Michael Luo in The New Yorker:

One night in 1953, the Reverend Billy Graham awoke at two in the morning, went to his study, and started writing down ideas for the creation of a new religious journal. Graham, then in his mid-thirties, was an internationally renowned evangelist who held revival meetings that were attended by tens of thousands, in stadiums around the world. He had also become the leader of a cohort of pastors, theologians, and other Protestant luminaries who aspired to create a new Christian movement in the United States that avoided the cultural separatism of fundamentalism and the theological liberalism of mainline Protestantism. Harold Ockenga, a prominent minister and another key figure in the movement, called this more culturally engaged vision of conservative Christianity “new evangelicalism.” Graham believed a serious periodical could serve as the flagship for the movement. The idea for the publication, as he later wrote, was to “plant the Evangelical flag in the middle of the road, taking a conservative theological position but a definite liberal approach to social problems.” The magazine would be called Christianity Today.

During the next several decades, Graham’s movement became the dominant force in American religious life, and perhaps the country’s most influential political faction. From the late nineteen-seventies through the mid-eighties, evangelicals became increasingly aligned with the Republican Party, progressively shifting its priorities to culture-war issues like abortion. Today, evangelical Protestants account for approximately a quarter of the U.S. population and represent the political base of the G.O.P. Despite President Trump’s much publicized moral shortcomings, more than eighty per cent of evangelicals supported him in the 2016 election. Last week, however, Mark Galli, the ninth editor to lead Christianity Today since its founding, in 1956, published an editorial calling for President Trump’s impeachment and removal from office. “The president of the United States attempted to use his political power to coerce a foreign leader to harass and discredit one of the president’s political opponents,” Galli writes. “That is not only a violation of the Constitution; more importantly, it is profoundly immoral.” Galli, who will retire from his post early in the new year, implores evangelicals who continue to stand by Trump to “remember who you are and whom you serve. Consider how your justification of Mr. Trump influences your witness to your Lord and Savior.”

Galli and other contributors to the magazine have been critical of Trump in the past, but the forcefulness of the editorial took many by surprise. The piece became a sensation, trending online and receiving widespread media coverage.

More here.

Saidiya Hartman in The New York Times:

“Complexity” was the term that Ralph Ellison deployed most often to describe black life and culture. And it is the term best suited to convey the character of this brilliant, often disapproving and unsparing man. Decades before Toni Morrison’s “Beloved” and “Song of Solomon,” “Invisible Man” (1952) singularly defined the meaning of literary achievement. As a critic, Ellison was no less significant a thinker and stylist. Always, he was a philosopher of black expressive form and an astute cultural analyst.

I first encountered Ellison through the scrim of Larry Neal’s 1970 essay “Ellison’s Zoot Suit,” so I knew what I needed to read for — the invaluable critical propositions about African-American culture, the dazzling enactment of blues vernacular in modernist prose, artistic achievement steeped in reference to the music and an eye capable of discerning what Zora Neale Hurston described as the distinctive asymmetry and angularity that were the most striking manifestations of black style and the will to adorn. I also knew what I had to read past — the cult of the masculine hero and an aesthetic project that “restores to man his full complexity” and to the native son truth and revelation, while abandoning the daughter to the chaos of the underworld.

More here.

Moribund

The animals are dying.
All the beautiful women are dying too.

Ila Kumar, deserving winner of a national writing contest for this, in The Lily:

Dear imagined future self,

On Halloween, my best friend’s older brother sold us each one Poland Spring water bottle filled with watered-down vodka. There are now 15 dollars less to my name. We drank this vodka with a great deal of teenage bravado — trying not wince at the clear liquid’s resemblance to rubbing alcohol. My friend’s father made a crudité platter for us. The night ended with me throwing up baby carrots and mini peppers in my dad’s Honda, at the first hard left out of my friend’s driveway. Never have I felt more like a 16-year-old.

Future self, I hope you are more sophisticated now. Not a “blousy” adult who wears long necklaces — but the kind of adult who seems like they drink salads, wear camel coats and know the definition to words like “palaver.”

My dad didn’t say anything. I knew he understood what had happened, and why. Maybe the same thing had happened to him when he was 16. Silence hung between us like fog; I felt embarrassed to be alive.

More here.

Puja Changoiwala in Undark:

False words, phony videos, doctored photos, and violent content are regular features on the online ecosystem worldwide. India is no exception, where such content, which often attracts millions of views, has led to grave crimes and even communal and political unrest.

With more than half a billion Indians online, the Indian government and social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and WhatsApp now struggle to contain the misinformation and disinformation epidemics. MetaFact, a local startup, says it has found solutions in a type of artificial intelligence called natural language processing, which combines linguistics and computer science. The goal of the technology is to teach computers how to understand how human, or natural, language works by showing it many examples.

MetaFact’s fact-checking tool, the company says, uses natural language processing, sometimes called NLP, to help detect, monitor, and counter phony stories. The tool is meant to extend to newsrooms “the power to detect and monitor fake news in real time, sifting through all the data cacophony that is generated online,” Sagar Kaul, MetaFact’s founder, wrote in an email to Undark.

More here.

Julian Hargreaves in The Conversation:

Accusations of antisemitism have been swirling around the Labour Party since Jeremy Corbyn’s election as leader in 2015. He has been accused of harbouring antisemitic views and offering public support to party colleagues labelled as antisemitic. Meanwhile, the Conservative Party have faced accusations of “endemic” Islamophobia.

In the run-up to the 2019 general election, the main political parties have repeatedly accused each other of antisemitism and Islamophobia. Away from politics, there are widespread concerns about prejudice targeting Jews and Muslims. But the narratives are often simplistic and without supporting data. We hear much from politicians, community leaders and experts. We hear far less from “everyday” people and know relatively little about what Jewish and Muslim members of the public are likely to find offensive.

A recent study, published in Ethnic and Racial Studies, is the first known study to compare antisemitism and Islamophobia using statistics and found varying levels of sensitivity towards antisemitism and Islamophobia among British Jewish and Muslim communities. The study offers a rare insight into the sensitivities of “everyday” people within both communities.

More here.

Brian Kim Stefans at Poetry Magazine:

I often think that my obsession with Ezra Pound’s poetry was due to his well-known formula “DICHTEN = CONDENSARE” (dichten means “to write poetry” but also “to seal” or “to tighten” in German) or to those chestnuts from “A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste,” such as “use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation [of the thing],” all of which was appealing because I was well practiced in reducing these programs to the bare minimum while still achieving their effects. No one wants to play a video game that is too slow or too easy or ends up in an uncontrolled loop (an early version of the spinning pizza of death) because of sloppy coding. One pleasure of programming is reducing many lines of unwieldy code to a few elegant ones, maybe as a function that can be called upon repeatedly. In some ways, I think this is a central pleasure in writing poetry as well—cutting lines, swapping out dull words for lively ones, interjecting a tonal shift that renders some strictly explanatory lines superfluous, and so forth—all while seeing the effect increase as the poem gets smaller.

more here.

Hannah Stamler at Artforum:

Unlike Armstrong or Cukor, who stay true to Alcott’s timeline, Gerwig begins in the middle of the narrative, depicting the second half of the book while weaving in scenes drawn from the first. We open on the March sisters in their late teens or early twenties. The women in question are no longer very little, and the Civil War that cast a shadow over their youth has ended. We find the eldest, Meg, searching for contentment in her new life as the wife of a poor tutor (James Norton). Played by Emma Watson, she is the picture of grace if not always the voice, her Yankee accent at times on the brink. Tomboyish Jo—Ronan, offering a perfect compromise between Ryder’s timidity and Hepburn’s ham—is in New York avoiding an unwanted marriage proposal from her best friend, Laurie (Timothée Chalamet), and chasing after her dream of becoming a writer. Amy (Florence Pugh), the bratty baby, is in Europe to hone her painting skills and find a society husband. Only sweet, sickly Beth (Eliza Scanlen) remains at home, though she will soon depart on an adventure of a more permanent kind, as she learns to accept her slowly impending death, the consequence of childhood scarlet fever. As she says of her fate in one of Alcott’s most poetic lines, delivered with solemn elegance by Scanlen, who makes the most of Beth’s limited part: “It’s like the tide . . . when it turns, it goes slowly, but it can’t be stopped.”

more here.

Mallika Rao at The Believer:

Jugaad is a hack, a hustle, a fix. It’s a lot from a little, the best with what you’ve got—which is likely not much, if you need jugaad. A “very DU word,” a Delhi University grad once explained to me, and I thought about how college students as a rule and around the world turn nothing into something (e.g., instant noodles).

I first learned the Hindi word in the summer of 2008, which I spent as an intern at a Delhi magazine called Money. A friend in another Indian city—an interloper in the old country, like me—revealed it on a call. She and I loved words. Back in Texas, we had devoured the words of Indian novelists, used them to build an alternate world, a fantasy India, as if our parents had never left (the voluble writers came in handy: Salman Rushdie, with his refracting tales; Vikram Seth, whose A Suitable Boy dropped with a life-changing thud). Jugaad explained a quality we knew about before we had the means to name it. For instance, when our parents took idlis on road trips because they valued fermentation as a preservation method long before Williamsburg shopkeepers taught the world to do the same.

more here.

Andrew Elrod in Dissent:

A facility that saw 53,000 emergency room visits per year disappeared from Philadelphia this summer with the prolonged and still-unfinished closure of Hahnemann University Hospital. The 496-bed hospital employed 2,700 people and saw 17,000 admissions in 2017, its last year under the management of the Tenet Healthcare Corporation. Tenet, one of the nation’s largest for-profit hospital conglomerates, owned ninety-six hospitals and nearly 500 outpatient centers in the United States that year. Not all of them turned a profit. Hahnemann, for example, booked $790 million in revenue in 2017, $115 million short of breaking even. So Tenet embarked on an international restructuring program, liquidating seventeen low-margin hospitals in the United States and the United Kingdom. In Philadelphia, Tenet sold Hahnemann to Joel Freedman, a man from Los Angeles who sat on the advisory board of the University of Southern California’s Leonard D. Schaeffer Center for Health Policy and Economics (his name has since been removed from the center’s website) and managed an investment fund, Paladin Capital, with interests in “the world’s most innovative cyber companies,” according to its website. By spring 2019 Freedman was still losing $3 to $5 million a month on Hahnemann. He had burned through four CEOs in fifteen months. In June, hospital administrators announced that the facility was shutting down.

Hahnemann is just one of the historic hospitals across the United States that has closed this year while claiming that Medicaid and Medicare payments fail to meet rising costs.

More here.

Galen Strawson in The Guardian:

There is no escape from this dilemma – either all matter is conscious, or consciousness is something distinct from matter”: Alfred Russel Wallace put the point succinctly in 1870, and it is hard to see how his colleague Charles Darwin, the great evolutionary gradualist, could disagree. Wallace, however, wanted us to have souls; he believed that consciousness was indeed distinct from matter. Darwin was a staunch materialist; he had no doubt that consciousness was wholly material. As early as 1838 he took it for granted that thought is “a secretion of brain”, using the word “thought” in Descartes’s way to cover any conscious experience. He wondered why people found this harder to believe than the fact that gravity is a property of matter. Darwin didn’t explicitly endorse panpsychism – the view that there is an element of consciousness in all matter, or, somewhat more cautiously, that consciousness is one of the fundamental properties of matter. But he saw the force of the position, and saw that it implied our profound ignorance of the nature of matter: “What is matter? the whole thing a mystery”. Certainly he understood the point that William James made in 1890: “If evolution is to work smoothly, consciousness in some shape must have been present at the very origin of things. Accordingly we find that the more clear-sighted evolutionary philosophers are beginning to posit it there.”

Philip Goff’s engaging Galileo’s Error is a full‑on defence of panpsychism. It’s plainly a difficult view, but when we get serious about consciousness, and put aside the standard bag of philosophical tricks, it seems that one has to choose, with Wallace, between some version of panpsychism or fairytales about immaterial souls. This is of course too simple; Galileo’s Error lays out many of the complexities. It’s an illuminating introduction to the topic of consciousness. It addresses the real issue – unlike almost all recent popular books on this subject. It stands a good chance of delivering the extremely large intellectual jolt that many people will need if they are to get into (or anywhere near) the right ballpark for thinking about consciousness. This is a great thing.

More here.

Looking for the Differences

I am struck by the otherness of things rather than their sameness.
The way a tiny pile of snow perches in the crook of a branch in the
tall pine, away by itself, high enough not to be noticed by people,
out of reach of stray dogs. It leans against the scaly pine bark, busy
at some existence that does not need me.

From Slate Star Codex:

This project seeks to explore the viability of spiritual or religious experiences as empirical evidence for a component of reality that transcends or is radically different from our ordinary experience. The question at hand is not the existence of God or higher powers, nor the failures, successes, or benefits of religion, but rather the role of spiritual experience in the human understanding of the nature of reality. We formulated the topic in controversy this way:

The empirical study of the content and nature of people’s personal spiritual experiences justifies taking them seriously as evidence of an important component of human life deserving of individual and collective exploration.

Our fellow human beings have always had unusual experiences that they found special and meaningful, but often struggled to interpret or place in the context of their ordinary lives. These experiences and their interpretation have aroused intense controversy, both because people have deployed them as support for their views on contested issues about the nature of reality, and because they may arise in settings where one could easily question whether the brain’s altered perceptions and understandings are enhanced or impaired. Another source of debate is how radically different individuals’ experiences—and their personal interpretations of the origins and meanings of those experiences—can be. Finally, spiritual experiences are often reported through a cultural lens that leads to questions about how accurately and objectively people could perceive and describe the unusual things that they perceived.

More here.

Philip Kitcher in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

During the past eight years, many astute people, inside and outside the scientific community, have worried about the quality of scientific research. They warn of a “replication crisis.” In biomedicine and psychology in particular, it seems that a high proportion of published results cannot be reproduced. The absolute number of retractions for articles in these fields are rising. Whether or not it is right to talk of crisis, it is certainly reasonable to be concerned. What is going on?

Explanations typically fall into three categories. One possibility is that contemporary science, at least in some domains, is full of corrupt and dishonest people who routinely commit fraud, making up data for experiments that were never performed, or misreporting the results they have actually found, or tweaking their graphs and prettifying their images, and so on. In short, these fraudsters intentionally attempt to deceive their colleagues and, ultimately, members of the broader public. A second possibility is that incompetence or sloppiness is at play. As in Nick Carraway’s verdict on Tom and Daisy Buchanan, biomedical and psychological researchers are quite simply careless people who make a mess for others to clear up as best they can. And the third possibility: Neither fraud nor lack of rigor is responsible for the problem.

More here.

David Byrne in Reasons to be Cheerful:

Around the world, the cost of housing is destabilizing cities. In Europe, low interest rates meant to spur growth have caused an affordability crisis. American cities are sprouting the kinds of slums usually associated with the developing world. Some have even argued that Hong Kong’s protests are, in reality, about a real estate market that has gotten so expensive young folks have essentially no chance of getting their own place.

What can be done? How can cities make sure that people other than the wealthy can find a foothold? A few places have shown that affordability is possible. One is Vienna, Austria.

A hundred years ago, in 1919, Vienna decided to do something about its shortage of low-cost housing for blue-collar workers and creative types. It began constructing publicly financed housing under a model that, over the years, has evolved into a system that works incredibly well. Far from being “projects,” “council houses,” or “schemies,” this is housing built by the best architects, where, over time, people of all income levels have come to live. It’s not perfect, but it’s pretty close.

Today, 62 percent of Vienna residents live in this “social housing.” (In New York, where I live, about eight percent of residents call public housing home.) This is a city that has, for many years running, been voted one of the most livable large cities in the world. Clearly they’re doing something right.

More here.

Summer Pretorius in Nautilus:

As a paleoclimatologist, I often find myself wondering why more people aren’t listening to the warnings, the data, the messages of climate woes—it’s not just a storm on the horizon, it’s here, knocking on the front door. In fact, it’s not even the front door anymore. You are on the roof, waiting for a helicopter to rescue you from your submerged house. The data is clear: The rates of current carbon dioxide release are 10 times greater than even the most rapid natural carbon catastrophe¹ in the geological records, which brought about a miserable hothouse world of acidic oceans lacking oxygen, triggering a pulse of extinctions.² Despite the evidence for anthropogenic climate change, views about the severity and impact of global warming diverge like branch points on a gnarly old oak tree (below).

The first split is between deniers and acceptors; only the denial branch doesn’t go anywhere—it’s just a dead stump, no longer sustained by the nutrients of evidence. The next bifurcation is on the root cause of climate change. Naturalists say “the climate has always changed,” which aside from ignoring evidence that the recent increase in carbon dioxide is from burning fossil fuels,³ is a diversion tactic for derailing meaningful conversations by stating the obvious. Of course, the climate is always changing; the relevant variable is the rate at which it does so.

If we follow the branch line that accepts the evidence for human-induced climate change, the next major split is between those who see global warming as a good thing and those who view it as a bad one. The former view an ice-free Arctic as a business boon for oil extraction or sweltering cities as an expanding market for air conditioners, or they are your clueless uncle joking about his property going up in value because it will suddenly be beachfront property.

More here.

Margaret Wardlaw in Guernica:

Madison was never expected to live this long. The doctors had told her parents she would probably die at birth. Surprising everyone but her mother, she seized and trembled, and refused to suckle—but she didn’t die. Madison never learned to walk. Her four limbs were spastic. She remained small for her age, and she never learned to speak, not even to say Mama or milk, or no. But she saw and experienced many things beyond seizures, infections, breathing and feeding tubes; beyond Christmases and Easters and birthdays, and the everyday intimacies of childhood. She was her mother’s joy, and knew a fierce and indelible love, breathed over her in a nightly vigil. It imbued Madison with the quiet beauty of a survivor. Whatever trials she endured, there was a sense that she was lit from inside by something sacred.

Still, there were the hospitals. The familiar scene, where doctors told Madison’s mother that her daughter would not survive, played out over and over as the little girl got older. She would get sick—her pulse quickening, fever rising, skin becoming clammy—and then she would get very sick, convulsing with seizures, rapid breath shaking her thin frame. But then, just when she was so sick that everyone thought it would be the final sickness, she would get just a little better. Each time this happened, Madison’s mother, living in ambiguity since her daughter’s birth, would trust the doctors a little less. By the time she got to the hospital where I was a doctor, Madison was almost eighteen. This time she really was dying. Sent to our regional referral center by her well-meaning rural physicians who thought they had nothing left to offer, Madison was barely responsive. The sliding-glass door of her hospital room framed a scene that was, at first glance, distinctly modern. State-of-the-art monitors spewed data, and machines pumped tube feeds and broad-spectrum antibiotics into her body. But Madison’s mother, keeping watch by the bed, her face bent over the curled body of her daughter, was a timeless image of suffering, like a stoic pieta. Except that she bore no trace of the placid, limpid resignation the Holy Mother always seemed to wear. She was unbelieving, and angry.

Your daughter is dying, the doctors at our hospital told Madison’s mother. Doctors always say that, she responded.

More here.

Massimo Pigliucci in Aeon:

These days it is highly fashionable to label consciousness an ‘illusion’. This in turn fosters the impression, especially among the general public, that the way we normally think of our mental life has been shown by science to be drastically mistaken. While this is true in a very specific and technical sense, consciousness remains arguably the most distinctive evolved feature of humanity, enabling us not only to experience the world, like other animal species do, but to deliberately reflect on our experiences and to change the course of our lives accordingly.

A lot of the confusion, as we shall see, hinges on what exactly we mean by both ‘consciousness’ and ‘illusion’. In order to usefully fix our ideas instead of meandering across a huge literature in philosophy of mind and cognitive science, consider a fascinating essay for Aeon by Keith Frankish. He begins by making a distinction between phenomenal consciousness and access consciousness. Phenomenal consciousness is what produces the subjective quality of experience, what philosophers call ‘qualia’. This is what makes it possible for us (and, presumably, for a number of other animal species) to experience what it is like, for example, to see red, or taste a persimmon, or write essays on philosophy of mind.

More here.