Jeff Tollefson in Nature:

US President Joe Biden’s administration wants to create a US$6.5-billion agency to accelerate innovations in health and medicine — and revealed new details about the unit last month¹. Dubbed ARPA-Health (ARPA-H), it is the latest in a line of global science agencies now being modelled on the renowned US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), whose work a generation ago laid the foundation for the modern Internet.

…The US Department of Defense established DARPA in 1958, one year after the Soviet Union launched the world’s first satellite, Sputnik 1. The goal was to avoid falling behind the Soviets, and to ensure that the United States remained a world leader in technology. DARPA was instrumental in early computing research, as well as in developing technologies such as GPS and unmanned aerial vehicles (See ‘Following in DARPA’s footsteps’).

DARPA functions differently from other major US science funding agencies, and has a leaner budget ($3.5 billion). Its roughly 100 programme managers, borrowed for stints of 3–5 years from academia or industry, have broad latitude in what they fund, and actively engage with their teams, enforcing aggressive deadlines and monitoring progress along the way. By comparison, projects funded by agencies such as the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) typically see little engagement between programme managers and the researchers they fund, beyond annual progress reports. Projects funded by these agencies also tend towards being those that are likely to succeed — and thus typically represent more incremental advances, says William Bonvillian, a policy researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge who has studied DARPA.

More here.

Where Will the Next One Come From

The next one will come from the air
It will be an overripe pumpkin
It will be the missing shoe

The next one will climb down
From the tree
When I’m asleep

The next one I will have to sow
For the next one I will have
To walk in the rain

The next one I shall not write
It will rise like bread

It will be the curse coming home

by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra
from Smith College Poetry Center

Justin E. H. Smith in his Substack Newsletter:

In her influential 1971 article, “A Defense of Abortion”,[1] the philosopher Judith Jarvis Thomson deploys a number of outlandish thought experiments. Among them is the story of a woman much like herself who gets kidnapped and, on awakening, finds she is attached by complicated life-support apparatuses to a great violinist. Her kidnappers explain when she awakens that she happens to be just so physiologically constituted as to be necessary for the violinist’s survival, and surely she agrees it is important to keep this rare musician alive, does she not? If she gets up and walks away, he will die; if she stays attached to him for nine months, they will both live. But, they acknowledge, she is of course free to go.

This particular scenario is one that Thomson only invokes in the course of making another point about another category of human beings than frail adult violinists, and yet it is a passing remark about his dependency on her that has preoccupied me the longest and most profoundly: we all agree, she reasons, that the person attached to the violinist is free to get up and leave, but she is not free to slit the violinist’s throat before going. Why not? The effect is the same in both cases —the violinist dies—  and indeed a case could be made that killing him swiftly is more merciful than letting him die slowly.

More here.

Scott Aaronson in Quanta:

Quantum computers, you might have heard, are magical uber-machines that will soon cure cancer and global warming by trying all possible answers in different parallel universes. For 15 years, on my blog and elsewhere, I’ve railed against this cartoonish vision, trying to explain what I see as the subtler but ironically even more fascinating truth. I approach this as a public service and almost my moral duty as a quantum computing researcher. Alas, the work feels Sisyphean: The cringeworthy hype about quantum computers has only increased over the years, as corporations and governments have invested billions, and as the technology has progressed to programmable 50-qubit devices that (on certain contrived benchmarks) really can give the world’s biggest supercomputers a run for their money. And just as in cryptocurrency, machine learning and other trendy fields, with money have come hucksters.

In reflective moments, though, I get it. The reality is that even if you removed all the bad incentives and the greed, quantum computing would still be hard to explain briefly and honestly without math. As the quantum computing pioneer Richard Feynman once said about the quantum electrodynamics work that won him the Nobel Prize, if it were possible to describe it in a few sentences, it wouldn’t have been worth a Nobel Prize.

More here.

UPDATE: Apologies to our readers, this video is apparently a hoax and we should have known better.

Heidi Matthews in Psyche:

As a new parent of boy/girl twins (at least as they were assigned at birth), I puzzle about the cultural pressure to scrutinise my infant son’s burgeoning masculinity lest it emerge as ‘toxic’. I catch myself watching and wondering, resisting the urge to police his interactions with his sister: He took the toy she was playing with, is this aggression that will stifle her confidence? She seems unbothered and has quickly snatched it back – phew! Is it bullying or an early form of manspreading when, both of them vying for the same object, he moves into her space and pushes her aside?

Today, popular parenting messaging, from Instagram to The New York Times, is suspicious of and concerned about boys. ‘Boys are broken,’ we are told. Boys underperform girls in school and college, and are more likely to engage in behaviour that is harmful to both themselves and others. Boys fight, bully, take dangerous risks, and sexually harass. From school shootings to incel-inspired terrorism, white boys in particular perpetrate mass acts of violence.

More here.

In a Station

Once I walked through the halls of a station
Someone called your name
In the streets I heard children laughing
They all sound the same

Wonder could you ever know me
Know the reason why I live?
Is there nothing you can show me?
Life seems so little to give

Once I climbed up the face of a mountain
And ate the wild fruit there
Fell asleep until the moonlight woke me
And I could taste your hair

Isn’t everybody dreaming?
Then the voice I hear is real
Out of all the idle scheming
Can’t we have something to feel?

Once upon a time leaves me empty
Tomorrow never came
I could sing the sound of your laughter
Still I don’t know your name

Must be some way to repay you
Out of all the good you gave
If a rumor should delay you
Love seems so little to say

by Richard Manuel
from Music From Big Pink
The Band, 1968

The Band, “In a Station” – YouTube

Danielle Geller in Guernica:

The saltwater aquarium in my new dentist’s office is its best feature. My favorite fish is a red fish with big eyes and a black stripe along its back. He has a generally grumpy demeanor, and I cannot help but feel a friendship form between us. I take photos of him and sometimes post them to Instagram. (“This red fish is my favorite fish, he is a total weirdo.”) He is popular among my friends.

I am aware, though it has not been my experience, that aquariums are common features in dentist offices. (One of my childhood dentists had an arcade machine. My sister and I would race monster trucks before our appointments.) I imagine this is due to the anxiety many people feel about dental procedures. (I once had a full-blown panic attack before my wisdom tooth extraction, even though I had been given Valium to take beforehand. “I can’t do anything if you don’t stop crying,” my dentist snapped.) Aquariums aren’t cheap to maintain, but dentists or their office administrators must feel they have some beneficial or tangible impact. (In the Google reviews for my new dentist office, I find one from four years ago that reads: “Excellent service. But I went because of Dr. K—’s military service and understanding of PTSD.”) Watching fish swim lazily through a fifty-gallon tank surely has some small but significant calming effect.

The red fish doesn’t really swim. He darts from hiding place to hiding place to resting bowl, and then he crawls along with grasping, tensile fins.

…This essay is a glass aquarium. The fish, a smooth-eyed distraction.

My father is dying. Liver cancer, stage 4.

“Tell your sister not to get too excited,” he tells me in a short phone call. By excited, he does not mean thrilled. He means worked up, distraught. We are not supposed to cry about his death.

More here.

Steve Donoghue in The Christian Science Monitor:

Many of us tend to like our geniuses as neatly lovable caricatures. And when it comes to Isaac Newton, we tend to envision a virtually disembodied intellect who was inspired by a falling apple to revolutionize physics from the quiet of his study at Trinity College. But even when Newton was performing his intellectual feats at Cambridge in the 1680s, he was eager to move on to a new life. Patricia Fara, historian of science at Cambridge University, seeks to chronicle that period in “Life after Gravity: Isaac Newton’s London Career.” In this book she presents Newton as “a metropolitan performer, a global actor who played various parts.”

Here we have not the familiar – and almost inhuman – Newton who produced his great “Principia Mathematica” in 1687, but rather a worldly, cosmopolitan Newton: master of the Royal Mint, president of the Royal Society, member of parliament, speculator on the market, prominent man-about-town.

In many ways it’s a startling portrait, and it’s clearly intended to be. Fara is a pleasingly lively historical guide – not just to Newton’s London life, but also to the London of those decades. It’s the London of Queen Anne and William Hogarth and most of all John Dryden, and their presence wonderfully hovers over everything here. We see Newton become preoccupied with straightening out the complicated mess he’d inherited at the Royal Mint. We see him working the stock market – not always successfully, which seems at first odd about somebody who invented whole new kinds of calculus at will. And Fara’s lengthy digressions are as fascinating as her main subject – particularly the mini-biography she provides of Newton’s relative and fellow thorough-going London creature John Conduitt.

Elham Saeidinezhad over at his website:

Who has access to cheap credit? And who does not? Compared to small businesses and households, global banks disproportionately benefited from the Fed’s liquidity provision measures. Yet, this distributional issue at the heart of the liquidity provision programs is excluded from analyzing the recession-fighting measures’ distributional footprints. After the great financial crisis (GFC) and the Covid-19 pandemic, the Fed’s focus has been on the asset purchasing programs and their impacts on the “real variables” such as wealth. The concern has been whether the asset-purchasing measures have benefited the wealthy disproportionately by boosting asset prices. Yet, the Fed seems unconcerned about the unequal distribution of cheap credits and the impacts of its “liquidity facilities.” Such oversight is paradoxical. On the one hand, the Fed is increasing its effort to tackle the rising inequality resulting from its unconventional schemes. On the other hand, its liquidity facilities are being directed towards shadow banking rather than short-term consumers loans. A concerned Fed about inequality should monitor the distributional footprints of their policies on access to cheap debt rather than wealth accumulation.

Dismissing the effects of unequal access to cheap credit on inequality is not an intellectual mishap. Instead, it has its root in an old idea in monetary economics- the quantity theory of money– that asserts money is neutral. According to monetary neutrality, money, and credit, that cover the daily cash-flow commitments are veils. In search of the “veil of money,” the quantity theory takes two necessary steps: first, it disregards the payment systems as mere plumbing behind the transactions in the real economy.

More here.

Matt Weir in Dissent:

On the night of August 20, 1968, neighbors woke the Czech writer Bohumil Hrabal and his wife, Eliška Plevová, to tell them that the Soviet Union was invading. Already their occupiers, the Soviets were now coming to put an end to the reforms of the Prague Spring. By morning, planes were flying low overhead, and soldiers and tanks filled the streets. One tank pointed its cannon directly at the offices of the Union of Czechoslovak Writers in Wenceslas Square. Hrabal, however, was eager to fulfill his duties as the best man at the wedding of his friend, the graphic artist Vladimír Boudník, in nearby Český Krumlov. “I set out in my car,” Hrabal writes in The Gentle Barbarian, “but I couldn’t get out of Prague, either through the city centre, or by using back routes, because the fraternal armies had arrived to liquidate something that was not there.” So he returned home, tried to attend a gallery show on modern American art (sorry, closed), and later relayed his troubles to his and Boudník’s mutual friend, the writer and philosopher Egon Bondy. Bondy, who called Hrabal by his nickname, Doctor, explodes in a frenzy of jealousy and admiration for Boudník:

Goddamn it! That Vladimír! Will I ever have the good fortune to have so many armies set in motion because I’m getting married? The only thing that beautiful, Doctor, was when you took my greetings to Rudi Dutschke, and you went into his apartment building just as they were carrying him out after he was shot in the head. But mobilizing five armies just to stop a wedding, that’s something I’ll never fathom. Why? Because Vladimír has always attracted great events and great misfortune. That’s just how it is. Goddamn it! What amazing luck the man has!

This foolish exuberance for life and its endless variety, modern American art and lurid despotic violence alike, is characteristic of the Hrabalian universe, as is the offhand, jarring mention of the attempted assassination of Dutschke, a leftist student leader in Germany. In Hrabal’s writings, history is a portentous, dynamic background, the slaughter bench on which rests the well-told tale.

More here.

Gideon Jones in Strife:

One of the great stories about the United States in recent years has been the rise of political polarisation and instability. Though the growing strife at the heart of the nation has been in the making for decades, the last year alone has seen the Covid Crisis, the death of George Floyd and the subsequent Black Lives Matter movement, as well as an election process that climaxed with the storming of the U.S Capitol Building. To any observer, it is apparent that these events have continued to exacerbate cleavages in American political life, and it seems that such divides will not be bridged anytime soon. The great fear is that US in the 21^st Century may be facing a period of political instability, competing radical ideologies and ever-widening inequality. The last century in the US saw a post-World War One resurgence in the Roaring of the 1920s- will the 2020s in contrast see us dragged Screaming through the decade?

The United States is not alone in facing this problem. France has faced nationwide protests since 2018 with the gilets jaune movement, whilst the United Kingdom faced political paralysis and partisan infighting with the Brexit referendum (while Northern Ireland faced some of the worst riots its seen in years  in part due to the Irish Sea Border).  Many hypotheses have been put forward about the source of the discontent that has been rising in the United States and the rest of the Western world.  Yet no theorisation, I believe, can claim to be as unique or intriguing as that of elite overproduction, and there is reason to believe that the 2020s will continue to see increasing political instability because of it.

Peter Turchin, whose work has been gaining increased recognition as of late, uses Structural Demographic Theory alongside a way of studying the long-term dynamics that create conditions for political stability, and in turn, political disintegration, and uses this to analyse history. Turchin proposes that all structural-demographic variables that influence the (in)stability of a given society are encompassed within three forces: the population, the state, and the elites (with each of these categories subject to change in response to structural shifts).

More here.

Robert Hockett in Forbes:

There seems to be some confusion afoot about what ‘fiat currencies’ are, whether the dollar is one of them, and whether it ought or ought not to be. Much of this stems from latterday gold enthusiasts like Peter Schiff and, ironically, what I call his Cryptopian antagonists.

Goldbugs use ‘fiat’ as a term of opprobrium, suggesting that money by decree is a threat to liberty and currency value alike thanks to the power conferred on the state or its agent – the central banker. Cryptopians talk the same talk, thereby infuriating the likes of Schiff.

Schiff’s beef with the Cryptopians is that they replace what he views as one valueless instrument – the fiat dollar – with another, the so-called crypto asset – neither of which bears any ‘intrinsic’ value. Only substances like gold, Schiff maintains in his guise as a latterday exponent of ‘commodity money,’ retains that.

Kathryn Hughes at The Guardian:

The way Robert Peal describes Georgian England, you’d be mad not to want to live there yourself. In “Merrie Englande” – he uses the term without irony and a fair shot of wistfulness – everyone is high on a trifecta of chocolate, sugar and gin. No one seems cross, although there must have been some almighty hangovers, and sex sounds polymorphous and unproblematic. In the period known as the long 18th century, suggests Peal in his euphoric introduction, you could love any way you chose, get giddy on spirits and dress in a positive rainbow of new colours imported from Britain’s nascent empire. Religion, moreover, was reasonable and unflustered by sin.

Peal knows it’s not really like this of course – in the 18th century most people couldn’t afford sugar, homosexuals were hanged and John Wesley founded Methodism in order to make people feel guilty about absolutely everything. Still, Peal’s aim in this avowedly populist book is to rescue the Georgians from collective cultural amnesia.

more here.

Alex Ross at The New Yorker:

Eastman died in 1990, at the age of forty-nine. Ebullient and confrontational in equal measure, he attended the Curtis Institute of Music, joined the Creative Associates program at the University of Buffalo, and found a degree of renown in avant-garde circles. In his final years, struggling with addiction, he faded from view. As a Black gay man, he encountered resistance and incomprehension during his lifetime. He is now experiencing a dizzying posthumous renaissance, to the point where his Symphony No. II is scheduled for the New York Philharmonic’s 2021-22 season.

“Femenine,” the companion to a now lost piece titled “Masculine,” can be roughly described as a minimalist score. Like Terry Riley’s 1964 classic, “In C,” “Femenine” is bound together by an unrelenting ostinato.

more here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=suMfPe9eqxQ

Ibram X. Kendi in The Atlantic:

The United States is not in the midst of a “culture war” over race and racism. The animating force of our current conflict is not our differing values, beliefs, moral codes, or practices. The American people aren’t divided. The American people are being divided. Republican operatives have buried the actual definition of critical race theory: “a way of looking at law’s role platforming, facilitating, producing, and even insulating racial inequality in our country,” as the law professor Kimberlé Crenshaw, who helped coin the term, recently defined it. Instead, the attacks on critical race theory are based on made-up definitions and descriptors. “Critical race theory says every white person is a racist,” Senator Ted Cruz has said. “It basically teaches that certain children are inherently bad people because of the color of their skin,” said the Alabama state legislator Chris Pringle.

There are differing points of view about race and racism. But what we are seeing and hearing on news shows, in school-district meetings, in op-ed pages, in legislative halls, and in social-media feeds aren’t multiple sides with differing points of view. There’s only one side in our so-called culture war right now. The Republican operatives, who dismiss the expositions of critical race theorists and anti-racists in order to define critical race theory and anti-racism, and then attack those definitions, are effectively debating themselves. They have conjured an imagined monster to scare the American people and project themselves as the nation’s defenders from that fictional monster.

The evangelist Pat Robertson recently called critical race theory “a monstrous evil.” And over the past year, that “monstrous evil” has supposedly been growing many legs. First, Republicans pointed to Black Lives Matter demonstrators. Three days after George Floyd’s murder last year, President Donald Trump recast the largely peaceful demonstrators as violent and dishonorable “THUGS.” By the end of July, Trump had framed them as “anarchists who hate our country.” Then “cancel culture” was targeted. At the Republican National Convention in August, Trump blasted “cancel culture” as seeking to coerce Americans “into saying what you know to be false and scare you out of saying what you know to be true.”

More here.