they are always standing in a semicircle
with their arms folded, their bare legs set apart,
their breast protected by hard metal disks.

by Billy Collins
from The Art of Drowning
University of Pittsburg Press, 1995

Maria Popova at The Marginalian:

Two hundred million years ago, long before we walked the Earth, it was a world of cold-blooded creatures and dull color — a kind of terrestrial sea of brown and green. There were plants, but their reproduction was a tenuous game of chance — they released their pollen into the wind, into the water, against the staggering improbability that it might reach another member of their species. No algorithm, no swipe — just chance.

But then, in the Cretaceous period, flowers appeared and carpeted the world with astonishing rapidity — because, in some poetic sense, they invented love.

Once there were flowers, there were fruit — that transcendent alchemy of sunlight into sugar.

more here.

Michael Burleigh at Literary Review:

Some of NSO’s human targets had already been beaten or tortured in, for example, Morocco (for oppositional activity or revealing property deals involving the royal family), where five thousand phones were invaded. In Mexico, where over 150 journalists (including those investigating drug cartels) have been murdered by both cartels and the police since 2000, fifteen thousand phone numbers were on NSO’s list. Among NSO’s targets in Mexico, alongside lawyers and journalists, were the driver, the cardiologist and the wife of the politician Andrés Manuel López Obrador (who was elected president in 2018), along with three of his children.

The intrepid authors needed to persuade individuals, who were often being harassed and persecuted, to allow experts to go into their phones in search of evidence of NSO activity. Once the telltale signs had been identified, and with the malware being traced back to suspiciously identical servers, Forbidden Stories shared its findings with the Washington Post, Le Monde, Die Zeit, The Guardian, Süddeutsche Zeitung and twelve other media outlets.

more here.

Justin E. H. Smith in his Substack newsletter, The Hinternet:

A curious passage in Salammbô, Gustave Flaubert’s 1862 Orientalist phantasmagoria, describes a mostly forgotten practice of the ancient Carthaginians:

[A group of Barbarian soldiers] ran to see it. It was a lion, attached to a cross by its four limbs like a criminal. Its enormous muzzle was falling upon its chest, and its two front paws, half-disappearing beneath the abundance of its mane, were spread wide like the two wings of a bird. Its ribs, all lined up, jutted forth beneath its taut skin; its hind legs, nailed alongside one another, rose up somewhat; and the black blood, pouring through its hairs, had collected in stalactites at the end of its tail that hung straight down along the length of the cross. The soldiers amused themselves with it; they called it consul and citizen of Rome and threw pebbles at its eyes to chase away the flies.

One hundred steps further they saw two more, then suddenly there appeared a long line of crosses bearing lions. The ones had been dead for so long that only the debris of their skeletons remained on the wood; others, half-eaten, twisted their faces into a horrible grimace; some of them were enormous, the tree of the cross folded beneath them and they swung in the wind, as above their heads bands of crows circled in the air without stopping. Thus did the Carthaginian peasants avenge themselves when they captured a ferocious beast; they hoped by this example to terrify the others. The Barbarians, when they had stopped laughing, fell into a long astonishment. “Who are these people,” they wondered, “who amuse themselves by crucifying lions!?” [Emphasis added].

Flaubert’s novel had been among the readings in preparation for my stay at the École Normale Supérieure in Tunis earlier this month. I am probably as much in love with Flaubert as with any author — I’ve written in this space before of the ecstasies to which his “Saint Julien L’Hospitalier” has brought me. But previously I could never finish Salammbô, written in part during his own sojourn in Tunis and vicinity in order to escape the stupid controversy in his home country over the purported obscenity of Madame Bovary. It took a stay in Tunisia for me to be able to feel my way into the novel, which reimagines ancient events mostly drawing on source material from Polybius, and other Roman authors who related the history of the Punic wars.

More here.

Caitlin Zaloom at Public Books:

Caitlin Zaloom (CZ): Your book presents a counterintuitive perspective: that emotions live between people, not only inside them. How did you come to see emotions as fundamentally social?

Batja Mesquita (BM): It is never clear how you get interested in a question, but the roots probably lie with my parents. They were Jewish. They survived the Second World War in hiding. At the end of the war, my mom was an orphan and my dad’s family was heavily reduced. There were so many losses and also fears that I knew about as a child. I don’t know how early I knew about them, but my parents were not particularly secretive about their experiences. Still, I couldn’t quite understand the emotions that my parents had from things that happened in the moment. I was always trying to understand where their emotions came from. As a four-year-old I didn’t know that I was going to become a professor who studies culture and emotion, of course. I do think, though, that the question where emotions come from has always been an interest of mine and may have been an interest of necessity all of my life.

More here.

Salman Rushdie in National Geographic:

The trouble with India’s Taj Mahal is that it has become so overlaid with accumulated meanings as to be almost impossible to see. A billion chocolate-box images and tourist guidebooks order us to “read” the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan’s marble mausoleum for his wife Mumtaz Mahal, known as “Taj Bibi,” as the World’s Greatest Monument to Love. It sits at the top of the West’s short list of images of the Exotic (and also Timeless) Orient. Like the Mona Lisa, like Andy Warhol’s silk-screened Elvis, Marilyn, and Mao, mass reproduction has all but sterilized the Taj Mahal.

Nor is this by any means a simple case of the West’s appropriation or “colonization” of an Indian masterwork. In the first place, the Taj, which in the mid-19th century had been all but abandoned and had fallen into a severe state of disrepair, would probably not be standing today were it not for the diligent conservationist efforts of the colonial British. In the second place, India is perfectly capable of over merchandising itself.

More here.

Paul J. Griffiths in Commonweal:

But what, exactly, is mourning, and how does doing it well contribute to a fully human life? These are good questions, addressed too rarely. In Imagining the End, Jonathan Lear takes them on with his usual learning, verve, and lucidity. Lear, who has taught at the University of Chicago since the 1990s, has written prolifically on various fundamental aspects of human life—including hope, love, illness, and irony, with Aristotle, Socrates, Plato, Freud, Kierkegaard, and Wittgenstein among his most frequent interlocutors. He is always concerned with the texture of human life: how it is woven, how it can become unwoven, what its principal virtues are. He wants to know how we should live, and on that question he is among our most intelligent guides.

More here.

Christine Kenneally in Scientific American:

Colossal Biosciences, the headline-grabbing, venture-capital-funded juggernaut of de-extinction science, announced plans on January 31 to bring back the dodo. Whether “bringing back” a semblance of the extinct flightless bird is feasible is a matter of debate.

Founded in 2021 by tech entrepreneur Ben Lamm and Harvard University geneticist George Church, the company first said it would re-create the mammoth. And a year later it announced such an effort for the thylacine, aka the Tasmanian tiger. Now, with the launch of a new Avian Genomics Group and a reported $150 million of additional investment, the long-gone dodo joins the lineup.

More here.

Robert Goldman in The Conversation:

Israel has demolished the homes of thousands of Palestinians in recent years. Bulldozing properties of those deemed responsible for violent acts against Israeli citizens or to deter such acts has long been government policy.

But it is also illegal under international law. As an expert on international humanitarian law, I know that holding the family of assailants responsible for their acts – no matter how heinous the crime – falls under what is know as collective punishment. And for the past 70-plus years, international law has been unequivocal: Collective punishment is strictly prohibited in nearly all circumstances. Yet, when it comes to the demolition of Palestinian homes, international bodies have been unable to enforce the ban.

More here.

From The Marginalian:

Prompted in large part by the dissolution of his engagement to Felice Bauer, in which Hermann’s active disapproval of the relationship was a toxic force and which resulted in the estrangement of father and son, 36-year-old Kafka set out to hold his father accountable for the emotional abuse, disorienting double standards, and constant disapprobation that branded his childhood — a measured yet fierce outburst of anguish and disappointment thirty years in the buildup.

His litany of indictments is doubly harrowing in light of what psychologists have found in the decades since — that our early limbic contact with our parents profoundly shapes our character, laying down the wiring for emotional habits and patterns of connecting that greatly influence what we bring to all subsequent relationships in life, either expanding or contracting our capacity for “positivity resonance” depending on how nurturing or toxic those formative relationships were.

More here.

Eleni Schirmer in Lapham’s Quarterly:

Higher education in the United States is a speculative endeavor. It offers a means of inching toward something that does not quite exist but that we very badly want to realize—enlightenment, higher wages, national security. For individuals, it provides the lure of upward mobility, an illusion of escape from the lowest rungs of the labor market. For the federal government, it has charted a kind of statecraft, outlining its core commitments to military strength and economic growth, all the while absolving the state of the responsibility for ensuring that all its subjects have dignified means to live. We are told the path to decent wages and social respect must route through college.

The metric of higher education is credit; it runs on the belief of future value amid present uncertainty. This has readily lent to the industry’s financialization, the elaborate ways of using money to make more money rather than to produce goods and services. Today financialized systems of higher education mean that colleges and universities operate as investors or borrowers or both.

More here.

Bahar Imboden in Inversant:

In her poignant essay “What is Owed,” Nikole Hannah Jones paints a compelling picture of the inequity and inequality faced by black Americans. In it, Jones shares the disparity between class, income, and wealth. 

“So much of what makes black lives hard, what takes black lives earlier, what causes black Americans to be vulnerable to the type of surveillance and policing that killed Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, what steals opportunities, is the lack of wealth that has been a defining feature of black life since the end of slavery.”

Wealth is power, security, and peace of mind. Our higher education system, like our entire system, has failed at providing black Americans a path to building wealth and financial stability. Black and African American communities have long dealt with a targeted message: The belief that a college degree is the key to upward economic mobility. There’s the promise of higher wage premiums – the difference in wage between college and non-college graduates. The result is higher wealth formation, which is central to the great American Dream.

But for black communities, it’s remained an unattainable dream.

While a  college degree might bring higher wages to black people, it still falls behind their white peers. This explains the stubborn and growing wage gap between white and white communities. However, when it comes to forming wealth, college does nothing for black Americans. Economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis show that on average, black families headed by college graduates born in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s haven’t accumulated more wealth than households headed by black, non-college graduates born in the same decades. In fact, the authors of the study conclude that whites are the only racial or ethnic group for whom college provides a reliable wealth advantage over non-college graduate families.

More here. (Note: Throughout February, at least one post will be dedicated to Black History Month. The theme for 2023 is Black Resistance. Please send us anything you think is relevant for inclusion)

Ode to H2O

three atoms, covalently bonded
a simple elixir to keep bodies
nourished; one which allows
cells, tissues, organs to regulate
body temperature as well as cook
pasta, boil meat, or even bubble
a human in the form of a bath or
jacuzzi; and sure, in frozen form
a cube to plop into a strawberry
soda or add to a cocktail

a liquid that can be swum in for
exercise, added to a sponge to
clean a mess, or even used to dip
an infant
to absolve original sin

a fluid that one can use to refresh
first thing in the morning
a cold slap against epidermis
or watch
leak from the sky, or pelt tired
rooves, and smear against windshields

this planet—mostly water
our bodies—too

the system is a closed one:
the amount of water on earth
never changes
the same drops we use
hydrated Shakespeare,
scrubbed Cleopatra, diluted
the blood that oozed from
Christ’s crown of thorns

evaporation, condensation,
precipitation—a holy trinity

the water molecule—a god
living around us, within us

by Mathieu Cailler
from the Ecotheo Review