Peter Singer in Project Syndicate:

Last month, the Journal of Controversial Ideas – of which I am a co-editor – published its first issue. The journal is a response to the shrinking boundary, even in liberal democracies, of acceptable discourse. It is specifically designed to provide a forum in which authors can, if they wish, use a pseudonym to avoid running the risk of receiving personal abuse, including death threats, or of irrevocably harming their careers.

There was a time when the threat to academic freedom in democratic countries came primarily from the right. The free speech cause célèbre of the early twentieth century United States featured Scott Nearing, a left-leaning economist at the University of Pennsylvania who was dismissed because his activism for social justice did not sit well with the bankers and corporate leaders on the university’s board of trustees.

Fifty years later, in the McCarthy era, many people were blacklisted or dismissed because of their support for leftist ideas. When I came to Princeton in 1999, Steve Forbes (who was then campaigning for the Republican nomination for president) called for my appointment to be rescinded because he objected to my critique of the traditional doctrine of the sanctity of human life.

Today, however, most of the opposition to freedom of thought and discussion comes from the left.

More here.

Ed Yong in The Atlantic:

This time last year, the United States seemed stuck on a COVID-19 plateau. Although 1,300 Americans were dying from the disease every day, states had begun to reopen in a patchwork fashion, and an anxious nation was looking ahead to an uncertain summer. Twelve months later, the situation is very different. Cases are falling quickly. About half as many people are dying every day. Several vaccines were developed faster than experts had dared to predict, and proved to be more effective than they had dared to hope. Despite a shaky start, the vaccination campaign has been successful, and almost half of the country has received at least one shot, including 85 percent of people older than 65. As the pandemic rages on elsewhere in the world, the U.S. is eyeing a summer of reconnection and rejuvenation.

But there is another crucial difference between May 2020 and May 2021: People have now lived through 14 months of pandemic life. Millions have endured a year of grief, anxiety, isolation, and rolling trauma. Some will recover uneventfully, but for others, the quiet moments after adrenaline fades and normalcy resumes may be unexpectedly punishing. When they finally get a chance to exhale, their breaths may emerge as sighs.

More here.

Peter Beinart in The Guardian:

Last Saturday was Nakba Day, which commemorates the 700,000 Palestinians who were expelled by Israel – or who fled in fear – during the country’s founding in 1948. The commemoration had special resonance this year, since it was Israel’s impending expulsion of six Palestinian families from the East Jerusalem neighbourhood of Sheikh Jarrah that helped trigger the violent struggle currently engulfing Israel-Palestine. For many Palestinians, that imminent expulsion was evidence that the Nakba has still not come to an end.

Every year, commemorating the Nakba represents a kind of mental struggle to remember the past and sustain the hope that it can be overcome – by ensuring that Palestinian refugees and their descendants can return home. In my own community, by contrast, Jewish leaders in Israel and the diaspora demand that Palestinians forget the past and move on. In 2011, Israel’s parliament passed a law that could deny government funds to any institution that commemorates the Nakba. Israeli teachers who mention it in their classes have been reprimanded by Israel’s Ministry of Education. Last year, two Israeli writers, Adi Schwartz and Einat Wilf, published an influential book, The War of Return, which criticised the Palestinian desire for refugee return as emblematic of a “backward-facing mode” and an “inability to reconcile with the past”.

As it happens, I read The War of Return last year just before Tisha B’Av, the day on which Jews mourn the destruction of the temples in Jerusalem and the exiles which followed. On Tisha B’Av itself, I listened to medieval kinnot, or dirges, that describe those events – which occurred, respectively, 2,000 and 2,500 years ago – in the first person and the present tense.

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Osmosis: in which molecules of a solvent pass through a membrane to achieve equilibrium.

Osmosis

Minna Zallman Proctor at Bookforum:

I would imagine that anyone approaching Edmund Gordon’s comprehensive biography, The Invention of Angela Carter, has a memorable “first time” with Carter. When it comes to cult figures of the intelligentsia, the story of the first time is practically de rigueur. Gordon himself mentions his own in his epilogue. During a post-university year in Berlin, he came upon a secondhand copy of The Magic Toyshop, which Carter had described to her editor in 1966 as a “Gothic melodrama about a sort of South Suburban bluebeard toymaker & his household.” A writer Gordon admired, Ali Smith (an iconoclast of her own order), had spoken highly of Carter, whose reputation he’d previously thought had something “off-putting” about it—“a sense, perhaps, that she was just for girls.” Nonetheless, he bought the novel and “tore” through it “in a few intoxicated hours, stunned by the fearless quality of the imagination on display and by the luminous beauty of the prose.”

Carter’s fiction (like the figure of Angela Carter herself) occupies an array of literary territories. She was a postmodernist and a feminist, a fabulist and an inadvertent scholar, a columnist and a cultural critic.

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George Prochnik at Literary Review:

As a tormented young anarchist pacifist pining for radical deliverance while cooped up at home with his parents in Berlin during the First World War, Gershom Scholem felt absolutely committed to one cause: Zionism. The only problem, he acknowledged in his journal, was that Zionists had not yet defined the contents of their ideology. As far as Scholem was concerned, Zionism had no political implications. It did not necessitate an oceanic ingathering of the Jewish people from the diaspora. There was no imperative to farm the Holy Land. The movement, in the eyes of the future pioneering scholar of kabbalah, was a humanistic, anti-bourgeois endeavour that probably required a commitment to living in Palestine or thereabouts. But it did not require the acquisition of sovereign control over territory, let alone taking possession of land belonging to the Arab peoples resident in the country.

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Alison Flood in The Guardian:

Leading Indian authors Pankaj Mishra and Arundhati Roy have spoken out against Penguin Random House India’s decision to publish and promote a book by Narendra Modi during the country’s coronavirus crisis, with Mishra accusing PRH India of “enlist[ing] in a flailing politician’s propaganda campaign”. In a letter published in the London Review of Books blog, Mishra wrote to the chief executive of PRH India, Gaurav Shrinagesh, after the publisher announced it would be reissuing Modi’s book Exam Warriors while, in Mishra’s words, “smoke from mass funeral pyres rose across India”. India suffered a world record one-day death toll from Covid-19 on Wednesday – 4,529 – with the overall figure believed to be much higher than the official death toll of 283,248. Calling Modi “an inspirational leader for the youth”, PRH India describes the 2018 guide as an “inspiring book for students” that will “be a friend in acing exams and facing life”. Advice from Modi includes: “Do not merely dream of becoming a doctor, engineer or lawyer. Think of how best you can make a difference to society and let that ideal guide you”; and: “Proper feedback is one that makes the other person reflect, and not feel repulsed.”

…“Publishing Modi’s Exam Warriors is a similar form of self-abasement, made more ridiculous by the unresolved mystery about Modi’s degrees – a BA by correspondence taken at the age of 28 and an MA in ‘Entire Political Science’ from a university in Gujarat that never offered such a course,” said Roy. “Every effort to verify the authenticity of these claims about his degrees that he has made on oath before he stood for the 2014 elections has been blocked by the universities, the election commission and the courts. So we don’t know what (if any) exams this Exam Warrior took.”

More here.

Peter Mundy in Scientific American:

Since the modern era of research on autism began in the 1980s, questions about social cognition and social brain development have been of central interest to researchers. This year marks the 20th anniversary of the first annual meeting of the International Society for Autism Research (INSAR), and it is evident in this year’s meeting that the growth of social-cognitive neuroscience over the past two decades has significantly enriched autism science. For those unfamiliar with the term, social-cognitive neuroscience is the study of the brain systems that are involved in the causes and effects of social behaviors and social interaction. Some of these involve brain systems involved in thinking about other people’s thoughts or intentions, empathizing, social motivation and the impact of social attention on an individual’s thinking and emotions.

At the same time, research with and for autistic people has also enriched social-cognitive neuroscience and the understanding of how our social minds develop. Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a complex and heterogeneous part of the human condition, or neurodiversity. It is associated with a wide range of life outcomes, from “disorder” or the profound challenges that encumber about 30 percent of affected individuals with minimal language and intellectual disability, to “differences” among people who have well-above-average abilities and accomplishments.

More here.

Sean Illing in Vox:

It’s hard to understand the culture of policing in America from the outside.

There’s an informal code among police officers, “the blue wall of silence,” that encourages them not to talk to outsiders. There have been good attempts to study the police — who they are, what they believe in, what makes them tick — but if you really want to know how they see the world and their role in it, you almost have to become one.

And that’s exactly what Rosa Brooks, a law professor at Georgetown University, did in 2015. Brooks has spent much of her career in the national security world, focusing on human rights and the expanding role of the military in government, but she decided to become a sworn reserve police officer with the Washington, DC, Metropolitan Police Department. After graduating from the police academy, Brooks worked part time as a patrol officer from 2016 to 2020 and eventually wrote a book about her experiences called Tangled Up in Blue: Policing the American City.

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David Guaspari in The New Atlantis:

One pillar of the modern world was the project to transform science from a discipline for contemplating nature into a tool for mastering it. Queen among the new sciences was mathematical physics, made possible by a corresponding transformation of mathematics. Ancient mathematicians, said René Descartes, had misunderstood their subject. They offered a procession of dazzling spectacles, but mathematics properly understood is not the presentation of beautiful chance discoveries. It must instead provide a systematic method for solving problems.

True and oft-heard though this story is, it is also easily taken for granted. Harvey Flaumenhaft’s new book Insights and Manipulations seeks to remedy that with a hands-on guide to this momentous change. To understand that change, he says, and to understand it as progress, “we need to know what it was a step from as well as what it was a step toward.” He presents it as a movement from the Conics of Apollonius of Perga, a brilliant and difficult triumph of ancient mathematics written in the third century b.c., to Descartes’s 1637 Geometry, a decisive stride into modernity. For Apollonius, mathematics was a way of gaining insights into the nature of geometrical forms by envisioning them in the mind; Descartes made mathematics into an activity of manipulation — hence the title of Flaumenhaft’s book.

More here.

Steven Brill in the New York Times:

In a study of the effectiveness of putting calorie counts on menu items, consumers were more likely to make lower-calorie choices if the labels were placed to the left of the food item rather than the right.

“When calories are on the left, consumers receive that information first and evidently think ‘a lot of calories!’ or ‘not so many calories!’ before they see the item,” Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony and Cass R. Sunstein explain in this tour de force of scholarship and clear writing. “By contrast, when people see the food item first, they apparently think ‘delicious!’ or ‘not so great!’ before they see the calorie label. Here again, their initial reaction greatly affects their choices.” This hypothesis is supported, the authors write in a typically clever aside, by the “finding that for Hebrew speakers, who read right to left, the calorie label has a significantly larger impact if it is on the right rather than the left.”

These inconsistencies are all about noise, which Kahneman, Sibony and Sunstein define as “unwanted variability in judgments.”

More here.

Bird

I set my alarm by an inner dove,
wake to crows.

Wherever the jay flies
my sparrows come after.

But above the jittery sandpiper,
a petrel with a beach of wing

is an intimate of the sun, single robin on the skylawn,
never flocking with the starlings,

singular and steady—planet light, hawk gaze,
heron waiting on the fishrise.

Within that silence find love even for the carrion birds—
vulture, raven, gull.

by Kim Garcia
from The Brooklyn Quarterly

Colette Davidson in The Christian Science Monitor:

France’s literary institutions have long struggled with a diversity problem. Though France doesn’t collect statistics on race and ethnicity, a majority of top editors and authors have historically been white. Its literary awards heavily favor men: Since France’s top literature prize, the Prix Goncourt, began in 1903, only 12 women have won. The integration of marginalized literary voices, especially those of second-generation French or people of color, has come in fits and starts. Until the 1990s, literature written by children of immigrant parents of Maghrebis descent was categorized using a pejorative term for Arab. The publication of a 1999 novel by Rachid Djaïdani, which described daily life in France’s housing projects where many immigrants live, was a landmark in breaking the mold. Another was the publication in 2007 of a controversial literary collection by second-generation French writers about their complex relationship with France.

But progress has been incremental. Publishers still gravitate to books by people of color from Francophone Africa or the United States, rather than minority writers who grew up in France. “I’ve always been struck by the lack of representation in French literature of my reality: what it means to be Black in France,” says Gladys Marivat, a Paris-based literary journalist. In 2015, she interviewed all of the major publishing houses in Paris as part of an investigation into the lack of diversity in French literature; her report went unpublished. “When I asked [publishers] why this was the case,” says Ms. Marivat, “the answer was always the same: a total incomprehension of my question. They said, ‘But we publish authors from Francophone Africa.’ But that’s not the same thing.”

More here.

From 1843 Magazine:

The malevolence of cybercrime often seems all the worse for the impenetrable jargon used to describe attacks. Perhaps a “time bomb” blew up your computer, or malicious software turned your smartphone into a “zombie”? Even lower-tech crimes get strange labels: “shoulder-surfing” refers to when scammers nab your passwords by literally looking over your shoulder as you type (sometimes with binoculars). “Catfishing” is when you’re tricked into thinking you’re in an online relationship and unknowingly send cash to scammers using a fake profile (the supermodel who claims to have the hots for you may in fact be a 52-year-old man called Steve).

Confusing you is exactly what these cyber-attackers want. And they’re worryingly successful: in America the amount of money lost to cybercrime increased threefold from 2015 to 2019. And that was before the pandemic pushed more criminals to focus on internet crime – just as many of us started living our entire lives online. Online criminals are often dubbed “hackers”. The term itself is controversial: many geeks use it to describe anyone with an advanced understanding of computers, and prefer the term “malicious hacker” for someone who uses their skills for nefarious purposes. They point out that hackers can also use their knowledge for good, to fight the bad guys. If you want to know the difference between online outlaws and angels, start by learning the language they speak.

More here.

Alex Kong at n+1:

THE CHARACTERS in Éric Rohmer’s films seem to be perpetually vacationing—an activity they elevate into an art form. A Rohmer holiday is languorous and leisurely, stretching on until it’s described in terms that barely make sense. The vacationers compute how much time is left not in days, but in entire months. They often run out of things to do. Sometimes they complain that their vacations are too long—which to an American sensibility can only register as a category mistake, like trying to claim the number 3 is red. This exquisitely dilated temporality seems like a dispatch from an alien planet—but if we were pressed to attach a name to it, a good one might be: social democracy. There’s a morbid anthropological interest in observing this vanished, inaccessible system, which in my more pessimistic moments strikes me as more fantastical than anything out of Buñuel.

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Katy Waldman at The New Yorker:

“Everybody” ’s central character is the Viennese psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich, and perhaps it’s no accident that Laing presents him as a man in pieces. This is a formal description—fragments of Reich’s story are woven throughout—and a thematic one: the doctor, whom Laing praises as a “connector,” emerges as a teetering amalgam of brilliance, delusion, empathy, and prejudice. Born in 1897, Reich was one of Freud’s most famous protégés. He treated mostly working-class patients and believed that they were “carrying their past experiences around in their bodies, storing their emotional pain as a kind of tension,” which he called “character armor.” Therapy could help, as could Marxism, but what was really needed, Reich thought, was a revolution in sex, the liberatory potential of which had been warped by an extractive economic system. Reich and Freud fell out over their differing views on repression and Hitler—Freud wanted to remain neutral, while Reich urged resistance—and after Reich fled to the United States, in 1939, he grew paranoid and grandiose. He invented the orgone accumulator, a freestanding closet designed to collect orgasmic energy, and the Cloudbuster, the better to wage war on the weather. He eventually died in prison, after the Food and Drug Administration ordered him to stop selling orgone accumulators. (He didn’t.)

more here.