Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe:

Aristotle conceived of the world in terms of teleological “final causes”; Darwin, or so the story goes, erased purpose and meaning from the world, replacing them with a bloodless scientific algorithm. But should we abandon all talk of meanings and purposes, or instead conceptualize them as emergent rather than fundamental? Philosophers (and former Mindscape guests) Alex Rosenberg and Daniel Dennett recently had an exchange on just this subject, and today we’re going to hear from a working scientist. David Haig is a geneticist and evolutionary biologist who argues that it’s perfectly sensible to perceive meaning as arising through the course of evolution, even if evolution itself is purposeless.

More here.

Adam Tooze in Public Books:

In the first half of 2020, as the world economy shut down, hundreds of millions of people across the world lost their jobs. Following India’s lockdown on March 24, 10s of millions of displaced migrant workers thronged bus stops waiting for a ride back to their villages. Many gave up and spent weeks on the road walking home. Over 1.5 billion young people were affected by school closures. The human capital foregone will, according to the World Bank, cost $10 trillion in future income.

Meanwhile, in China, economic growth had resumed by the summer. Amazon has added hundreds of thousands to its global workforce. The world’s corporations issued debt as never before. And, with Jeff Bezos in the lead, America’s billionaires saw their wealth surge to ever-more-grotesque heights.

In Las Vegas the painted rectangles of parking lots were repurposed as socially distanced campsites for those with no shelter to go to. Tech-savvy police forces in Southern California procured drones with loudspeakers to issue orders to the homeless remotely. Lines of SUVs and middle-class sedans snaked for miles as 10s of thousands of Americans stopped commuting and queued for food. Meanwhile, in the Hamptons, wealthy exiles from Manhattan outbid each other to install luxury swimming pools on the grounds of their summer residences.

Even in a world accustomed to extreme inequality, the disparate experience of the COVID shock has been dizzying. It will be years before comprehensive data is available to chart the precise impact of the pandemic on global inequality. But what might a sketch look like?

More here.

Once in Twelve Years, I Go to Church

I go to the church with the cross in it
and I kneel, because it hurts too much to sit,
and I pray, wordlessly. I go when it’s quiet,
when service is over, ideally when no one
is there. But someone is always there.

I don’t mean the priest. I don’t mean Jesus
or some deity who looks down on us.
God does not look down on us.
God does not exist, and yet God is
all there is. I mean I look at these walls,

mammoth two-foot by four-foot
blocks of limestone that could crush us,
beautifully. And I recall that limestone
is composed entirely of skeletal fragments,
of organisms caught in their less-than-final

resting places. And I hear in the stone
a rustling, the rustling of creatures
who once crept and bled upon the Earth,
like you and me. Creatures still here,
still whispering in our ears, still embodied

and participating in the language of the world.
What I hear is: that word—upon—is wrong.
We say upon as if the Earth were merely
lithosphere—the ground beneath—
and not the atmosphere, the Ecosphere:

not the sky and why above, not the blood
and good within. We say upon as if
the Earth and men were not each other,
and the lesser was merely a visitor
upon the greater’s soils. We say upon

but mean as one, we mean the Earth
that rose up and lived as us, as she lives
the creatures who whisper in these walls,
and as she lives the little poet
turning to limestone in this poem.

by Ricky Ray
from the Echotheo Review

Lydia Davis at The Believer:

The 1898 children’s classic known in America as ​Bob, Son of Battle ​and in England as ​Owd Bob: The Grey Dog of Kenmuir​, by Alfred Ollivant, was long declared—and still is considered, by some—one of the great dog stories of all time, if not the greatest. One reviewer, E.V. Lucas, writing in ​The Northern Counties Magazine ​soon after the book was published, felt that this was the first time “full justice” had been done to a dog as a character in fiction. He declared, “Owd Bob​ is more than a dog story; it is a dog epic.”

Bob, Son of Battle​ is set in the county of Cumbria, in northern England, in the wild Daleland country close to the Scottish border, within a sheepherding community. The plot centers upon the rivalry between two sheepdogs—the noble Owd Bob, last of a long line of champions, gentle and patient; and the pugnacious, ill-tempered, ugly mongrel Red Wull—along with their masters and a boy who is caught in the middle, the son of one man but devoted to the other. Depicted in the most extreme terms throughout is the contrast between the character of the good master, James Moore, with his good dog, Owd Bob, and that of the violent father, M’Adam, with his mongrel, Red Wull, though both dogs and both masters are extraordinarily adept at the exacting skill of herding sheep.

more here.

Margaret Talbot at The New Yorker:

In 1964, a twenty-year-old Canadian singer named Joan Anderson began composing her own folk songs. They were good folk songs, sturdily constructed and memorable, but the genre corseted her. She would need to roam the mountains and plains of rock and jazz in order to claim her gift. Folk was not enough—but it was what was available to her as a young woman from Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, in the early nineteen-sixties, a woman in possession of an ethereal soprano and a four-string baritone ukulele, the instrument she could afford to buy on her own after her mother nixed a guitar. At nineteen, she left home for art school in Alberta—painting was her first creative outlet—and then began touring, playing in coffeehouses or church basements in Toronto and Calgary and Detroit. For her mother Myrtle’s birthday in 1965, Joan made her a tape with three of the songs she had written, “Urge for Going,” “Born to Take the Highway,” and “Here Today and Gone Tomorrow.” In the folk tradition, they celebrate footloose rambling.

more here.

Marc Caplan in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

ONE HUNDRED YEARS AGO, when most American Jews were immigrants from Eastern Europe, nearly every Jew in the United States spoke Yiddish, but no one gave it any respect. Today, by contrast, everyone is full of affection for Yiddish, even though almost no one speaks it. Though one hears from every synagogue pulpit and reads in most university Jewish Studies mission statements that Hebrew is the eternal and unifying language of the Jewish experience, Yiddish maintains an emotional claim on the descendants of Eastern European Jews, as well as leaving an indelible imprint on the popular culture created by, for, and among these immigrants and their offspring. Is this valorization of Yiddish commensurate with knowledge and appreciation of — or respect for — the language and the culture it created beyond the lexicon of sentimental melodies, off-color jokes, and redefined adjectives? One could gesture to the 2020 Seth Rogen film An American Pickle without having to answer the question further. Emotional relationships can often lead in nonrational directions, seldom directed by facts.

Toni Morrison has cautioned all Americans that no haunting can ever be entirely benign. And to the extent that Yiddish has changed American culture — as Ilan Stavans and Josh Lambert assert in the title of their readable and teachable new anthology — it is as a haunting, a ghostly reminder of deceased ancestors, defunct aspirations, and lost causes.

More here.

Frédérique de Vignemont in Aeon:

Heini Hediger, a noted 20th-century Swiss biologist and zoo director, knew that animals ran away when they felt unsafe. But when he set about designing and building zoos himself, he realised he needed a more precise understanding of how animals behaved when put in proximity to one another. Hediger decided to investigate the flight response systematically, something that no one had done before.

Hediger found that the space around an animal could be partitioned into zones, nested within one another, and measurable down to a matter of centimetres. The outermost circle is what’s known as flight distance: if a lion is far enough away, a zebra will continue to graze warily, but any closer than that, the zebra will try to escape. Closer still is the defence distance: pass that line and the zebra attacks rather than fleeing. Finally, there’s the critical distance: if the predator is too close, there’s nothing to do but freeze, play dead and hope for the best. While different species of wild animals have different limits, Hediger discovered that they’re remarkably consistent within a species. He also offered a new definition of a tame animal, as one that no longer treats humans as a significant threat, and so reduces its flight distance for humans to zero. In other words, a tame animal was one to which you could get close enough to touch.

Like all animals, humans also protect themselves from potential threats by keeping them at a distance. Those of us beginning to see friends again after months of pandemic-induced social distancing can feel this at a visceral level, as we balance the desire for contact against a sense of risk. Once we evaluate something as a potential threat – even if that assessment is informed by public policy or expert prescription – there’s a powerful urge to maintain a buffer of space.

More here.

Annie Zaidi in Scroll.in:

The beating heart of literature is writers’ engagement with sadness and the conflicts of their time. Many of these conflicts are centred on wealth and access to natural resources: land, water, mineral, forest, stone, sand, clean air. Big money, often with the aid of big media, attempts to shape public opinion about who controls the world, who deserves what, how resources ought to be shared. In a similar vein, traditional hegemonies in India – patriarchy and the caste system – try to control the stories we tell about each other.

Why, then, do some of these powerful groups enable spaces where they can be challenged? Why do they invest in literature or theatre or film festivals where non-hegemonic views are invited? Writers are easy to take down, to put away or, at the very least, politely ignore. Why are we invited, given a platform and asked to comment on contentious issues?

I have struggled with this question for a few years now: what do the wealthy hope to gain?

More here.

Sara Harrison in Undark:

THERE’S A WEALTH OF information floating in the air, though we rarely take the time to notice. Olfaction, or the ability to smell, may be the least appreciated of the five senses. A 2011 poll by the marketing firm McCann Worldgroup, for instance, found that 53 percent of young people would prefer to give up their sense of smell than to give up their use of technology.

But that was before the Covid-19 pandemic suddenly made us acutely aware of the dangers in the air around us: the droplets expelled from unmasked mouths and noses, the potentially infectious soup of molecules in unventilated, indoor spaces. And before anosmia, or the loss of smell, emerged as one of the most common Covid-19 symptoms. So perhaps it’s time we pay closer attention to what else is in the air.

As Harold McGee shows in “Nose Dive: A Field Guide to the World’s Smells,” olfaction is a fascinating landscape that adds much to our sensory experience of the world, if only we would breathe a bit deeper. He devotes some 600 pages to the vast and exciting “osmocosm,” his term for the odors that swirl around us every day, even if we don’t notice them.

More here.

Rasha Aridi in Smithsonian:

The Covid-19 pandemic has made the world feel lonelier than ever as people have been shut away in their homes, aching to gather with their loved ones again. This instinct to evade loneliness is deeply engrained in our brains, and a new study published in the journal Nature Neuroscience suggests that our longing for social interaction elicits a similar neurological response to a hungry person craving food, reports Ali Pattillo for Inverse. Livia Tomova, a cognitive neuroscientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and her collaborators conducted a study in which they had a test group of 40 people fast for ten hours. At the end of the day, the hungry subjects were shown images of pizza and chocolate cake while receiving a brain scan, reports Bethany Brookshire for Science News.

In a second round of experimentation, the subjects were barred from social interaction—no in person or virtual human contact—for ten hours. Afterward, they were shown images of people gathering and playing sports as the team scanned their brains. The scans revealed that the same part of their brains perked up in response to both food and social gatherings, reports Science News.

…”[This study] provides empirical support for the idea that loneliness acts as a signal—just like hunger—that signals to an individual that something is lacking and that it needs to take action to repair that,” Tomova tells Inverse.

More here.

Burnt Norton—excerpt

At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.
I can only say, there we have been: but I cannot say where.
And I cannot say, how long, for that is to place it in time.

T.S. Eliot
from Four Quartets: Burnt Norton

Painting by John Civitello

Jennifer Senior in The New York Times:

More than 40 years ago, three psychologists published a study with the eccentric, mildly seductive title, “Lottery Winners and Accident Victims: Is Happiness Relative?” Even if you don’t think you know what it says, there’s a decent chance you do. It has seeped into TED talks, life-hack segments on morning shows, even the occasional whiff of movie dialogue. The paper is the peanut butter and jelly sandwich of happiness studies, a staple in any curriculum that looks at the psychology of human flourishing.

The study is straightforward. As the title suggests, the authors surveyed lottery winners and accident victims, plus a control group, hoping to compare their levels of happiness. But what the authors found violated common intuition. The victims, while less happy than the controls, still rated themselves above average in happiness, even though their accidents had recently rendered them all either paraplegic or quadriplegic. And the lottery winners were no happier than the controls, at least in any statistically meaningful sense. If anything, the warp and weft of their everyday lives was a little more threadbare. Talking to friends, hearing jokes, having breakfast — all of these simple pleasures now left them less satisfied than before.

There were flaws in the study — its design, alas, was as crude as an ax — but you can see why it became famous. It had an irresistible takeaway: Money! It doesn’t buy you happiness! Perhaps even more fundamentally, it had a sexy, almost absurd, premise. What kind of mind would think to pair lottery winners and accident victims in a research paper? Who in academic psychology had such a cockeyed imagination? It was social science by way of Samuel Beckett.

More here.

Thea Riofrancos in The Baffler:

GLOBALIZATION IS UNDER ATTACK from all quarters. It’s hard to pinpoint when the discord began: the concept, and the process it grasps, is nearly coterminous with the contention swirling around it. January 1, 1994, the day the North American Free Trade Agreement went into effect, was also the day the Zapatista Army declared war on the Mexican government. In the United States, the alter-globalization movement erupted in the 1999 Battle of Seattle; in the hemisphere, it peaked with the 2005 World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil, which registered over 150,000 participants. A few years later came the “movements of the squares” as protesters occupied public spaces from Athens to New York to Cairo. These events coincided with an entire era of resistance to free trade and U.S. hegemony in Latin America, culminating in the Pink Tide, which in turn foreshadowed the global spread of populisms left and right that, though diametrically opposed in their diagnoses, targeted the insipid managerialism of market democracies.

And that was just the beginning. Having survived the turbulence of social movements and financial crises, the fate of the flat earth utopia—the dream of a global humanity linked by the sinews of peaceful trade, digital communication, and international institutions, all protected by benevolent American imperialism—entered into yet another phase of uncertainty. Across multiple continents, right-wing nationalism, itself nurtured by neoliberalism, captured state power. Trade wars, withdrawals from multilateralism, and reconfigurations of historic alliances ensued. Global integration already appeared at a nadir when the novel coronavirus emerged in China before spreading everywhere through the pathways of transnational interconnectedness. Supply chains premised on frictionless circulation and just-in-time production ground to a halt; meanwhile, political leaders of all ideological stripes bemoaned “dependency” not just on China, but on globally dispersed production itself, which manufactures everything from the superficial (fast fashion) to the essential (personal protective equipment). In their place, they called for “re-shoring” supply chains, scaling down production to domestic and regional levels, and balancing economic efficiency with newly salient exigencies of public health. Are we witnessing the twilight of globalization?

More here.

Gerry Canavan in the LA Review of Books:

IT SEEMS PERVERSELY easier to tell a science fictional story about a world centuries in the future than the one just a few years away. Somehow we have become collectively convinced that massive world-historical changes are something that cannot happen in the short term, even as the last five years alone have seen the coronavirus pandemic; the emergence of CRISPR gene editing; too many droughts, hurricanes, and wildfires to count; the legalization of gay marriage in many countries, including the United States; mass shooting after mass shooting after mass shooting; the #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter movements; the emergence of self-driving cars; Brexit; and the election of Donald Trump to the presidency of the United States. We are living through historic times — the most widely tumultuous period of transformation and catastrophe for the planet since the end of World War II, with overlapping political, social, economic, and ecological crises that threaten to turn the coming decades into hell on Earth — but it has not helped us to think historically, or to understand that no matter how hard we vote things are never going to “get back to normal.” Everything is different now.

Everything is always different, yes, fine — but everything is really different now.

The Ministry for the Future is Kim Stanley Robinson’s grimmest book since 2015’s Aurora, and likely the grimmest book he has written to date — but it is also one of his most ambitious, as he seeks to tell the story of how, given what science and history both tell us to be true, the rest of our lives could be anything but an endless nightmare. It is not an easy read, with none of the strategies of spatial or temporal distancing that make Mars or the Moon or the New York of 2140 feel like spaces of optimistic historical possibility; it’s a book that calls on us instead to imagine living through a revolution ourselves, as we are, in the here and now. Robinson, our culture’s last great utopian, hasn’t lost heart exactly — but he’s definitely getting deep down into the muck of things this time.

More here.

Peter Schadt and Hans Zobel in Jacobin:

The United States and China are engaging in a trade war that British think tank Chatham House calls rooted in “a race for global technological dominance.” And for German business daily Handelsblatt, “Europe is getting caught in the crossfire of [this] technology war.” Faced with this threat, the European Commission has reserved large parts of its coronavirus recovery fund to boosting or maintaining Europe’s “digital sovereignty.” Technology, it would seem, is a matter of power politics. But what does “technological dominance” mean in the digital age?

In her State of the European Union address in September, European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen announced that we have ahead of us nothing less than a “digital decade,” and demanded clear-cut goals for a digital Europe by 2030. As she put it, “Europe must now lead the way on digital — or it will have to follow the way of others, who are setting these standards for us. This is why we must move fast.”

The three remaining world powers — the EU, China, and the United States — are today struggling for world market supremacy. The battles will be fought in the field of digital technology. And as von der Leyen indicated, one of their most important weapons will be the bid to impose their own standards on the global market. Let’s have a look at their battle plans.

More here.