Kwon and Tormes in Scientific American:

In 1968 an exhibit entitled Cybernetic Serendipity: The Computer and the Arts was held at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. The first major event of its kind, Cybernetic Serendipity’s aim was to “present an area of activity which manifests artists’ involvement with science, and the scientists’ involvement with the arts,” wrote British art critic Jasia Reichardt, who curated the exhibit. Even though it was an art show, “most of the participants in the exhibition were scientists,” Reichardt said in a 2014 video. “Artists didn’t have computers in the 1960s.” A lot has changed since then, however. Computers, no longer the commodity of a select few, help artists to deviate from more traditional mediums.

The changes since the 1960s are well-reflected in the entries for the 2020 Art of Neuroscience competition, held by the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience. Now marking its 10th year, the contest features some highly technological pieces and others grounded in classical methods, such as drawing with pen on paper. The winning entries were created by independent artists, as well as working scientists, demonstrating that art and neuroscience can inspire both professions. A winner and four honorable mentions were selected from dozens of submitted works. And seven pieces were chosen by Scientific American as Editors’ Picks. (Photography editor Liz Tormes served on the panel of judges for the competition.)

More here.

Poem That Needs No Introduction

…… -an excerpt

I.
Listen, I have endured so much bad art in my lifetime
that my brain actually throbs and pulses
in the manner of a 1960s comic-book supervillain
and my skull threatens to burst at the seams like a lychee nut
at the mere thought of those tuneless bands and lousy etchings
and the earnest readings in coffee houses
smelling of clove cigarettes,
pretentious photos of phallomorphic icebergs,
the opening at the gallery hung with stillborn elephants—
what could you say?—and one unforgettable night
a conceptual dance performance akin to ritual sacrifice
with the audience as victims—as if art
might prove the literal death of me—all this,
all this and so much more,
only to find myself here, in Bratislava,
at the Ars Poetica poetry festival,
yet again drinking red wine from a plastic cup
while the poets disclaim in languages
dense and indecipherable as knotted silk, thinking, well,
what could be better than this?

II.
Perhaps it would be better if the air-conditioning worked
and the keg of Zlatý Bažant had not run dry
but the local wine is unexpectedly delicious, hearty as a wild boar’s
…. blood,
and the very existence of such an exuberantly cacophonous conclave
in this diminutive and innocuous backwater of Mitteleuropa
makes me yearn to do something hearty and wine-soaked and
…. boarish—
no, not boorish—to shout spontaneous bebop musings
like the hipster Beatnik poet Fred from Paris
or crack wise like the balding Fran O’Hara imitator from Vienna
or sing like the yodeling, pop-eyed jokester from Prague
or simply intone with great seriousness like the well-mannered poets
from Warsaw and Wroclaw, Berlin and Budapest and Brno.

III.
o river sand,
sink deeper and fling yourself
into my whirlpool!

blue-flower gas-ring octopus—
what brings you
to the rain forest, amigo?

IV.
Well, that came out a bit like Basho imitating Corso
but the thought is what counts when it is 10:45 and you are drunk
enough to believe a poem scribbled on a festival program
could change the world
and when someone says time is an invisible marauder
I shout Fuck you! And everybody smiles.

V.
This poem will change the world!
. . .
.
by Campbell McGrath
from Nouns & Verbs
Harper Collins, 2019

Benjamin Plackett in Nature:

Current methods for predicting heart attacks are woefully outdated, says Cheerag Shirodaria, a cardiologist at the Oxford University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, UK. “We basically look at a patient’s age, obesity and whether they have diabetes. The most sophisticated we get is measuring their cholesterol,” he says. Heart attacks are often caused when fatty accumulations inside arteries, known as plaques, result in the narrowing of blood vessels. These plaques then rupture and form blood clots. Age, being overweight or obese and having diabetes are all risk factors, and people in at-risk groups are closely monitored. “But 50% of heart attacks are in people without narrowing, and they’re being missed by current tests,” he says. A desire to drag prognosis into the modern era is what pushed Shirodaria and a group of like-minded cardiologists to set up Caristo Diagnostics. Rather than blood-vessel narrowing, the team focuses on another driver of plaque ruptures — vascular inflammation. The company uses algorithms to analyse information that until now has been hidden in the noise of computed tomography (CT) scans. This enables it to assess inflammation and calculate the likelihood that a person will have a heart attack in a given time period.

…Fat tissue bordering blood vessels, known as perivascular fat, had long been thought to be a cause of inflamed arteries. “There was this perception that perivascular fat was the bad guy,” says Antoniades. That’s why his research started out as a hunt for any potential chemicals produced and sent by the fat to the blood vessels — the working theory used to be that such chemicals could have been behind the problem. “But the results always showed the opposite,” he explains. The signals were instead going the other way. Antoniades showed that when an artery is inflamed, it sends out SOS signals that are then picked up in the surrounding fat¹. In response, the fat undergoes lipolysis — the lipids break down and the water content in the fat cells increases (see ‘Sensing a heart at risk’). That effectively means that diminished perivascular fat is an indicator of inflammation, and therefore also of an increased risk of heart attack. Other scientists have validated the link between perivascular fat abnormalities in CT scans and coronary inflammation².

More here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JBqrlgZXZXk&feature=emb_logo

Cam Scott at Music and Literature:

A certain mythology has gathered around the thirty-five year hiatus that followed Coursil’s incredibly fruitful period of musical cosmopolitanism. There is a romantic obscurity to the way in which jazz fans discuss the career interruptions of their favorite players, mistaking hard times and financial exigencies for semi-monastic trials of spirit. A prime example would be Sonny Rollins, who retreated into a prolonged rehearsal session at the height of his fame, practicing all hours on the Williamsburg bridge and bearing solitary witness to the city; or Dexter Gordon, whose incarceration in the fifties secured his reputation as the perennial ambassador of bebop, and an intercontinental comeback kid. Other disappearances are far more lacunar and prolonged, such as that of sought-after bassist Henry Grimes, who devoted himself to poetry and literature during a decades-long stint in the workaday world, only to emerge with startling vigor in the early twenty-first century.

Coursil’s willful abstention from recording was in service to a scholarly path.

more here.

Jack Beatty at Lapham’s Quarterly:

Of the millions of bullets fired in 1914, only two changed history: the bullet fired on June 28 in Sarajevo by Gavrilo Princip’s Browning automatic that killed Archduke Franz Ferdinand, and the bullet fired on March 16 in Paris by Henriette Caillaux that killed Gaston Calmette. As premier in 1911, her husband had by back-channel negotiations defused a war-charged crisis with Germany, grounds for believing he could have worked his magic again three years later, when he would have all but certainly been elected premier again—but for the bark of Henriette’s Browning. Months before the war, anticipating that Caillaux, then the finance minister, would soon be premier, Belgium’s ambassador to Paris assured Brussels: “Caillaux’s presence in power will lessen the acuteness of international jealousies and will constitute a better base for relations between France and Germany.” That was heresy in “official Paris,” where “everybody that you meet tells you that an early war with Germany is certain and inevitable.” Months into the war, the Kölnische Zeitung stated, “If Monsieur Caillaux had remained in office, if Madame Caillaux’s gesture had not been made, the plot against the peace of Europe would not have succeeded.”

more here.

Amit Chaudhuri in the TLS:

To include the Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita in a series called “Footnotes to Plato” may seem odd for many reasons – some obvious, some less so. But to address the oddity is invigorating, and offers a way of considering the necessity of placing these works in the wider discussion, as well as the historical and conceptual impediments to doing so.

Among the impediments is a logistical one which reveals how, in the West, value and significance are attributed according to certain classificatory norms and not others. I don’t mean the “canon”; I’m referring to a more basic category: authorship. “Footnotes to Plato” (like Western philosophy), is, generally, as much about the philosophers as it is about the philosophy. In fact, the field of knowledge called “the history of Western philosophy” could just as easily be called “the history of Western philosophers”, inasmuch as Western philosophers are the sum total of their lives and works, and we often defer to both biography and thought when we interact with the philosophy. Each body of work has a personality, but so does its author; in almost every case, we can, literally, put a “face” to the work, whether that’s a photograph of Bertrand Russell or a fourth-century BC bust of Plato.

What do we do with a philosophy when there’s no philosopher in sight?

More here.

Debraj Ray and S. Subramanian in the Boston Review:

It has been just over five months since the first case of COVID-19 was detected in India. With nearly a million confirmed cases, the country now has the third greatest number of infections, behind only the United States and Brazil. At least 25,000 people have died.

The outbreak began, as it did elsewhere, with an isolated case—a student at Wuhan University who had returned to Kerala in late January. Before long the infection had moved into community transmission, with over 1,000 confirmed reports by the end of March. But in the central government’s scheme of priorities, COVID-19 was initially swamped by other preoccupations: Assembly elections in Delhi, murderous communal atrocities in the aftermath of a profoundly provocative Citizenship Amendment Act passed last year, Donald Trump’s visit to India in late February, and the politics of regime change in the state of Madhya Pradesh.

More here.

James L. Gibson and Joseph L. Sutherland at SSRN:

Over the course of the period from the heyday of McCarthyism to the present, the percentage of the American people not feeling free to express their views has tripled. In 2019, fully four in ten Americans engaged in self-censorship. Our analyses of both over-time and cross-sectional variability provide several insights into why people keep their mouths shut. We find that:

(1) Levels of self-censorship are related to affective polarization among the mass public, but not via an “echo chamber” effect because greater polarization is associated with more self-censorship.

(2) Levels of mass political intolerance bear no relationship to self-censorship, either at the macro- or micro-levels.

(3) Those who perceive a more repressive government are only slightly more likely to engage in self-censorship. And

(4) those possessing more resources (e.g., higher levels of education) report engaging in more self-censorship.

Together, these findings suggest the conclusion that one’s larger macro-environment has little to do with self-censorship. Instead, micro-environment sentiments — such as worrying that expressing unpopular views will isolate and alienate people from their friends, family, and neighbors — seem to drive self-censorship. We conclude with a brief discussion of the significance of our findings for larger democracy theory and practice.

More here.

Emily Tamkin in New Statesman:

This is not the usual bland political ­memoir offering yet another story of finding the American dream. In part, this is because Ilhan Omar is not another dull politician. That much is obvious from the waves she has made in Washington, DC since becoming a member of Congress in 2019. Omar, from Minnesota, and Rashida Tlaib, from Michigan, are the first two ­Muslim women elected to Congress. Along with two other women of colour, who are also in their first term, Alexandria ­Ocasio-Cortez and Ayanna Pressley, they are known as “the squad”. The 181-year-old ban on wearing ­religious head-wear in the House chamber was changed in 2019, allowing Omar to wear her hijab on the floor of Congress. While ­running for Congress, Omar admits, she was worried that this rule would keep her from being able to serve.

Omar quickly gained attention for her progressive stances, aggressive questioning of foreign policy hawks, and contentious statements on Israel (she apologised for one of these comments, a 2019 tweet that suggested Republican support for Israel was “all about the Benjamins, baby” – ie, financially motivated). And she has been relentlessly attacked from all sides, from the far right to the centre left. Donald Trump ranted about Omar in a rally in 2019, prompting the crowd to start chanting, “Send her back.” Omar was born in Mogadishu, Somalia, in 1982. She was the baby of the family; “a particularly tiny child” and a tomboy. She lost her mother at a very young age, but even so her family lived what sounds like a happy, chaotic but colourful life – until war came and they left for the US. Omar’s book gives an insight into one of the likely future leaders of Democratic politics. Some of the details are unexpected: I didn’t think the person, living or dead, she would choose to meet would be Margaret Thatcher: “Time and time again,” Omar writes, “she showed up in rooms filled with men and didn’t have to do much to lead them to decide that she should be in charge.”

More here.

Kevin Berger in Nautilus:

Helen Fisher first appeared in Nautilus in 2015 with her article, “Casual Sex May Be Improving America’s Marriages.” Since then we’ve interviewed the biological anthropologist a host of times, anxious to hear her insights into the ties that bind and fray. Fisher made her name in popular science in 1992 with her book, Anatomy of Love, tracing the evolution of love from prehistoric to neuroscientific times. She’s the author of other books including Why Him? Why Her? Today she’s a senior research fellow at the Kinsey Institute and chief scientific advisor to Match.com.

Fisher’s research has found its way into many articles and books about the science of love and sex, including Love Drugs, a provocative new book by Brian D. Earl and Julian Savulescu, also featured this week in Nautilus. We could hardly create a Nautilus issue about love and sex without her voice. Her comments below represent her key points about the biology of love and sex, and are often counterintuitive and surprising. They are drawn from my interviews with her and presented on their own under short headings.

I Love You, Doctor

We put over 100 people who were madly in love into a brain scanner using fMRI. We noticed those who had fallen in love in the first eight months had a lot of activity in brain regions linked with intense feelings of romantic love. Those who had been madly in love for a longer period of time—from eight to 17 months—showed additional activity in a brain region linked with feelings of deep attachment. That vividly showed us the brain can easily fall happily and madly in love rapidly, but feelings of deep attachment take time. Romantic love is like a sleeping cat: It can be awakened at any time. But attachment, those feelings of cosmic, deep, profound love for another person, takes time.

More here.

Andrew Gelman over at his website:

Tyler Cowen writes:

Avoid criticizing other public intellectuals. In fact, avoid the negative as much as possible. However pressing a social or economic issue may be, there is almost always a positive and constructive way to reframe your potential contribution. This also will force you to keep on thinking harder, because it is easier to take apparently justified negative slaps at the wrongdoers.

This is not my approach, so it might be worth exploring our differences here.

1. Most importantly, there’s division of labor, or the ecosystem. I think it’s good to have some writers who are positive and others who are negative. Each of us has our own style. If Cowen is comfortable being positive most of the time and that works for him, that’s cool.

2. Regarding my own negativity: one thing I’ve found is that often I will start from a positive, constructive perspective but then move to the negative after a series of frustrations.

For example, I thought the newspaper columnist David Brooks had some interesting insights regarding Bobos, Red and Blue America, etc., but I gradually got frustrated at his sloppiness and his refusal to correct his mistakes. Where do you draw the line between making a mistake and flat-out lying? I’m not sure.

This comes up a lot: the beauty-and-sex-ratio research, the Why We Sleep book, Pizzagate, ESP at Cornell, ovulation-and-clothing, etc etc etc. People make mistakes, we discuss these mistakes in a constructive way, and we reach escalating levels of frustration as the promulgators of these errors refuse to consider the possibility they may be wrong.

But that’s all background. Here’s my main point:

3. Negativity (when applied with rigor) requires more care than positivity.

More here.

Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins interviews Roberto Unger in The Nation:

ROBERTO MANGABEIRA UNGER: To grasp the meaning of this moment for the future of the country, it is useful to begin by distinguishing the immediate background—the failure of the established approach to racial injustice in the United States—from the larger context of which this failure forms a part: the disorientation of American progressives and the long-standing absence in American politics of any program responsive to the needs, interests, and aspirations of the working-class majority of the country, white or black.

The prevailing response to racial injustice in the United States has been the integrationist orthodoxy. It treats racial injustice as a threshold issue, to be addressed before all problems of economic equality and opportunity. Its signature expression is affirmative action. It has done little for those who most require protection, the vast number of black people who languish in prisons and dead-end jobs. This approach has offended the white working-class majority, who believe themselves to be victims of a conspiracy between sanctimonious white elites and the representatives of black workers. And it has provided a model for the identity politics that has addressed legitimate demands for respect and recognition only by diverting the country from engagement with its structural problems.

There is an alternative. The alternative is to distinguish individualized racial discrimination from the advancement of the unequipped, the excluded, and the impoverished.

More here.

Sam Moyn over at the Quincy Institute:

Since September 11, 2001, American policy in matters of war has abandoned the restraints in the U.S. Constitution and international law, with grievous results not merely for wrongful victims of war (such as the abused captives in Guantánamo Bay or civilians killed in drone strikes) but also for those whom the laws governing how war is conducted were never devised to protect. In focusing exclusively on harms to abused captives and civilians killed as “collateral damage,” American debate has ignored a wider set of wrongs. These include the death and injury of fighters themselves on both sides, including long-term post-traumatic stress; the fate of populations under increasing surveillance and constant threat of force; and the enormous costs of an “endless war” footing that whole societies must bear. In the American case, these costs come to trillions of dollars.

With rare exceptions, debate has focused in the honorable but wrong place: on making the conduct of war less brutal and more plausibly legal.[1] In the later years of George W. Bush’s administration, the United States sought to make his war on terror more humane while lending it greater legitimacy; the harshest treatments of detainees, notably those fairly considered torture, were eliminated. The ironic result was that the war on terror endured. Endless war was elaborated during the presidency of Barack Obama, with its pivot away from heavy-footprint interventions to light– and no-footprint operations involving armed drones, standoff missiles, and special forces. Surprisingly, the same pattern has continued under President Donald Trump. His rhetoric of brutality and his contradictory promises to bring troops home notwithstanding, Trump has adopted no dramatically new methods while intensifying many of the conflicts he inherited.

More here.

Sarah Stoller in Aeon:

Modern-day flexible work policies didn’t arise in a sudden moment of crisis, but from the slow burn of second-wave feminist activism. In the 1970s, even though growing numbers of women had entered the paid workforce, they continued to do a disproportionate share of the childcare and housework. In the consciousness-raising and campaign groups that cropped up in the US and Europe, women increasingly recognised that what felt ‘merely’ personal was, in fact, political. A new generation of activists pushed for changes in the structure and conditions of paid work. The idea was to render it more suited to the needs of workers with caring responsibilities and allow women of all backgrounds to participate in the economy on equal terms with men. Meanwhile, men would be urged to share more fully in maintaining home and family. Feminist activism for what we now call ‘flexibility’ was part of a vision for remaking communities and supporting the needs of workers as whole human beings. This is most apparent in the first-hand testimony of the women who dedicated their energies to reimagining paid work at a time when the 9-to-5, 40-hour working week was the near-universal model for professional success.

In the decades since feminists first challenged the structures governing paid work, the vision at the heart of their campaigning has been lost. While employers have adopted some feminist ideas for reforming the workplace, for the most part they’ve strategically bracketed the question of who ends up looking after the children. Ironically, piggybacking on feminists’ ideas about transforming paid work has done more to contribute to a 24/7 work culture than it has to opening up new options for women. Only by looking back at the earlier ideals that structured flexible employment policies can we recover a richer sense of what it might mean to imagine a future that works for us all.

More here.