Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe:

Physicists have traditionally simplified systems as much as possible, in order to shed light on fundamental properties. But small, simple parts build up into large, complex wholes. Are there new rules and laws of nature that apply specifically to the realm of complexity? This has been a popular question for a few decades now, and we have some answers but not as many as we would like. Neil Johnson is an expert on complex systems generally, and information networks in particular. We discuss how self-organization can arise from individual units following their own agendas, and how we can mathematically characterize such behavior. Then we talk about information networks in the modern world, including how they have been used to spread disinformation and find recruits for radical fringe groups.

More here.

Julian Borger in The Guardian:

A first-hand account of Britain’s role in the 1953 coup that overthrew the elected prime minister of Iran and restored the shah to power has been published for the first time.

The account by the MI6 officer who ran the operation describes how it took British intelligence years to persuade the US to take part in the coup. Meanwhile, MI6 recruited agents and bribed members of Iran’s parliament with banknotes transported in biscuit tins.

Together the MI6 and CIA even recruited Shah Reza Pahlavi’s sister in an effort to persuade the reluctant monarch to back the coup to overthrow Mohammad Mossadegh.

“The plan would have involved seizure of key points in the city by what units we thought were loyal to the shah … seizure of the radio station etc … the classical plan,” recalled Norman Darbyshire, the head of MI6’s Persia station in Cyprus at the time of the coup.

More here.

Kelly Grovier at the BBC.

That the Latin name for the caper flower, Capparis spinosa, is related to the Italian word capriolare (meaning ‘to jump in the air’), is a droll enough visual/verbal play to suggest that Titian is intentionally teasing us with the placement of the prickly perennial plant directly under the bouncing Bacchus. But it is the plant’s medicinal use, since antiquity, as a natural carminative (or remedy for excessive flatulence) that reveals the artist is truly letting rip with some mischievous fun. In the context of Titian’s carefully deployed caper, Bacchus’s explosive propulsion from his seat appears more wittily, if crudely, choreographed by Titian, who demystifies the lovestruck levitation by providing us with a more down-to-earth explanation for the cheeky lift-off. In Titian’s retelling of Ovid’s myth, Bacchus has been hoisted by his own pungent petard, as Shakespeare, who likewise loved toilet humour, might have said.

more here.

James Delbourgo at Literary Review:

The original Garden of Emptiness, Kyle Chayka explains in his pugnacious whistlestop tour of minimalism, is to be found in the 16th-century rock garden of the Kyoto Zen temple Ryoan-Ji. Chayka journeys to this sacred spot in search of the philosophical minimalism that has been obscured by today’s commodified decluttering. His book, which ranges from the Stoics and Buddhism to Mies van der Rohe, is a rebuke to the Shintoistic declutterer Marie Kondo, whose bestselling Netflix-powered KonMari method urges us to retain only those possessions that ‘spark joy’ and to practise such techniques as folding trousers vertically and not – heavens! – horizontally. Chayka warms to Donald Judd’s Plexiglas, Philip Johnson’s Glass House and Brian Eno’s ‘Discreet Music’. He is irked by minimalist hipsters’ all-grey uniforms and the solipsistic sensory deprivation of the Soulex company’s amniotic ‘float spas’. But such businesses are booming. In hard times, many go minimal by default, yet others pay handsomely for the ultimate postmodern lifestyle commodity, which, Kayla observes, they can of course never possess: nothing.

more here.

Sheltered in Place

You watch your boy struggle with giving
up the turtle, returning it to the pond
where he’d found it on a walk—
first time you’d all been out in days.

How thoughtful he thought he’d been,
making it a home in the home
where the family sheltered in place.
How he cared for his armored friend.

Having picked flowers, knowing they’d die,
you understand the urge to pluck
the exotic, the beautiful—any diversion
from fear, which is in itself a disease.

That morning, you helped your boy
give up the idea of living forever.

by Richard Levine
from The Poetry Foundation

Anna Smith in BBC:

In 1994, the term ‘straight to TV movie’ was used mostly as an insult. So when a small film called The Last Seduction premiered on HBO, nobody expected much. But those who caught it were floored by a darkly comic noir thriller with a knockout performance from Linda Fiorentino as Bridget Gregory. Bridget is a smart-talking New Yorker who hits ‘cow country’ with a suitcase of cash her husband Clay (Bill Pullman) had acquired in a drug deal. Advised to lie low for a while, Bridget shacks up with smitten local Mike (Peter Berg) and uses him to enact a devious plan. Directed by John Dahl and written by Steve Barancik, The Last Seduction is bitterly funny and deliciously clever – the razor-sharp dialogue is loaded with one-liners. It’s also sexy in a way that appeals to both women and men. With its manipulative femme fatale, it touches on similar themes to the big-budget Basic Instinct – but many believe it does it much better.

…Calculated tears are a move worthy of the film’s lead character Bridget, a quick-thinking profiler who knows exactly how to get results from the person in front of her. She issues orders to Mike in the manner of a dominatrix (in and out of bed), but she also knows when he needs to feel manly – so she feigns vulnerability. City slicker Bridget exploits everyone’s weaknesses and prejudices, even harnessing the casual racism of small-town cops to shake off a black private investigator on her tail. She is what lawyer Frank (JT Walsh) calls “a self-serving bitch” – a ruthless, superior psychologist who knows she’s smarter than everyone else in the room.

With brazen self-confidence, a knowing smile and a husky voice, Linda Fiorentino spoke to audiences seeking an unconventional heroine. It was a ‘dream role’ for the actress, according to a 1995 interview with Roger Ebert. “After I read that script, I was in Arizona and I got in a car and drove six hours to get to the meeting because I had never read anything so unique in terms of a female character. And I walked in the meeting with John Dahl, the director, and I said, ‘John, you are not allowed to hire anyone but me for this film.’ And I wasn’t kidding.”

More here.

Vidya Krishnan in The Atlantic:

Soon after the Bollywood superstar Amitabh Bachchan tweeted that he had tested positive for COVID-19 and been admitted to a Mumbai hospital, the authorities declared his palatial residence in India’s business capital a “containment zone,” and several members of the Bachchan family were announced to have also tested positive. Bachchan is one of the world’s most recognizable actors, a celebrity with no peer in India, and his health was an issue of national concern. Ultimately, his case was a light one, and he was eventually discharged, allowed to quarantine at home.

Yet while the narrow facts of his case appear straightforward, the episode nevertheless spotlights a much broader problem in India: Its coronavirus caseload appears to only be worsening, hamstrung by decades of underinvestment in public health, poor medical infrastructure, and, more recently, a troubling official tolerance of pseudoscience, as well as a growing politicization of health care.

The mere fact that Bachchan tested positive—that he was tested at all—will focus minds in India on the coronavirus pandemic, which has been slowly but surely gathering pace in the country. More than 1.8 million people have so far tested positive, upwards of 48,000 are known to have died of COVID-19, and infections show little sign of abating. Arguably India’s most recognizable celebrity, Bachchan has starred in movies for decades, as have his wife, son, and daughter-in-law, and his high-profile announcement may spur many who were skeptical of getting tested to do so (if they are able) and to take greater precautions: He is quite literally cinematic royalty, some combination of Tom Hanks and Prince Charles (both of whose diagnoses made the virus very real for Americans and Britons, respectively).

More here.

Simon Petch in the Sydney Review of Books:

This, Clive James’s final book, is a collection of his writings on Larkin and his work. James takes his title from the final words of Larkin’s ‘The Whitsun Weddings’ (1959). The ninety four pages, which include copies of one manuscript letter and two typed letters from Larkin to James, don’t offer very much book for your money, but you do get Clive James, who’s always good value. His explanation of why Jack Nicholson is the only Hollywood actor appropriate to play Larkin onscreen justifies the price of admission.

The book consists of eleven reviews and two poems, all published between 1974 and 2018. There’s an introduction, dated 2019, and an undated coda. As a collection of occasional pieces, all of them short, this is anything but a sustained consideration of Larkin’s writing. It’s a bits-and-pieces book, and its critical reflections are hit-and-miss. The misses are few, the parade of hits is good, and James writes as well on Larkin’s prose as on his poetry. The best essay in the book (which is also the longest), ‘On Larkin’s Wit’, is reprinted from Anthony Thwaite’s 1982 collection Larkin at Sixty. Here, James maintains that the jazz reviews that Larkin wrote for the Daily Telegraph, collected in 1970 as All What Jazz, constitute ‘one of the great books of creative criticism in our language’. An extravagant claim, perhaps, but this essay remains a significant revaluation of what Larkin called ‘the one book of mine that no one ever bothers about’.

More here.

Charles King in Nautilus:

In July 1925, Margaret Mead, a doctoral student at Columbia University, set off on a cross-country train journey with a young faculty member, Ruth Benedict. Mead was bound for the west coast and then American Samoa, her first fieldwork expedition as a junior anthropologist. Benedict was stopping in New Mexico to study myth and ritual in the Zuni Pueblo. The journey took them through Ohio to Illinois, across the prairie, then south toward the deserts. It was the longest the two of them had ever spent together, certainly the longest without their husbands in tow.

They had become acquainted more than two years earlier, Mead as an undergraduate at Barnard College, Benedict as her teaching assistant. It had taken time for Mead to stop referring to “Mrs. Benedict,” but over the years, something had changed. “She rests me like a padded chair and a fireplace,” Benedict jotted in her diary. Now, on the train west, Mead would remember weeping in Benedict’s arms, parsing her troubled marriage and other romantic entanglements. Benedict would later lie awake thinking of the nights they spent on the train—making love, kissing Mead’s fingers, trailing her lips across the palm of her hand. “Tofa, my sweetheart,” Mead wrote in a letter once she got to Samoa, using the local term for goodbye. “In my dreams I bury my face in your hair.” She had long signed her notes to Benedict with “love,” as one might to an older sister. But now she could say it all plainly, outright. “And always I love you.”

More here.

Tyson Fisher in Land Line:

Recently, researchers at MIT published a study that looks into autonomous vehicle mobility, employment and policy. The research found that self-driving vehicles will happen later than sooner.

Despite optimism from several stakeholders, including Google and Tesla, that fully automated vehicles will be available soon, MIT researchers believe it may be at least another decade before that becomes a reality. Even then, self-driving cars may be limited to urban and suburban areas in warmer climates. Winter climates and rural areas will experience longer transitions, according to the study.

One study projects employment changes under the assumption all driving becomes fully automated by 2050. However, the MIT study states “this is extremely unlikely to occur.”

“Current best estimates show a slow shift toward Level 4 systems even in trucking, one of the easier use cases, with only limited use by 2030,” the study states. “Overall shifts in other modalities, including fleets and passenger cars, are likely to be no faster, and so disruption to taxi, rideshare, and bus driver jobs is likely to be limited in the near term.”

More here.

Sal Khan in the New York Times:

It is becoming clear that many of our nation’s children could be attending school from home for this school year and possibly longer. If educators and families aren’t empowered with the right support and tools, this will evolve from an education crisis to an education catastrophe.

As the founder of the philanthropically funded nonprofit Khan Academy, which provides free online exercises, videos and software to over 100 million users in 46 languages, I’m something of a poster child for online learning. It all started 16 years ago, when I was working as an analyst at a hedge fund in Boston and learned that my then-12-year-old cousin Nadia — who was visiting for my wedding — was struggling with math. She lived in New Orleans, so I offered to do distance tutoring with her every day. It helped her catch up with her class within a few months. Word soon spread in my family that free tutoring was available, and by 2006 I was working with 15 cousins and family friends in my limited spare time. I decided to make math practice software and videos to help even more. Before I knew it, people who were not my cousins started using those materials. Fast forward to today and that family side project has become my life’s mission: to provide a free, world-class education for anyone, anywhere.

More here.

Emily Tamkin in New Statesman:

Since 1964, the presidential candidate who has won Florida and its 29 electoral college votes has also won the White House in every election except 1992. In that time, the constant has not been whether Florida goes for Republicans or Democrats – both parties have been in power in the past three decades – but that the vote has been close. In 2016, Donald Trump won with 48.6 per cent of the vote compared to Hillary Clinton’s 47.4 percent. In 2008, Barack Obama had 51 percent, compared to John McCain’s 48.2. And no one, of course, can forget the 2000 election, which came down to 537 votes out of six million cast (and a Supreme Court decision that eventually left George W Bush the winner). But why does the White House tend to swing in the same direction as this state? And why is the vote always so tight? What is it that, every four years, keeps our anxious eyes pointed towards the Sunshine State?

…Crucially, this isn’t also just another close presidential election in Florida. It’s happening during a pandemic in which, particularly in Florida, the death toll is still rising at time of writing. The need many will have to vote safely by mail therefore adds a logistical component to the concern about voter representation. “How many people are going to mail their ballot the day before?” Robinson asked, noting that her group is working to let people know that they need to get their votes in on time. “There could be a lot of ballots that aren’t counted.” Trump has generally tried to discredit mail-in voting, but tweeted that mail-in voting was safe in Florida, perhaps recognising that he needs the votes of Florida’s ageing population.

To Fernand Amandi, managing partner at leading multi-ethnic and multi-lingual public opinion research firm Bendixen & Amandi, Trump’s narrative that mail-in voting is illegitimate is the reason that, this time, Democrats will carry the state. “Like cult members, a lot of [Trump] supporters have said we’re not going to vote by mail,” Amandi said. “Just because Republicans aren’t going to vote by mail doesn’t mean millions of Democrats and independents aren’t going to do it.”

More here.

Lorissa Rinehart in Lapham’s Quarterly:

It was no coincidence that the world’s introduction to industrialized warfare determined the shape of Johan Varendonck’s opus on daydreams. Varendonck himself didn’t expect daydreaming to be the subject of his only book; his studies began in a different field. But World War I—and Freud—intervened. Born in 1879 to a Belgian schoolteacher and his wife, Varendonck hadn’t done much to distinguish himself by the time he turned thirty-five. Following in his father’s footsteps, he took up a career in education, becoming a lecturer at Ghent University, just eleven miles from his hometown of Zelzate. He eventually enrolled in a pedagogical doctoral program in Brussels, but the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s declaration of war on July 28, 1914, interrupted his graduate studies and pursuit of a better life.

Academic ambitions notwithstanding, Varendonck volunteered for armed service the moment Kaiser Wilhelm sent his army marching to France via Belgium. His passable command of English earned him a post as translator for the British Royal Naval Division stationed in Antwerp, where the Allies hoped to stop the German war machine before it got up to speed. The Allied commanders had reason to believe they might succeed. In the past, Antwerp had proved nearly impregnable, ringed by a series of earthen and stone fortresses collectively known as the National Redoubt.

But when the Germans arrived in August 1914, their Big Bertha guns effortlessly vaulted Antwerp’s medieval defenses. Bomb-laden zeppelins sailing far above defenders’ bullets dropped their payload on the city’s center. By September the Allies’ chances looked bleak. Things were not that bad for Varendonck, all things considered. His post kept him far from the front while most of the people he was tasked with translating for were occupied with battle, leaving him time to finish his original pedagogical thesis. By early October Varendonck’s scientific investigation of educational processes in Belgium was ready to send back to his advisers. Unfortunately, Antwerp erupted into chaos before he had a chance to put it in the mail. The city’s defenses collapsed on October 10, 1914. German artillery fell like a hailstorm, igniting oil tanks and apartment buildings until the entire city was one enormous conflagration. Civilians poured onto the docks of the Scheldt River, clamoring to board anything that would float. Hoping to fight another day, the Belgian army hastily retreated west, toward the Yser River.

Amid the pandemonium, the pages of Varendonck’s thesis disappeared.

More here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8UGBFID-LW4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mM1H14avork

The Night Poetry Danced With Us

Orlando 49
emblazoned on the back of a t-shirt
worn by a white queer
who looked through and past
our table of Latinx, Indigenous, Black, Muslim queers
right in front of her
as if we never existed
as if we were not sitting there
laughing and thriving
radiating life
insistent in our brown, black, mixed skinned existence
as if we were not the brilliance of the sun streaking fire
when it decides to go down on the horizon
as if you were not our queer siblings
familia yaars dildars
our amours our pyars
our everything
shaking beautiful bronzed hips
the night poetry danced with us
before being shot
the night poetry danced with us
before being assumed to be a shooter
the night poetry danced with us
before it became second nature
to check for exits
the night poetry danced with us
before bullets replaced stanzas
before the breath of our beloveds
became a line break
with too much finality
the night poetry danced with us
before we understood
some only value our lives
after we are gone
the night poetry danced with us
until we realized
we were the poem

by Amal Rana
from Split This Rock