Christopher J. Snowdon in Quillette:

H.G. Wells once predicted that “statistical thinking will one day be as necessary for efficient citizenship as the ability to read and write.” It was a slight exaggeration, but in an age of big data in which governments pride themselves on being “evidence-based” and “guided by the science,” an understanding of where facts and figures come from is important if you want to think clearly.

Georgina Sturge works in the House of Commons Library where she furnishes UK MPs with statistics. If Bad Data is any guide, she also provides them with caveats and other words of caution, which are ignored. This informative, reasoned, and apolitical book offers a string of examples to show that statistics are not always what they seem. Some statistics are rigged for political reasons. Others are inherently flawed. Some are close to guesswork. Even crucial variables such as Gross National Income and life expectancy are shrouded in more uncertainty than you might think. We don’t really know how many people live in Britain legally, let alone illegally. The number of people who are living in poverty varies enormously depending on how you measure it.

More here.

The Buddy Holly Poem

It’s so easy
when you realize
that all the squirrels
on the shingled rooftops
of Milwaukee
are Buddha
that all trees shake green
in the wind
that the moon is you

Sing
that the whole of every note
is individual and one
that love is free
every day
on the blue earth

Listen to me

by Maurice Kilwein Guvara
from Touching the Fire
Anchor Books, 1998

Bill McKibben in The New Yorker:

On Tuesday, the Department of Energy is expected to announce a breakthrough in fusion energy: according to early reports, scientists at the government’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, in California, have succeeded for the first time in making their complex and expensive machinery produce more power than it uses, if only for an instant. It’s a breakthrough of great significance—in essence, the researchers are learning to build a second sun. And it was greeted with the requisite hosannas—the Washington Post described it as a “holy grail,” a “major milestone in the decades-long, multibillion-dollar quest to develop a technology that provides unlimited, cheap, clean power.”

That it comes with equally requisite caveats does not diminish the glory of the achievement, but they’re important, too. As a fusion expert at the University of Cambridge, in England, told CNN on Monday, “This result is miles away from actual energy gain required for the production of electricity. Therefore, we can say (it) is a success of the science but a long way from providing useful energy.” Among other things, producing this reaction required one of the largest lasers in the world, and the reaction creates neutrons that can destroy the very equipment required to produce it. As the Post put it, “Building devices that are large enough to create fusion power at scale” would “require materials that are extraordinarily difficult to produce.” It is therefore still “at least a decade—maybe decades—away from commercial use.”

More here.

Andy Carstens in The Scientist:

In the 1950s, scientists on a mission to create better anesthesia drugs synthesized phencyclidine, commonly known as PCP. Though PCP worked well to keep most people unconscious during surgical procedures, some experienced what the authors of a 1959 trial described as “delirium and hallucinations which, although usually of a highly pleasurable nature, are sometimes rather terrifying to the patients.” This so-called dissociated state—when what the brain experiences is disconnected from reality—lasted as long as 12 hours.

Seeking a shorter-acting agent, researchers in the 1960s made a compound that’s structurally related to PCP called ketamine. Ketamine remains a common anesthetic today, says Joe Cichon, a neuroscientist and anesthesiologist at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine. At lower doses than would be used for anesthesia, people remain conscious yet experience a similar dissociated state as with PCP but for far less time. In the 2000s, researchers found that these lower, so-called subhypnotic doses of ketamine have an antidepressant effect that can last for several weeks, well after the body has metabolized the drug, Cichon says. “And still to this day, after 60 years of being available for human use . . . we still don’t quite understand how it exerts all these different effects over a wide range of doses—that’s the mystery of ketamine.”

Now, Cichon and his colleagues have uncovered a new clue: By using calcium photon imaging, they found that the drug flips a “switch” in mice brains, shutting off neurons that had been firing in the awake state while activating a separate group of previously dormant neurons.

More here.

Harmony Holiday at Bookforum:

PINUPS ARE RUMORED TO EMERGE FROM THE SEA, mer-peoples caught between nautical and earthly existence, so that maybe there are fewer black pinups circulating in popular culture, because the sea for us is in part the graveyard of the Middle Passage, not just an escapist fantasy. Black pinups would emerge blood-drenched and haunting, rather than seducing onlookers. Just bypass the trance of glamour and observe Josephine Baker’s double consciousness in any photograph, at once entertaining you and devastating you, silly and caustic with grief. Or just look at Prince and try not to fall in love. Hilton Als’s account of witnessing, meeting, interviewing, befriending, and loving Prince Rogers Nelson begins with the recapitulation of a Jamie Foxx stand-up bit, in which Foxx describes involuntarily lusting after Prince at first glance, I mean he’s cute, he’s pretty. Foxx sits with the ambiguity onstage, seeming to need the confessional; it’s the frantic announcement of a romance that’s been a secret for too long. He’s not just aroused when he looks into and avoids Prince’s eyes during their conversation, he’s overcome and forever changed. Prince is loved, lusted after, and objectified like a pinup because his presence and his music compel us to overcome ourselves. His is the kind of irreducible androgyny that upends gender without the use of any jargon—it’s God-driven wish-fulfillment.

more here.

Claire Harman at Literary Review:

One of Katherine Mansfield’s defining characteristics was her restlessness, both personal and artistic: she was always most at home when on the move. ‘Do other artists feel as I do,’ she wondered, ‘the driving necessity – the crying need?’ Ambitious, curious, greedy for experience, she became a formidable innovator, reading and borrowing from other authors, adapting techniques from avant-garde painting, music and new media, and trying all the time to make it new.

It helped that she was no snob about ‘low’ culture and enjoyed panto and vaudeville as much as the cutting-edge art she wrote about for the magazine Rhythm. When ‘the Fillums’ took off dramatically in the 1910s, she became a frequent cinema-goer (there was a theatre very near her flat) and noted down things she thought might make ‘a good cinema film’. Her first date with her future husband, John Middleton Murry, was at the movies, and it’s obvious whose choice that was. ‘Will you suggest the day for the visit to the pictures?’ he wrote. ‘They’re all the same to me.’

more here.

The Such Thing As the Ridiculous Question –

Where are you from???

When I say ancestors, let’s be clear:
I mean slaves. I’m talkin’ Tennessee
cotton & Louisiana suga. I mean grave

dirt. I come from homes & marriages
named after the same type of weapon –
all it takes is a shotgun to know

I’m Black. I don’t got no secrets
a bullet ain’t told. Danger see me
& sit down somewhere.

I’m a direct descendant of last words
& first punches. I got stolen blood.
My complexion is America’s

darkest hour. You can trace my great
great great great great grandmother back
to a scream. I bet somewhere it’s a haint

with my eyes. My last name is a protest;
a brick through a window in a house
my bones built. One million

scabs from one scar.
Heavy is the hand that held
the whip. Black is the back that carried this

country & when this country’s palm gets
an itch, I become money. You give this country
an inch & it will take a freedom. You can’t talk slick

to this legacy of oiled scalps. You can’t spit
on my race & call it reign. I sound like my mama now,
who sound like her mama who sound like her mama who

sound like her mama, who sound like her
mama who sound like her mama who sound like her
mama who sound like her mama, who sound like a scream.

& that’s why I’m so loud, remember? You wanna know
where I’m from? Easy. Open a wound
& watch it heal.

by Siaara Freeman
from Split This Rock

Noah Kumin at Compact:

When the Italian writer and publisher Roberto Calasso died last year, he was more widely admired than understood. When he is praised in the Anglophone world, it is usually for being erudite. Meanwhile, in his native Italy, Calasso is better known as a publishing impresario, because of his leadership of the independent publishing house Adelphi. Calasso’s great work, a capacious 11-part series that he began in 1983 with The Ruin of Kasch, and ended in 2021 with The Tablet of Destinies, is often said to be indescribable. Actually, it is rather straightforward once you have the key. Calasso is writing gnoseology (a word he uses often)—that is, an examination and history of esoteric knowledge.

This helps to explain what can be one of the more confounding elements of his work. Critics never fail to mention the bewildering mixture of genres one finds in Calasso.

More here.

Yasemin Saplakoglu in Quanta:

Decades of work and billions of dollars went into funding clinical trials of dozens of drug compounds that targeted amyloid plaques. Yet almost none of the trials showed meaningful benefits to patients with the disease.

That is, until September, when the pharmaceutical giants Biogen and Eisai announced that in a phase 3 clinical trial, patients taking the anti-amyloid drug lecanemab showed 27% less decline in their cognitive health than patients taking a placebo did. Last week, the companies revealed the data, now published in the New England Journal of Medicine, to an excited audience at a meeting in San Francisco.

More here.

Christopher de Bellaigue in The Guardian:

For the past 12 weeks, revolutionary sentiment has been coursing through the cities and towns of the Persian plateau. The agitation was triggered by the death of Mahsa Amini, a young Kurdish woman, on 16 September after she was arrested by the morality police in Tehran. From the outset the movement had a feminist character, but it has also united citizens of different classes and ethnicities around a shared desire to see the back of the Islamic Republic. Iran has known numerous protest movements over the past decade and a half, and the nation’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has comfortably suppressed each one with a combination of severity and deft exploitation of divisions within the opposition. This time, however, the resilience and unity shown by the regime’s opponents have consigned the old pattern of episodic unrest to the past. Iran has entered a period of rolling protest in which the Islamic Republic must defend itself against wave upon wave of public anger.

In their retaliation against the protesters, the security forces have killed at least 448 people, including 60 children and 29 women, and made up to 17,000 arrests.

More here.

00:00 – Jonathan Schaffer 01:34 – Timothy Williamson 06:11 – Michael Slote 09:19 – Alex Rosenberg 10:48 – Benjamin Mitchell-Yellin 14:36 – Susanna Siegel 18:08 – Frank Jackson 21:45 – Stanley Fish 25:33 – Benj Hellie 31:12 – Arif Ahmed 33:57 – Joshua Rasmussen 35:58 – Christopher Peacocke 36:42 – Eric Sampson 37:52 – Terence Horgan 41:08 – Michael Huemer 44:08 – Owen Flanagan 46:33 – Brian Bix 48:15 – Mark Balaguer 51:04 – Paul Weirich 52:35 – Roy Sorensen 54:47 – Don Loeb 56:54 – Michael Walzer 1:00:22 – Alex Worsnip 1:04:24 – Pete Mandik 1:12:37 – Manuel Vargas 1:17:10 – Tyler Burge 1:22:54 – Linda Zagzebski 1:24:58 – Christopher Kaczor 1:26:09 – Avery Archer 1:30:47 – Brian Skyrms 1:31:38 – Herman Cappelen 1:36:58 – Tim Maudlin 1:40:54 – Barbara Partee 1:47:59 – Manuel Garcia-Carpintero 1:58:10 – Steven Pinker 2:01:49 – Kendall Walton

Carol Rumens in The Guardian:

Bell’s palsy is a neurological condition resulting from damage to the seventh cranial nerve, and typified by partial facial paralysis and pain on one side of the head.

Show me your teeth. Can you lift your arms?
Try to smile. Close your eyes. Swallow.
Dive into the dark water. Lie still
while the machine passes around you
and a voice reaches you from another room
where music is playing.
Is it just that side?

…Creatures real and imaginary thread through the landscapes of Goliat, the recently published second collection by the Welsh poet Rhiannon Hooson. There are roe deer, feral cats and, in the title poem, endangered whales (Goliat is an oilfield in the Barents Sea). Gentle monsters and combination-species may appear – stag-boy, rat-boy, the occasional mermaid or faun. This week’s poem also engages with the magic realism of metamorphosis, despite its real and human starting point, a possible diagnosis of Bell’s Palsy.

Traditionally, the number seven has magical associations. Stanza one, at seven lines the longest in the poem, begins the transformative process. It is bookended by short commands and questions from an unseen medical practitioner to a patient undergoing tests. The voice is unnerving, the actions and answers required intimately connected to simple human existence and needs. Threat is established. But a new register enters the third line: “Dive into the dark water.” From this point on, 7th Nerve becomes a kind of duet, diminishing the clash between the voice of the medic and the voice of the speaker-to-self. Between them they alter the course and meaning of the poem.

More here.

Shannon Osaka in The Washington Post:

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Guy Elgat at IAI News:

Should one be altruistic and act for the sake of others, even at a cost to oneself? Should one’s actions be free of any egoistic motivations? Is selflessness a virtue one ought to strive for and cultivate? To many of us the answer to such questions is so self-evident that even raising them would appear to be either a sign of moral obtuseness or an infantile attempt at provocation. For Friedrich Nietzsche, the 19^th Century “immoralist” German philosopher, however, the answer to these questions was by no means straightforward and unequivocal. Rather, he believed that altruism and selflessness are neither virtues to be unconditionally pursued and celebrated nor obligations grounded in absolute morality. Moreover, he thought that other-regard (regard for others) is something to be practiced, if at all, with care and moderation; indeed, in some cases selflessness could pose a great danger or even be a sign of deep existential malaise.

More here.

Gary Markus in his Substack newsletter:

The core of that threat comes from the combination of three facts:

• these systems are inherently unreliable, frequently making errors of both reasoning and fact, and prone to hallucination; ask them to explain why crushed porcelain is good in breast milk, and they may tell you that “porcelain can help to balance the nutritional content of the milk, providing the infant with the nutrients they need to help grow and develop”. (Because the systems are random, highly sensitive to context, and periodically updated, any given experiment may yield different results on different occasions.)

• they can easily be automated to generate misinformation at unprecedented scale.

• they cost almost nothing to operate, and so they are on a path to reducing the cost of generating disinformation to zero. Russian troll farms spent more than a million dollars a month in the 2016 election; nowadays you can get your own custom-trained large language model, for keeps, for less than $500,000. Soon the price will drop further.

More here.

Gareth Evans in Project Syndicate:

This century has not been kind to human-rights optimists, with 2022 being no exception. Many gains in the recognition and protection of the universal rights recognized in the post-World War II and post-Cold War years have stalled or been eroded. Russia’s criminal behavior in Ukraine is but the most recent example of a broader trend – made even more shocking by Russia’s status as a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council, which exists to uphold the very principles of international law that the Kremlin is now so brazenly violating.

Looking back, the high-water mark for human rights in the last two decades may have been the 2005 UN World Summit, when more than 150 heads of state and government unanimously embraced, as a universal principle, the concept of a “responsibility to protect” (R2P) populations against genocide and other mass atrocity crimes. We have had little to celebrate since then, as many recent surveys demonstrate.

More here.

Anna I. Krylov in Heterodox STEM:

My everyday experiences as a chemistry professor at an American university in 2021 bring back memories from my school and university time in the USSR. Not good memories—more like Orwellian nightmares. I will compare my past and present experiences to illustrate the following parallels between the USSR and the US today: (i) the atmosphere of fear and self-censorship; (ii) the omnipresence of ideology (focusing on examples from science); (iii) an intolerance of dissenting opinions (i.e., suppression of ideas and people, censorship, and Newspeak); (iv) the use of social engineering to solve real and imagined problems.

More here.