Abhijit Banerjee in The Print:

Many people have told me that they cannot cook to save their lives. I don’t believe them. A lot of them can build a dresser out of an IKEA box – despite the fact that the instructions read like they were written by a wall-eyed robot whose first language was Esperanto, while writing code in C++ or programming a television set to switch between the news and a soccer match. How could it be possible that they are not able to follow a simple set of instructions? 

Most culinary disasters, of which there are many, come from either underconfidence or overconfidence, and usually both. What undermines confidence is in part the memory of past disasters, cakes that leaked dough, meat that tasted like old leather, fish that suddenly melted into the stew, combined with the mysterious language that most cookbooks adopt.

My favourite example is from a Bengali cookbook that I owned when I first moved to the United States, which tells you, blandly, to wait till the onions have a nice colour. What is a nice colour, I would wonder, watching the onions go from translucent white to a rich golden, a reddish brown, a darker brown and finally a charred black. When should I have stopped?

More here.

Alex Williams in The New York Times:

Before she married her husband, Kiersten Little considered him ideal father material. “We were always under the mentality of, ‘Oh yeah, when you get married, you have kids,” she said. “It was this expected thing.” Expected, that is, until the couple took an eight-month road trip after Ms. Little got her master’s degree in public health at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, N.C. “When we were out west — California, Oregon, Washington, Idaho — we were driving through areas where the whole forest was dead, trees knocked over,” Ms. Little said. “We went through southern Louisiana, which was hit by two hurricanes last year, and whole towns were leveled, with massive trees pulled up by their roots.” Now 30 and two years into her marriage, Ms. Little feels “the burden of knowledge,” she said. The couple sees mounting disaster when reading the latest climate change reports and Arctic ice forums. Anxiety about having children has set in.

“Over the last year I thought, ‘Oh my God, I have to make a decision, it’s not that far away,” she said. “But I don’t know how I could change my mind. Over the next 10 years, I feel like there are only going to be more reasons to not want to have a kid, not the other way around.” Such fears are not necessarily unfounded. Every new human comes with a carbon footprint. In a note to investors this past summer, Morgan Stanley analysts concluded that the “movement to not have children owing to fears over climate change is growing and impacting fertility rates quicker than any preceding trend in the field of fertility decline.”

More here.

Scott Sayare in Harper’s:

Like many of the great perfumers, Jean Carles was a son of Grasse, a country town in the hills north of Cannes, on the French Riviera. Grasse, once a state unto itself, sits in a natural amphitheater of south-facing limestone cliffs, at the head of a valley of meadows sloping gently to the sea. The combined effect of this geography and the dulcet Mediterranean climate is a harvest of roses, jasmine, and bitter-orange blossoms that is exceptionally fragrant, and for hundreds of years the town has been known as the capital of the perfume trade. When Carles began his training, early in the twentieth century, a priesthood of Grassois perfumers presided over the industry. These so-called nez, or noses, were regarded with an awe of the sort that attaches, perhaps especially in France, to artistic genius. They were vessels of divine talent, their creations as wondrously perfect as the flowers of Grasse.

Would-be nez were initiated through an apprenticeship of several years, during which the secrets of the perfumer’s method were carefully revealed. The language of perfume is borrowed largely from music. Perfumers are said to “compose” their fragrances, merging individual “notes” into sonorous “accords” and arranging those accords in “harmony.” As his training progressed, Carles came to realize with some dismay that, for all its pretensions to art, perfumery proceeded almost entirely by trial and error. The noses selected ingredients by little more than instinct, and dosed them nearly at random. Perfumers worked, Carles later wrote scathingly, “in haphazard fashion, in the expectation of a potential miracle.” Many of the best formulas had been discovered “almost by chance,” he reported, “to the unfeigned surprise of their authors.” He set out to systematize perfumery, to establish a comprehensive theory of fragrance creation.

Carles proposed to arrange the scent realm in an orderly grid.

More here.

Spiderweb

From other
angles the
fibers look
fragile, but
not from the
spider’s, always
hauling coarse
ropes, hitching
lines to the
best posts
possible. It’s
heavy work
everyplace,
fighting sag,
winching up
give. It
isn’t ever
delicate
to live.

by Kay Ryan
from The Best of It
Grove Press, 2010

Christian Parenti in Nonsite.org:

How Herbert Marcuse’s widow used a Scientology-linked cult’s methodology to gamify Identity Politics and thus helped steer the U.S. Left down the dead-end path of identitarian psychobabble.

In the summer of 2021, a social justice training exercise called the Privilege Walk made headlines when outraged Republican lawmakers Tom Cotton and Dan Crenshaw denounced it on the U.S. Capitol floor as racist. The so-called Privilege Walk, or Power Shuffle, is a workshop activity much beloved by the diversity training industry, in which a group of participants stand together on a line, then each take one step forward or backwards in response to a facilitator reading a series of statements such as: “If you’re a white male, take one step forward. If you were ever made uncomfortable by a joke about your ethnicity, gender, appearance, or sexual orientation, take one step back.” At the end participants find themselves arrayed along a continuum of “privilege.” Thus sorted, discussion ensues.

The Privilege Walk is now a standard element in the diversity training used by nonprofits, churches, universities, corporations, and even some parts of the U.S. military. Proponents of the Walk say it helps us “unlearn oppression” and “build alliances across difference.” Mainstream critics say the exercise propagates divisive identity politics and mock it as foundational to the Oppression Olympics. A Marxist critique would say that the Walk transmogrifies material problems into cultural ones, economic exploitation becomes the more nebulous problem of oppression. Both are forms of domination, yet they are each very distinct. When rendered as oppression, the material problem of class power is replaced by the attitudinal problem of “classism.” Furthermore, the Privilege Walk relies on a methodological individualism that assumes macro-level social phenomena have micro-level causes and solutions.

More here.

Kathryn Hughes at The Guardian:

Publishers are getting ready to celebrate the centenary of 1922, the year the world emerged from war and pandemic to become recognisably modern. It was then that James Joyce’s Ulysses and TS Eliot’s The Waste Land were published, the USSR and the BBC were established and Tutankhamun’s tomb was discovered. If this last example seems slight by comparison, it is worth remembering that the craze for Egyptian hieroglyphics fed directly into art deco, the visual style that is synonymous with the “roaring 20s” to this day.

Nick Rennison has sensibly got in early, bringing out his Scenes from a Turbulent Year while other authors and publishers are still putting the finishing touches to their manuscripts. In this enjoyable slice of popular history, he assembles a month-by-month almanac, including all the most notable moments from science, politics, art and culture.

more here.

Charles Johnson at the NY Times:

“There was a period when he was turning out 7,000 words a day,” writes Tomalin. “He kept working at what seems an impossible rate, producing stories so varied one might easily think they came from a team of writers.” Few writers will equal his worldwide impact on letters. With Jules Verne and the publisher Hugo Gernsback, he invented the genre of science fiction. A crater on the moon’s far side is named after him. Nominated four times for the Nobel Prize in Literature, Wells, the futurist, foresaw the coming of aircraft, tanks, the sexual revolution, the atomic bomb, and created the classic templates for every story that has been written about alien invasion (his inspiration for “The War of the Worlds,” says Tomalin, was “Tasmania, and the disaster the arrival of the Europeans had been for its people, who were annihilated”) and time travel (he was the first to imagine such travel made possible by a machine).

more here.

Via Crooked Timber.

Willem deVries in Aeon:

To an unusual degree among the great philosophers, G W F Hegel’s influence has waxed and waned. At his death in 1831, he was the reigning voice in German philosophy. His followers, however, soon split into opposed camps: the Right Hegelians, a conservative and religious group, and the Left Hegelians, a socially radical group including Karl Marx. Amid their squabbles, Hegel’s star began to fade in Germany. But in the late 19th century, it once again rose to prominence in the rest of Europe and in the United States. Certain strains of 20th-century Continental philosophy were deeply marked by his influence, such as French existentialism and the Frankfurt school of critical theory. But 20th-century Anglophone philosophy reacted strongly against the neo-Hegelian thought that dominated the universities at the end of the 19th century. In English-speaking lands (including the US), Hegel has lived under a cloud for the past century: his writing too dense, his ideas too abstract, his politics as well as his theology too suspect. His works have been treated with derision in mainstream Anglophone philosophy, and excluded from the canon that trained philosophers need to master.

The logjam that blocked English-language Hegel studies, however, is finally crumbling, and a number of Americans are leading the way. Again, Hegel’s star rises. It isn’t outlandish to suggest that the new openness to Hegel marks an important inflection point in US philosophy.

More here.

Cedric Durand and Adam Tooze debate if and how the current shortfall in energy supply is directly connected to climate policy. First, Durand over at Sidecar:

[C]apitalism has already experienced the first major economic shock related to the transition beyond carbon. The surge in energy prices is due to several factors, including a disorderly rebound from the pandemic, poorly designed energy markets in the UK and EU which exacerbate price volatility, and Russia’s willingness to secure its long-term energy incomes. However, at a more structural level, the impact of first efforts made to restrict the use of fossil fuels cannot be overlooked. Due to government limits on coal burning, plus shareholders’ growing reluctance to commit to projects that could be largely obsolete in thirty years, investment in fossil fuel has been falling. Although this contraction of the supply is not enough to save the climate, it is still proving too much for capitalist growth.

Putting together several recent events gives a taste of things to come. In the Punjab region of India, severe shortages of coal have caused unscheduled power blackouts. In China, more than half the provincial jurisdictions have imposed strict power-rationing measures. Several companies, including key Apple suppliers, have recently been forced to halt or reduce operations at facilities in Jiangsu province, after local governments restricted the supply of electricity. Those restrictions were an attempt to comply with national emissions targets by restricting coal-fired power generation, which still accounts for about two thirds of China’s electricity.

Next, Tooze over at Chartbook:

The attraction of this kind of argument for a crisis-theorist of a Marxist bent is obvious. It has about it the ring of a contradiction from which one could then derive a general crisis model. It has also had a surprising amount of currency in the pages of the FT. It is, after all, a plausible-seeming scenario. But, as an account of the 2021 energy crisis it is fundamentally misleading. It attributes far too much influence to climate policy and mistakes the basic dynamics of investment in the sector. Read more »

Jennifer Ouellette in WIRED:

IN 1961, OSAMU SHIMOMURA AND Frank Johnson isolated a protein from jellyfish that glow green under UV light. Corals, too, can fluoresce in a wide range of hues, thanks to similar proteins. Now scientists at Harvard University have genetically modified the three-banded panther worm to enable the creature to emit a similar green glow, according to a new paper published in the journal Developmental Cell. Their hope is to uncover the secrets to regeneration.

Most animals exhibit some form of regeneration: regrowing hair, for instance, or knitting a fractured bone back together. But some creatures are capable of particularly amazing regenerative feats, and studying the mechanisms by which they accomplish these could have important implications for human aging. If a salamander loses a leg, the limb will grow back, for example, while some geckos can detach their tails as a distraction to evade predators and then regrow them later. The zebra fish can regrow a lost or damaged fin, as well as repairing a damaged heart, retina, pancreas, brain, or spinal cord. Cut a planarian flatworm, a jellyfish, or a sea anemone in half, and it will regenerate its entire body.

And then there is the three-banded panther worm (Hofstenia miamia), a tiny creature that looks a bit like a plump grain of rice, so named because of its trademark trio of cream-colored stripes across its body. If a panther worm is cut into three parts, each part will generate into a fully formed worm within eight weeks or so.

More here.

Reed Gochberg in Smithsonian:

On Christmas Day in 1839, 17-year-old Ellen Sewall received gifts from two suitors who happened, unfortunately, to be brothers. From John, she received a pale pink opal. From Henry, she received a collection of poems. Within a year, she had rejected both men’s offers of marriage—but she kept their gifts.

Sewall (later Osgood) had crossed paths with the Thoreau brothers that summer while visiting her aunt in Concord, Massachusetts. She would remain friends with the younger sibling, Henry David Thoreau, for the rest of her life and the elder, John Thoreau Jr., until his sudden death three years later from tetanus. At some point around a decade after they first met, Henry, who would go on to become a Transcendentalist philosopher and the author of Walden, sent Osgood another gift: an intricately built box designed to hold rocks and minerals. Now housed at the Concord Museum, this box—and the collection of specimens within it—has long been classified as the property of Osgood’s husband, Joseph, a minister and education reformer. In truth, however, the collection belonged to Ellen. It was the product of her lifelong interest in geology and her friendship with the now-famous Henry.

More here.

Introduction to Poetry

I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem’s room
and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author’s name on the shore.

But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.

by Billy Collins

Richard Thompson Ford in The Hedgehog Review:

The pursuit of authenticity in fashion has taken more than a few interesting turns in the modern world. Consider its role in the political project of President Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire, who during the early 1970s imposed a series of cultural reforms known as the retour à l’authenticité (return to authenticity) designed to rid the nation of European influences. Cities named after Europeans and colonial officials were given African names: Leopoldville became Kinshasa; Stanleyville, named after the Welsh explorer who established European rule, became Kisangani. Mobutu’s government encouraged citizens to change their Christian names and threatened any parent giving a child a Western name with five years’ imprisonment.

Mobutu also banned European attire, imposing a sort of national uniform—a Mao-style tunic called an abacost—short for à bas le costume, or “down with the suit”—inspired by a visit to the People’s Republic of China in 1973. The abacost, thick horn-rim glasses, and a leopard-skin fez or toque became the signature style of dress for Mobutu, who controlled Zaire until 1997.

More here.

Jenann Ismael at the IAI:

Any attempt to describe the universe as a totality inevitably involves self-reference. This isn’t something that one often confronts in physics. Most day-to-day physics is modelling other systems: cells, gases, planets. We maintain a separation of subject and object, or of investigator and system being investigated. And even though cosmology is explicitly devoted to the study of the universe as a whole, it is customary in cosmology to maintain the imaginative fiction that we – the people modelling the universe – are looking at it from the outside. We adopt, that is to say, the God’s Eye View.

Ultimately, though, we are part of the universe. And that means that however we regiment the universe, whatever regime we work in, if we aim for a theory that describes all of existence, self-reference is unavoidable. Any system that is modelling the universe as a whole – aiming for full coverage of all of existence – is going to encounter self-reference. This is something that we can ignore in some contexts. It matters in others.

The people that have unavoidably encountered it are people who are trying to program an artificial general intelligence (an AGI).

More here.