Manil Suri in Literary Hub:

The aim of my piece was to challenge the popular notion that mathematics is synonymous with calculation. Starting with arithmetic and proceeding through algebra and beyond, the message drummed into our heads as students is that we do math to “get the right answer.” The drill of multiplication tables, the drudgery of long division, the quadratic formula and its memorization—these are the dreary memories many of us carry around from school as a result.

But what if we liberated ourselves from the stress of finding “the right answer”? What would math look like if delinked from this calculation-driven motivation? What, if anything, would remain of the subject?

More here.

Arjun Appadurai in The Chronicle of Higher Education:

The recent debate over “presentism” among historians, especially those based in the United States, has generated both heat and light. It is a useful conversation to have now, at a moment when the public sphere, and even more so the university’s space within it, seems to consist more of mines than of fields. Debates about Covid-19, affirmative (in)action, antisemitism, sexual violence, student debt, Title IX, Confederate monuments, racist donors, resigning presidents, and rogue trustees combine to occlude the daylight of classes, books, and learning.

It is no wonder that the hills are alive with the sound of presentism. Absent a serious space for reflection, debate, and deliberation in or on the actually existing present, it becomes easy to claim that my history is bigger than yours, or more ethically relevant, or more marginalized. In this weaponized sense everyone is in the history business, and it is only in the relative calm of graduate programs, annual meetings, journal submissions, and the recruitment of professional historians that the soothing hum of sources, chronologies, periods, and methods can still be heard.

The weaponized present is always lurking.

More here.

Malcolm Gladwell in Oh, MG:

After a stellar year in 2021, Princeton University has an endowment of $37.7 billion. Over the past 20 years, the average annual return for the endowment has been 11.2 percent. Let us give Princeton the benefit of the doubt and assume that at least some of that was luck and maybe unsustainable, and that a more reasonable prediction going forward would be that Princeton can average a return on its investments of an even 10 percent a year. That puts Princeton’s endowment return next year at roughly $3.77 billion.

Now—what is Princeton’s annual operating budget? $1.86 billion. The arithmetic here is not hard. $3.77 billion in investment income minus $1.86 billion in operating expenses leaves you with $1.91 billion.

Princeton could let in every student for free. The university administrators could tell the U.S. government and all of its funding agencies, “It’s cool. We got this.”

They could take out the cash registers in the cafeteria, hand out free parking to all visitors, give away Princeton sweatshirts on Nassau Street, and fire their entire accounts receivable staff and their entire fundraising staff tomorrow.

More here.

Stuart Jeffries in The Guardian:

“Dear Sir,” wrote a nameless correspondent to Julian Huxley in 1937. “Would you consent to being the father of my wife’s child, possibly by artificial insemination?” Alison Bashford doesn’t reveal what prompted the request, nor if the evolutionary biologist, eugenicist and ecologist supplied the genetic material.

But she certainly knows why the correspondent would request it. The Huxley family, seemingly, had the right stuff that anyone would want to graft on to their family tree. The dynasty of geniuses began with Julian’s grandfather, Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-95), the great Victorian biologist and comparative anatomist known as Darwin’s bulldog for savaging critics of his friend’s account of natural selection, and proselytising that we descend not from Adam and Eve but from apes. His grandson Julian (1887–1975) was a biologist, a transhumanist, a poet, sci-fi writer, the secretary of London zoo, the first Unesco director general, a broadcasting catalyst for David Attenborough, a eugenicist and a leading figure in the “modern synthesis” that married Darwin’s theory of evolution with the first geneticist, gardening monk Gregor Mendel’s ideas on heredity.

The rest of the Huxleys were no slouches either. Julian’s physiologist half-brother Andrew was a Nobel laureate. Julian’s son Francis was an anthropologist and founder of Survival International. The most famous Huxley, Julian’s brother Aldous, author of Brave New World and devotee of consciousness-altering drugs, was perhaps a bit of an underachiever. The Huxleys were like the Kardashians in one sense only: it was hard to keep up with them.

More here.

Kian Tajbakhsh in Public Seminar:

Zan, Zendegi, Azadi: Woman! Life! Freedom!

This is the stirring slogan of the protests that have erupted across Iran, triggered by the death of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year old Kurdish Iranian woman who was visiting Tehran with her family when Iran’s morality police detained her on September 16 for showing too much hair under her hijab (head scarf).

Led by predominantly young women and men in their late teens and twenties, the nonviolent protests are expressing a range of priorities. Beyond their frustrations at the indignities of being harassed and arrested for violating the Islamic dress code—not to speak of the danger of dying as Amini did—most are also expressing a desire to live under a different system of government. I believe we are witnessing something unprecedented in Iranian history: a feminist social movement. The renewed demand for accountable government and individual freedom—the liberal democratic ideal—has sprung up from the battle over the patriarchal control of women’s bodies and the paternalistic domination of public space.

Today’s feminist movement, women and men alike, is saying no: women will exist in public not as wards under the control of male guardians of religious law, but as equal citizens. They are demanding recognition of basic individual human dignity and liberty, such as modern individuals have come to expect.

More here.

Barbarians

They do not come with furred caps,
Smelling of maresmilk, scimitared,
Dour, as tellable as kites.

They live quietly next door,
Speak almost the same language,
Wear almost the same clothes,

Inside the walls. But
Do not think they lack
Precisely the same intentions.

by John Fowles
from Poems– John Fowles
the Ecco Press, NY, 1973

Alden Young in Phenomenal World:

On May 1, 2014, Nigeria’s then-president, Goodluck Jonathan, addressed a crowd of workers in the country’s capital Abuja.  He declared that “the challenge of the country is not poverty, but redistribution of wealth.” The prompt for his comment was a report issued only a few days prior, which labeled Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country, as one of only five nations that are home to two-thirds of the world’s population living in extreme poverty. Rejecting the categorization of Nigeria as a poor country, President Jonathan pointed to the country’s Gross Domestic Production (GDP), which he declared was “over half a trillion dollars.” Moreover, the economy, he maintained, was “growing at close to 7 percent.”

It was only a week before the president’s address that the official figure for Nigeria’s GDP had been significantly revised. The first reexamination of the structure of the Nigerian economy since 1990 showed an increase in the country’s 2013 GDP by 89 percent. Scholars were surprised by the dramatic growth in the banking and telecommunications sectors and the significant decline in the relative size of the hydrocarbon sectors.

With little outside recognition, the Nigerian economy had transformed itself in the space of a couple of decades.

More here.

Stephen Ornes in Quanta:

A few minutes into a 2018 talk at the University of Michigan, Ian Tobasco picked up a large piece of paper and crumpled it into a seemingly disordered ball of chaos. He held it up for the audience to see, squeezed it for good measure, then spread it out again.

“I get a wild mass of folds that emerge, and that’s the puzzle,” he said. “What selects this pattern from another, more orderly pattern?”

He then held up a second large piece of paper — this one pre-folded into a famous origami pattern of parallelograms known as the Miura-ori — and pressed it flat. The force he used on each sheet of paper was about the same, he said, but the outcomes couldn’t have been more different. The Miura-ori was divided neatly into geometric regions; the crumpled ball was a mess of jagged lines.

“You get the feeling that this,” he said, pointing to the scattered arrangement of creases on the crumpled sheet, “is just a random disordered version of this.” He indicated the neat, orderly Miura-ori. “But we haven’t put our finger on whether or not that’s true.”

More here.

Kahled Talaat in Tablet (photo by Stefan Sauer/Picture Alliance via Getty Images)

Dwight Garner at the NYT:

His fingernails are ragged. He wears designer suits but his choice of underwear, cheap Russian tighty-whities, is poignant. When he gets drunk, he talks about Stalin. He likes the dumbest game shows. Maybe he’s K.G.B. He does not know how to unfasten garters.

The French writer Annie Ernaux’s new book, “Getting Lost,” comprises diary entries from 1988 through 1990; they recount her affair in Paris with a married Soviet diplomat. The sex is torrid, and described with a lemony eye for detail. “I realized that I’d lost a contact lens,” Ernaux writes. “I found it on his penis.”

S, as she refers to him, is a younger man. He’s in his mid-30s. Ernaux is approaching 50 and fearful of aging out of the game — the only game, to her mind, alongside writing.

more here.

Doreen St. Félix at The New Yorker:

How to walk properly, according to Lorraine O’Grady, the eighty-eight-year-old conceptual and performance artist: “With your chin tucked under your head, your shoulders dropped down, your stomach pulled up.” Good posture has become a concern for O’Grady in the past couple of years, as her latest persona, the Knight, is a character that requires her to wear a forty-pound suit of armor. “As long as I don’t gain or lose more than three or four pounds, I’m O.K.,” O’Grady told me in late August, over Zoom, while we discussed “Greetings and Theses,” the fourteen-minute film that constituted the official performance début of the Knight. The première was held, in late July, at the Brooklyn Museum, the site of the 2021 exhibition “Lorraine O’Grady: Both/And,” a retrospective of her radical and soul-shaking œuvre. The film is meta: the Knight trawls the arteries of “Both/And,” surveying the contents of a life’s work.

more here.

Paterson: Early Winter

I will see you once again
on the long silver train
people call “night”.

The sizzling green neon
of Van Houten Ave. pizzeria
will smooth the wrinkles
from your corduroy coat

It’ll be what we expected
of that time & of that place
&, so, to let it all slide into
the crisp russet Meadowlands

Sun will rise again on the good friends
we once had, now dreaming on the sly
as we cash in the empties from our karma
& become an animation of two guys
walking through the paradise
that New Jersey once was.

by Joel Lewis
from The Rutherford Red Wheelbarrow, 2009
publisher: Red Wheelbarrow Poets

Anthony Lane in The New Yorker:

There was no fanfare when “The Waste Land” first arrived. It was printed in the inaugural issue of The Criterion, a quarterly journal, in October, 1922. On the front cover was a hefty list of contents, among them a review by Hermann Hesse of recent German poetry; an article on James Joyce’s “Ulysses,” which had been published as a book in February of the same year; and an essay by an aged British critic titled—wait for it—“Dullness.”

Eliot was the begetter of The Criterion. He would edit it throughout its existence, until it closed, in January, 1939. In the years between the two World Wars, during which he surveyed—and held sway over—whole shires of the cultural domain, The Criterion would be his minster, with “A Commentary,” often signed “T.S.E.,” as an august and regular feature. No such pronouncements were evident, however, in this initial issue. Instead, Eliot’s only contribution was “The Waste Land.” It came with no preface, no afterword, and no warning. It was four hundred and thirty-three lines long. It appeared at first glance to be a poem, but of a disconcerting kind, and further glancing didn’t really help. Parts of it didn’t look, or sound, or feel, like poetry at all:

O the moon shone bright on Mrs. Porter
And on her daughter
They wash their feet in soda water
Et O ces voix d’enfants, chantant dans la coupole!

Twit twit twit
Jug jug jug jug jug jug
So rudely forc’d.
Tereu

More here.

Shannon Osaka in The Washington Post:

The typical “nuclear bro” is lurking in the comments section of a clean energy YouTube video, wondering why the creator didn’t mention #nuclear. He is marching in Central California to oppose the closing of the state’s Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant. His Twitter name includes an emoji of an atom ⚛️. He might even believe that 100 percent of the world’s electricity should come from nuclear power plants. As a warming world searches for ever more abundant forms of clean energy, an increasingly loud internet subculture has emerged to make the case for nuclear. They are often — but not always — men. They include grass-roots organizers and famous techno-optimists like Bill Gates and Elon Musk. And they are uniformly convinced that the world is sleeping on nuclear energy.

From The MIT Press Reader:

Climate change is a planetary emergency. We have to do something now — but what? Saul Griffith, an inventor and renewable electricity advocate (and a recipient of a MacArthur “genius” grant), has a plan. In his book “Electrify,” Griffith lays out a detailed blueprint for fighting climate change while creating millions of new jobs and a healthier environment. Griffith’s plan can be summed up simply: Electrify everything. He explains exactly what it would take to transform our infrastructure, update our grid, and adapt our households to make this possible. Billionaires may contemplate escaping our worn-out planet on a private rocket ship to Mars, but the rest of us, Griffith says, will stay and fight for the future.

More here.

Charlie Wood in Quanta:

For decades, a family of crystals has stumped physicists with its baffling ability to superconduct — that is, carry an electric current without any resistance — at far warmer temperatures than other materials.

Now, an experiment years in the making has directly visualized superconductivity on the atomic scale in one of these crystals, finally revealing the cause of the phenomenon to nearly everyone’s satisfaction. Electrons appear to nudge each other into a frictionless flow in a manner first suggested by a venerable theory nearly as old as the mystery itself.

“This evidence is really beautiful and direct,” said Subir Sachdev, a physicist at Harvard University who builds theories of the crystals, known as cuprates, and was not involved in the experiment.

More here.