Sigal Samuel in Vox:

It was a Monday morning, which was reason enough to meditate. I was anxious about the day ahead, and so, as I’ve done countless times over the past few years, I settled in on my couch for a short meditation session. But something was different this morning.

Gently squeezing my forehead was a high-tech meditation headset, outfitted with sensors that would read my brain waves to tell me when I was calm and when I was, well, me. Beside me, my phone was running an app that paired over Bluetooth with the headset. It would give me audio feedback on my brain’s performance in real time, then score me with points and awards.

This was the Muse headband, an innovation in mindfulness that picks up on Silicon Valley’s penchant for quantifying every aspect of ourselves through wearable tech — the idea being that the more data you have on your brain waves, heart rate, sleep, and other bodily functions, the more you can optimize the machine that is you. But a thought nagged at me: Isn’t there something self-defeating and contradictory about trying to optimize meditation by making it all about achieving success in a gamified app? The underlying technology is definitely intriguing. Muse is an application of neurofeedback, a tool for training yourself to regulate your brain waves. Neurofeedback began gaining popularity years ago in clinical contexts, as research showed it had the potential to help people struggling with conditions like ADHD and PTSD.

More here.

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

I have seen many things (corpses, the Northern Lights, a beached whale), but a few sights have left a particularly vivid impression. One is of a boy I spotted in Istanbul eighteen years ago. He was fifteen or so, with a pathetic whispy moustache, wearing a suit for what appeared to be the first time. We were in the textile district of Zeytinburnu, and it seemed to me he was likely beginning a new life in his father’s small business, though I could be wrong. Whatever the occasion, the boy had deemed fitting to commission the labor of an even smaller boy, nine years old or so, to shine his shoes. The shoeshine kid was kneeling on the ground, scrubbing away with rags and polish from his portable kit, a borderline-homeless street gamin for whom all of our rhetoric about the sacred innocence of childhood means nothing at all. The fifteen-year-old stared down haughtily, like a small sovereign, and the nine-year-old, knowing his place, did not dare even to look up.

Such is the way of the world, our collective, complacency-inducing clichés invite us to think on such occasions. Curiously, such a thought comes to us most naturally when we are observing an instance of domination as it were from above. The haughty kid dared to look down on the lowly kid, and yet if he had noticed he was being observed his haughtiness could quickly have curdled into shame. The further haughtiness of the ultimate obsever, in turn —in the event, me (as far as I know I was not being observed myself)— seems to arise from the passive and prejudicial presumption that the world of Turkish textile merchants and their sons is somehow a more accurate approximation of the mythical state of nature than what we are used to seeing in, say, a fast-food drive-through or a CostCo self-checkout.

But this is of course an illusion.

More here.

Adam Tooze in The Guardian:

When it comes to climate finance, the gap between what is needed and what is on the table is dizzying. The talk at the conference was all about the annual $100bn (£75bn) that rich countries had promised to poorer nations back in 2009. The rich countries have now apologised for falling short. The new resolution is to make up the difference by 2022 and then negotiate a new framework. It is symbolically important and of some practical help. But, as everyone knows, it falls laughably short of what is necessary. John Kerry, America’s chief negotiator, said so himself in a speech to the CBI. It isn’t billions we need, it is trillions. Somewhere between $2.6tn and $4.6tn every year in funding for low-income countries to mitigate and adapt to the crisis. Those are figures, Kerry went on to say, no government in the world is going to match. Not America. Not China.

We should take the hint. There isn’t going to be a big green Marshall plan. Nor are Europe or Japan going to come up with trillions in government money either. The solution, if there is to be one, is not going to come from rich governments shouldering the global burden on national balance sheets.

So, how does Kerry propose to close the gap? As far as he is concerned, the solution is private business.

More here.

Robert Meagher in Literary Hub:

On Thursday evening, March 28, every seat and open space in Columbia University’s McMillin Theater was taken. Those who still stood in line and hoped for entry were out of luck. The scene was without precedent. No lecture delivered in French at Columbia had ever drawn more than two or three hundred listeners, and yet four or five times that many had come to hear Albert Camus read his prepared remarks entitled “La Crise de l’Homme” (“The Human Crisis”). What they heard was not the cultural excursion they had come for. Instead, it was arguably the most prophetic and unsettling speech Camus ever gave.

On that night, in less than thirty minutes, he somehow managed to distill and convey his deepest fears and steepest challenges in words that have lost none of their urgency or relevance in the 75 years since he spoke them. Before we move on to what he had to say that evening, the chosen title of his brief talk calls for careful scrutiny.

More here.

Jo Lawson-Tancred at The New Criterion:

The title of Tate Britain’s latest exhibition, “Hogarth and Europe,” is slightly misleading. Setting out, as it does, to “suggest the cross currents, parallels and sympathies that crossed borders” during William Hogarth’s time, it more effectively makes clear some obvious cultural differences. Hogarth is celebrated for his social satires of eighteenth-century life but each time he is compared with a European contemporary—the curators have placed his works beside pieces from Amsterdam, Paris, Venice, and beyond—Hogarth only appears more bawdy, more biting, and more British.

Take, for example, the group of Venetian painters. Pietro Longhi may have elicited comparisons to Hogarth for his genre scenes, but The Painter in His Studio (ca. 1741–44), in which an artist paints an aristocratic young woman seated in his studio, feels like a straightforward portrayal of fashionable society and lacks the narrative vitality of Hogarth’s The Distressed Poet (1733–35).

more here.

Norma Clarke at Literary Review:

Few historians write better about pictures than Uglow, and her commentaries make you look and look again at bright colour plates that deliver little shocks. Physically, linocuts are not large: the whirligig of Cyril’s The Merry-go-round and the glorious swirl of ’Appy ’Ampstead burst from confined spaces; The Eight and Bringing in the Boat are not much bigger than a sheet of A4. The technical ability required to succeed in this medium is immense. The same could be said for piecing together the lives of individuals who covered their tracks and told themselves stories that were only partially true. Enough scraps survive to suggest that Cyril loved Sybil and was sad to lose her (he went back to his ‘quiet’ and kindly, amenable wife, and nothing was said in the family about his twenty-year absence). Sybil, who settled happily on Vancouver Island and whose reputation grew as she continued to work, was always busy, if not sketching and painting and linocutting then teaching, making her own clothes and boiling prodigious quantities of jam. To her brisk denial that her domestic relationship with her artist-collaborator had been that of lover, Uglow responds, ‘and who can deny her the right to possess the facts of her own life?’

more here.

Geese

That day the sun rose as if
it was the most natural thing
in the world; as if the long lake
glaciers had dug in the hard

bed of a withered sea
would keep the sea’s salt
buried forever like treasure;
as if the least you could expect

was for geese to swim through
blue air in a luminous shoal,
a great white mesh hauled
from the deep blue of the lake;

as if snow itself had hatched
a flock of fat flakes on the ground
and taught them how to fly
under their own steam; or as if

it should come as no surprise
to find yourself amazed,
between the salt and the sunlight,
catching snow-geese with your bare eyes.

by Robert Travers
from The Yale Review

Jessa Crispin in Boston Review:

Last May, after the Isla Vista shooter’s manifesto revealed a deep misogyny, women went online to talk about the violent retaliation of men they had rejected, to describe the feeling of being intimidated or harassed. These personal experiences soon took on a sense of universality. And so #yesallwomen was born—yes all women have been victims of male violence in one form or another.

I was bothered by the hashtag campaign. Not by the male response, which ranged from outraged and cynical to condescending, nor the way the media dove in because the campaign was useful fodder. I recoiled from the gendering of pain, the installation of victimhood into the definition of femininity—and from the way pain became a polemic.

The campaign extended beyond Twitter. At online magazines such as Impose, The Hairpin, and The Toast, writers from Emma Aylor to Roxane Gay told similar stories in 2,500 words rather than 140 characters. Suddenly women writers were being valued for their stories of surviving violence and trauma. Bestsellers such as Leslie Jamison’s The Empathy Exams portrayed women as inherently vulnerable. The New York Times Book Review recently proclaimed “a moment” for the female personal essayist.

No longer are the news or male commentators telling women they are at risk in the big, bad world, a decades-old manipulative ploy to keep us “safe” at home where we belong. Women are repeating this story for a different effect: women are a breed apart—unified in our experience and responses, distinct from those of men.

This emotional segregation is not good for us. I am worried about the implications of throwing the label “women’s pain” around individual experiences of suffering, and I am even more uncomfortable with women who feel free to speak for all women. I worry about making pain a ticket to gain entry into the women’s club. And I worry that the assumption of vulnerability threatens to invigorate just the sexist evils it aims to combat by demanding that men serve as shields against it.

More here.

Brandon Kiem in Nautilus:

In the annals of transportation history persists a tale of how automobiles in the early 20th century helped cities conquer their waste problems. It’s a tidy story, so to speak, about dirty horses and clean cars and technological innovation. As typically told, it’s a lesson we can learn from today, now that cars are their own environmental disaster, and one that technology can no doubt solve. The story makes perfect sense to modern ears and noses: After all, Americans love their cars! And who’d want to walk through ankle-deep horse manure to buy a newspaper? There’s just one problem with the story. It’s wrong.

For a recent telling, you can turn to SuperFreakonomics, the best-selling 2009 book by economist Steven D. Levitt and journalist Stephen J. Dubner. The authors describe how, in the late 19th century, the streets of fast-industrializing cities were congested with horses, each pulling a cart or a coach, one after the other, in some places three abreast. There were something like 200,000 horses in New York City alone, depositing manure at a rate of roughly 35 pounds per day, per horse. It piled high in vacant lots and “lined city streets like banks of snow.” The elegant brownstone stoops so beloved of contemporary city-dwellers allowed homeowners to “rise above a sea of manure.” In Rochester, N. Y., health officials calculated that the city’s annual horse waste would, if collected on a single acre, make a 175-foot-tall tower.

“The world had seemingly reached the point where its largest cities could not survive without the horse but couldn’t survive with it, either,” write Levitt and Dubner. A main solution, as they portray it, came in the form of cars, which, compared to horses, were a godsend, their adoption inevitable. “The automobile, cheaper to own and operate than a horse-drawn vehicle was proclaimed an ‘environmental savior.’ Cities around the world were able to take a deep breath—without holding their noses at last—and resume their march of progress.” To Levitt and Dubner, this historical turnabout teaches that technological innovation solves problems, and if it creates new problems, innovation will solve those, too.

It’s far too simplistic an interpretation. Cars didn’t replace horses, at least not in the way we usually think, and it was social as much as technological progress that solved the era’s pollution problems. As we confront our current car troubles—particulate and greenhouse gas pollutions, accidents and deaths, wasteful swaths of the landscape dedicated to automobiles—these are lessons we’d do well to recall.

More here.

Morgan Meis in The New Yorker:

Gazing with recognition at this pig, Burhan also noticed the painted silhouettes of two human hands toward its rear. The over-all look of the art work suggested to Burhan that it was very old—but how old?

Thus began a long process of trying to give the cave art a proper date. Experts were brought in from Griffith. Maxime Aubert, an archeologist and geochemist, decided to use a method called uranium-series dating. He removed some of the calcite on the surface of the painting, which archeologists sometimes call “cave popcorn,” and then analyzed it. Anything under the calcite layer had to be at least as old as what was on the surface. A number of problems arose with the machine that actually did the dating—the Nu Plasma Multi Collector Inductively Coupled Plasma Mass Spectrometer. Like “a Formula One race car,” Aubert said, it requires a team of highly trained engineers just to keep it going. Still, months later, a date was handed down: the painting of the warty pig was at least 45,500 years old. This makes it the oldest known example of figurative cave art in the world.

Scott Alexander in Astral Codex Ten:

Educational attainment is closely correlated with intelligence, but not perfectly correlated. How far you go in school depends not just on your IQ, but on other skills: how hard-working and motivated you are, how well you can cope with adversity – and arguably also less desirable qualities, like whether you so desperately seek societal approval that you’re willing to throw away your entire twenties on a PhD with no job prospects at the end of it. “Genes for educational attainment” will be a combination of genes for intelligence, and genes for this other stuff.

At some point, some geneticists just did the hard thing and found some actual genes for actual intelligence, separate from educational attainment. And if you have both the educational attainment genes and the intelligence genes, you can subtract the one from the other to find the non-intelligence-related genes that affect educational attainment in other ways.

More here.

Hamid Dabashi at Al Jazeera:

“Arabs” are not real people in these works of fiction. Arrakis in Dune are not Iraqis in their homeland. They are figurative, metaphoric and metonymic. They are a mere synecdoche for a literary historiography of American Orientalism. They are tropes – mockups that are there for the white narrator to tell his triumphant story.

The world at large will fall into a trap if we start arguing with these fictive white interlocutors, and telling them we are really not what they think we are. It is not just a losing battle. It is a wrong battle. This is not where the real battle-line is.

You do not fight Hollywood with critical argument. You fight Hollywood with Akira Kurosawa, Satyajit Ray, Abbas Kiarostami, Elia Suleiman, Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Moufida Tlatli, Ousmane Sembène, Yasujirō Ozu, Guillermo del Toro, Mai Masri, ad gloriam. You do not battle misrepresentation. You signal, celebrate, and polish representations that are works of art.

Holly Williams in The Guardian:

Huma Qureshi has the perfect title for her short story collection. Things We Do Not Tell the People We Love strikingly encapsulates a major theme of the book: the inability to communicate honestly with the most important people in your life. Qureshi’s stories keenly identify the everyday tragedies of feeling profoundly unknown or unheard, of holding secrets and misunderstandings.

Formerly a writer for the Observer and the Guardian, Qureshi published a memoir, How We Met, earlier this year about dating men her parents considered marriage material, before falling in love with a white British man. Her own story could slot neatly into this, her first fiction anthology. Qureshi’s stories feature a cast of – mostly – youngish women of Pakistani heritage, often struggling with overbearing, judgmental and oppressive mothers, blindly insensitive male partners, or both. These tales vividly capture the experience of feeling constrained by family expectations, but also of not quite fitting the norms of British culture either.

The terrain can get repetitive; this dilemma is usually felt by women who’ve left behind immigrant communities for a white, middle-class London milieu; there are many writers and journalists. Pressure points recur, too: in several stressful holidays, tolerable relationships become intolerable. And occasionally, the responses to monstrous mothers tip into melodrama; although it won the Harper’s Bazaar 2020 short story prize, I didn’t quite buy the murderous intent in The Jam Maker.

More here.

Arthur C. Brooks in The Atlantic:

A friend of mine once shared what I considered a bit of unadulterated wisdom: “If I wouldn’t invite someone into my house, I shouldn’t let them into my head.” But that’s easier said than done. Social media has opened up our heads so that just about any trespasser can wander in. If you tweet whatever crosses your mind about a celebrity, it could quite possibly reach the phone in her hand as she sits on her couch in her house.

The real problem isn’t technology—it’s human nature. We are wired to care about what others think of us. As the Roman Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius observed almost 2,000 years ago, “We all love ourselves more than other people, but care more about their opinion than our own,” whether they are friends, strangers, or enemies.

This tendency may be natural, but it can drive us around the bend if we let it. If we were perfectly logical beings, we would understand that our fears about what other people think are overblown and rarely worth fretting over. But many of us have been indulging this bad habit for as long as we can remember, so we need to take deliberate steps to change our minds.

More here.