Cailin O’Connor and James Owen Weatherall in Imperfect Cognitions:

Since early 2016, in the lead-up to the U.S. presidential election and the Brexit vote in the UK, there has been a growing appreciation of the role that misinformation and false beliefs have come to play in major political decisions in Western democracies. (What we have in minds are beliefs such as that vaccines cause autism, that anthropogenic climate change is not real, that the UK pays exorbitant fees to the EU that could be readily redirected to domestic programs, or that genetically modified foods are generally harmful.)

One common line of thought on these events is that reasoning biases are the primary explanation for the spread of misinformation and false belief. To give an example, many have pointed out that confirmation bias – the tendency to take up evidence supporting our current beliefs, and ignore evidence disconfirming them – plays an important role in protecting false beliefs from disconfirmation.

In our recent book, The Misinformation Age: How False Beliefs Spread, we focus on another explanation of the persistence and spread of false belief that we think is as important as individual reasoning biases, or even more so. In particular, we look at the role social connections play in the spread of falsehood. In doing so we draw on work, by ourselves and others, in formal social epistemology. This field typically uses mathematical models of human interaction to study questions such as: how do groups of scientists reach consensus? What role does social structure play in the spread of theories? How can industry influence public beliefs about science?

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Quinn Slobodian in The New Statesman:

In 2010, a precious metals blogger called Peter Boehringer posted an image of Karl Marx’s head floating over Frankfurt, the home of the European Central Bank. Like many online “gold bugs,” his message reflected the belief that currencies without the backing of gold amount to “monetary socialism” and pave the way to government overreach and eventual economic collapse. Boehringer now sits in the German Bundestag for the Alternative for Germany Party (AfD), and chairs the parliament’s budget committee.

A few years later, the far-right leader Marine Le Pen launched a campaign to return French gold deposits kept in New York. The gold bars “do not belong to the state, nor the Bank of France, but to the French people,” she announced. Last month, Italy’s Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini called gold the “property of the Italian people” and threatened to plug a gap in the budget by selling off Italy’s gold deposits.  Gold has also caught the attention of far-right politicians further eastwards. In 2018 Poland began stockpiling gold; Hungary, under the leadership of Viktor Orbán, has multiplied its gold reserves tenfold.

Why is the far right fixated on gold?

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Daniel Green at Poetry Magazine:

James Purdy’s first novel, Malcolm, the story of a beautiful young man who encounters a world of dangerous and grotesque comic characters while searching for his missing father, was published in 1959. The book brought Purdy critical acclaim (and was later adapted for the stage by Edward Albee), as did his next few novels: The Nephew (1961), Cabot Wright Begins (1964), and Eustace Chisholm and the Works (1967). Purdy was prominent enough that reviewing Cabot Wright Begins in the New York Times, Susan Sontag called him “indisputably one of the half dozen or so living American writers worth taking seriously.” This proved to be Purdy’s critical and popular zenith, however. As the first of his novels to incorporate homosexuality as a direct plot element, Eustace Chisholmpuzzled many critics, and while Purdy wouldn’t represent sexuality so explicitly again until his novel Narrow Rooms (1978), his fiction from the 1970s on attracted less and less notice. With his reputation as a novelist in decline, Purdy turned more often to playwrighting and poetry, with the latter remaining the genre for which he is still least recognized.

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David Hudson at The Criterion Collection:

Any attempt to neatly sum up the work of Carolee Schneemann, the painter, filmmaker, writer, and performance and installation artist who has passed away at the age of seventy-nine, will likely be a futile exercise. But in 2016, in a piece for the New York Times on Schneemann’s influence on artists as varied as Matthew Barney, Icelandic performance artist Ragnar Kjartansson, and Lena Dunham, Hillarie M. Sheets gave it a go, arguing that the “essential question her work posed early on was, Can a naked woman be both image and image-maker?”

Schneemann aimed to reclaim the female body, starting with her own, from the objectification ingrained over centuries of art history. Her father was a doctor, and as a young girl, she not only pored over his anatomy books but also drew bodies in motion on his spare prescription pads. While studying art at Bard College in the 1950s, she was free to pose nude for the male students but was suspended for painting herself without clothes on. By the early ’60s, she was hanging with Yoko One and other Fluxus artists, dropping in on Andy Warhol’s Factory, and taking part in performance works by Claes Oldenberg and Robert Morris, while her partner, the composer and music theorist James Tenney, introduced her to the likes of Philip Glass, Terry Riley, and Steve Reich.

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Drew Tewksbury at the LA Times:

While a computer is useless after just a few years or an iPhone goes out of date — planned obsolescence, of course — a brick can last for centuries; it’s the best technology we have ever developed.

In the world’s oldest book, “Epic of Gilgamesh,” the ruler of Uruk recognized how bricks paved a road toward the infinite. “Gilgamesh realized that his name stamped on hard bricks, ‘where the names of famous men are written,’ meant that his creations and his memory would last for eternity,” Cruickshank writes. “The kiln-dried brick was the passport to immortality, a guarantee that your creations — and your name — would live forever.” Built with fire- and sun-baked bricks, the monolithic Ziggurat of Ur — created around 2100 B.C. in a bustling metropolis of around 50,000 people, perhaps the Los Angeles of Mesopotamia — presaged the pyramids by centuries. A reconstruction of it exists today near Nasiriyah, Iraq, built by another ruler with an ultimately unsuccessful dream of immortality, Saddam Hussein.

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Bruce Robbins in The Chronicle of Higher Education:

On April 7, 2003, less than three weeks into America’s invasion of Iraq, Bruno Latour worried aloud, in a lecture at Stanford, that scholars and intellectuals had themselves become too combative. Under the circumstances, he asked, did it really help to take official accounts of reality as an enemy, aiming to expose the prejudice and ideology hidden behind supposedly objective facts? “Is it really the task of the humanities to add deconstruction to destruction?,” he wondered.

Latour’s name for this project of distrust was “critique.” Critique in his somewhat eccentric, “suspicion of everything” sense was not in fact what most progressive scholars and intellectuals thought of themselves as doing, whether in opposition to the war in Iraq or in general. When Latour’s lecture came out the following year under the title “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?,” it was an extremely influential bit of theater. Latour had made his career as a critic of science and purveyor of an all-purpose distrust. “I myself have spent some time in the past trying to show ‘the lack of scientific certainty’ inherent in the construction of facts,” he confessed in the essay. “Is it enough to say that we did not really mean what we said?” A famous intellectual revolutionary now seemed to be renouncing the revolution, and to many it seemed that the revolution itself was over. A number of other scholars came forward to testify that they too had had it up to here with critique. Postcritique was born.

In literary criticism, this much-discussed phenomenon has various labels: In addition to postcritique, it goes by “surface reading,” “distant reading,” “description,” and “the new formalism.” In a 2015 Chronicle Review essay, Jeffrey J. Williams summed these trends up as the field’s “new modesty.” “Literary critics have become more subdued,” Williams wrote, “adopting methods with less grand speculation, more empirical study, and more use of statistics or other data. They aim to read, describe, and mine data rather than make ‘interventions’ of world-historical importance.”

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Meredith Wadman in Science:

BethAnn McLaughlin has no time for James Watson, especially not when the 90-year-old geneticist is peering out from a photo on the wall of her guest room at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory’s Banbury Center. “I don’t need him staring at me when I’m trying to go to sleep,” McLaughlin told a December 2018 gathering at the storied New York meeting center as she projected a photo of her redecorating job: She had hung a washcloth over the image of Watson, who co-discovered DNA’s structure, directed the lab for decades—and is well-known for racist and sexist statements. The washcloth image was part of McLaughlin’s unconventional presentation—by turns sobering, hilarious, passionate, and profane—to two dozen experts who had gathered to wrestle with how to end gender discrimination in the biosciences. McLaughlin, a 51-year-old neuroscientist at Vanderbilt University Medical Center (VUMC) in Nashville, displayed the names of current members of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) who have been sanctioned for sexual harassment. She urged other NAS members—several of whom sat in the room—to resign in protest, “as one does.” She chided institutions for passing along “harassholes” to other universities. “The only other places that do this are the Catholic Church and the military,” she said.

In the past 9 months, McLaughlin has exploded into view as the public face of the #MeToo movement in science, wielding her irreverent, sometimes wickedly funny Twitter presence, @McLNeuro, as part cudgel, part cheerleader’s megaphone. In June 2018, she created a website, MeTooSTEM.com, where scores of women in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) have posted mostly anonymous, often harrowing tales of their own harassment. In just 2 days that month, she convinced the widely used website RateMyProfessors.com to remove its “red hot chili pepper” rating for “hotness.” And after launching an online petition, she succeeded last fall in spurring AAAS, which publishes Science, to adopt a policy allowing proven sexual harassers to be stripped of AAAS honors.

…In November 2018, McLaughlin shared the second annual $250,000 Disobedience Award from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab in Cambridge for “ethical, nonviolent” civil disobedience. And, “impressed by the sheer force of her conviction” at the Banbury meeting, Erin O’Shea, president of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Chevy Chase, Maryland, later pledged the institute’s financial support for a nonprofit, #MeTooSTEM, that McLaughlin is founding to support survivors of sexual harassment.

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Edward Mendelson in the New York Review of Books:

George Hutchinson’s Facing the Abyss has bracing and revelatory things to say about American culture in the 1940s; also, by contrast and implication, about American culture today. The book brings into focus intellectual and emotional realities of the decade during and after World War II that current historical memory largely occludes behind heroicizing or condescending stereotypes. On the one hand, popular media serve up nostalgia for a “Greatest Generation.” On the other hand, academic dogma rebukes the decade’s aspirations for “universality,” for an inclusive sense of what it means to be human, portraying those hopes as imperialist cudgels designed to impose Western values on a postcolonial world. Hutchinson’s demolitions of these and other recent fantasies typically begin with phrases like “On the contrary” or “This was not the case.”

His first chapter, “When Literature Mattered,” summarizes a brief era unlike any other, when Americans of all classes and backgrounds turned hungrily to novels, plays, and poems, provoked by a “need to recapture the meaning of personal experience.” Soldiers who had never picked up a book now read free Armed Services Editions paperbacks—more than a hundred million came off the presses from 1943 to 1947—first for relief from wartime tedium, then because the books offered them new ways to understand their relationships and inner lives. Educated readers, meanwhile, grew impatient with both the collectivist ethos and the formalist aesthetics that had governed intellectual life a few years earlier. Later, after the 1940s ended, literature lost its importance in general culture—it no longer mattered—partly because, as Hutchinson writes, “other media drew leisure-time attention,” but also because it “became increasingly (but not exclusively) a professional specialization supported by universities.”

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Leigh Phillips in the MIT Technology Review:

BP might not be the first source you go to for environmental news, but its annual energy review is highly regarded by climate watchers. And its 2018 message was stark: despite the angst over global warming, coal was responsible for 38% of the world’s power in 2017—precisely the same level as when the first global climate treaty was signed 20 years ago. Worse still, greenhouse-gas emissions rose by 2.7% last year, the largest increase in seven years.

Such stagnation has led many policymakers and environmental groups to conclude that we need more nuclear energy. Even United Nations researchers, not enthusiastic in the past, now say every plan to keep the planet’s temperature rise under 1.5 °C will rely on a substantial jump in nuclear energy.

But we’re headed in the other direction. Germany is scheduled to shut down all its nuclear plants by 2022; Italy voted by referendum to block any future projects back in 2011. And even if nuclear had broad public support (which it doesn’t), it’s expensive: several nuclear plants in the US closed recently because they can’t compete with cheap shale gas.

More here.

Thomas B. Edsall in the New York Times:

A recent survey asked Republicans and Democrats whether they agreed with the statement that members of the opposition party “are not just worse for politics — they are downright evil.”

The answers, published in January in a paper, “Lethal Mass Partisanship,” were startling, but maybe they shouldn’t have been.

Just over 42 percent of the people in each party view the opposition as “downright evil.” In real numbers, this suggests that 48.8 million voters out of the 136.7 million who cast ballots in 2016 believe that members of opposition party are in league with the devil.

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Peter Coviello at the LARB:

Now, listen: you don’t have to persuade me of the foolhardiness of leaning too earnestly into the elliptical, undergraduate-Ashberian lyrical misdirections of Stephen Malkmus, the band’s movie-star handsome singer and chief songwriter. But let’s indulge ourselves, just this once. For “Unfair” is, quite unambiguously, a song about something: it’s a song about California. Or rather (like the song “Two States” from their previous record), “Unfair” is a song about the maldistribution of California’s resources across the north-south axis. “Manmade deltas and concrete rivers,” Malkmus says (though he drawls it Dylanishly into “riv-ahhs”). “The south takes what the north delivers.” And that’s “Unfair”: Chinatown, basically, as two-minute punk rock diatribe.

The punkishness, it turns out, is what matters most. Because if I continue to adore this song, it is not least because it marks the moment in the whole decade-plus career of this band where the impress of punk rock is, I think, the least mitigated and diffused.

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Padraic Colum at Commonweal:

I have never lost my taste for cakes. After the cakes of folk-culture such as pancakes and “the cake of the palm,” came cakes that were still popular but approaching the cakes of the higher cultivation: squares of ginger-bread sold off carts at little fairs or in little shops; ginger-cakes which were very vitalizing as one faced a mile of road on a chill evening (in those remote days one could get a bag-full for two pence). Later on there was a heavy, clammy cake that one bought in pennyworths—Chester Cake it was called. It was related that the ingredients of this cake were always mixed in beer—porter—and this rumor added to the worth of the cake, to our minds, by giving it a dark and secret origin. And, still on the border between the cakes of folk-culture and the cakes of the higher cultivation, there were spiced cakes and cream tarts.

Then came cakes of the higher cultivation—cakes with icings, cakes with rare fruits crowning them and embedded in them, cakes that are the creations of meditative and daring intelligence. All such cakes are a temptation to me—all, I should say, except cakes that have chocolate outside or inside of them. I think such cakes are mistaken.

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Eleanor Birne at the LRB:

Over the next eighteen months he painted all the Cadaques subjects and ‘largely forgot’ he was painting blind. Black Windows (2006) is a result of this process. It’s a view of a traditional Spanish street – white houses, green shutters, orange roofs – with a figure in a hat standing at the street corner gazing down. It’s hard not to see the figure as Mann himself, drinking in the scene the real man can’t. Green and white and shades of purple and yellow dance on the canvas. It’s the scene as felt recreated in paint, a sort of synaesthesia at work.

Many of the paintings have a strong feeling of warmth or heat about them, generated by the vibrancy of colour. In Infinity Pool III, three women in red, green and black bathing costumes lounge in a beach hut.

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Shadi Hamid in Comment:

How Muslims make their place in a changing America, then, isn’t just about Muslims but about how to hold to the ideal of religious communities making America great. It is also about challenging the spread and normalization of Islamophobia. This rise in anti-Muslim bigotry has led many to see this as the worst period yet for American Muslims, exceeding even the immediate aftermath of the September 11 attacks. But looked at another way, Donald Trump has unwittingly propelled Muslims into the cultural and political mainstream. According to polling by my colleague Shibley Telhami, few things predict partisan affiliation more than attitudes toward Muslims and Islam. In practice, this means that there are few better ways to signal your anti-Trump bona fides than by being pro-Muslim.

I watched, somewhat in awe, the images of citizens rallying around American Muslims who protested Trump’s first travel ban by praying at airport baggage claims in January 2017. Scenes such as that would have been hard to imagine after 9/11. In Washington, DC, where I live, various cafés and restaurants feature welcome signs at their entrances with a picture of a woman wearing a headscarf. A new crop of Muslim candidates are running and winning elections, including the first two Muslim congresswomen in American history. A Muslim comic, Hasan Minhaj, headlined the White House Correspondents’ Dinner for the first time in 2017. Meanwhile, Muslim characters are showing up in prominent films and television shows, including, perhaps most interestingly, a transgender, observant Muslim in HBO’s Here and Now.

More here.

Elie Dolgin in Nature:

Nobody paid much attention to Jean Vance 30 years ago, when she discovered something fundamental about the building blocks inside cells. She even doubted herself, at first. The revelation came after a series of roadblocks. The cell biologist had just set up her laboratory at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, and was working alone. She thought she had isolated a pure batch of structures called mitochondria — the power plants of cells — from rat livers. But tests revealed that her sample contained something that wasn’t supposed to be there. “I thought I’d made a big mistake,” Vance recalls.

After additional purification steps, she found extra bits of the cells’ innards clinging to mitochondria like wads of chewing gum stuck to a shoe. The interlopers were part of the endoplasmic reticulum (ER) — an assembly line for proteins and fatty molecules. Other biologists had seen this, too, and dismissed it as an artefact of the preparation. But Vance realized that the pieces were glued together for a reason, and that this could solve one of cell biology’s big mysteries. In a 1990 paper, Vance showed that the meeting points between the ER and mitochondria were crucibles for the synthesis of lipids¹. By bringing the two organelles together, these junctions could serve as portals for the transfer of newly made fats. This would answer the long-standing question of how mitochondria receive certain lipids — they are directly passed from the ER.

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Karan Mahajan in Vanity Fair:

The three Gupta brothers—Ajay, Atul, and Rajesh—had bought the Optimum Coal Mine in December 2015, adding it to the tentacular empire they were building across South Africa, with interests in uranium deposits, media outlets, computer companies, and arms suppliers. The miners, the union leader told me, would watch as the Guptas landed their helicopter in the parched soccer field with its rusty goalposts, only to swagger around with their gun-toting white bodyguards and take their kids to the mine vents without protective gear. Sometimes, when the brothers were in a magnanimous mood, they would dole out fistfuls of cash to miners who had been particularly obsequious that day. At the same time, they cut corners viciously. Health insurance and pensions were slashed. Broken machines were patched up with old parts from other machines. Safety regulations were flouted.

Then, a few months after the Guptas bought the mine, a tectonic corruption scandal upended South Africa. A government official testified that the Guptas had offered him the position of finance minister; the three brothers, it turned out, had effectively seized control of the state apparatus. It was, to date, one of the most audacious and lucrative scams of the century. Drawing on their close ties to President Jacob Zuma—and with the help of leading international firms like KPMG, McKinsey, and SAP—the Guptas may have drained the national treasury of as much as $7 billion. Zuma was forced to resign. McKinsey offered an extraordinary public apology for its role in the scandal. The Guptas fled to Dubai. And the mine, which the brothers had obtained in a corrupt deal brokered and financed by the government, tipped into bankruptcy.

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Ed Yong in The Atlantic:

In 1828, a teenager named Charles Darwin opened a letter to his cousin with “I am dying by inches, from not having anybody to talk to about insects.” Almost two centuries on, Darwin would probably be thrilled and horrified: People are abuzz about insects, but their discussions are flecked with words such as apocalypse and Armageddon.

The drumbeats of doom began in late 2017, after a German study showed that the total mass of local flying insects had fallen by 80 percent in three decades. The alarms intensified after The New York Times Magazine published a masterful feature on the decline of insect life late last year. And panic truly set in this month when the researchers Francisco Sánchez-Bayo and Kris Wyckhuys, having reviewed dozens of studies, claimed that “insects as a whole will go down the path of extinction in a few decades.” The Guardian, in covering the duo’s review, wrote that “insects could vanish within a century”—a crisis that Sánchez-Bayo and Wyckhuys believe could lead to a “catastrophic collapse of nature’s ecosystems.”

I spoke with several entomologists about whether these claims are valid, and what I found was complicated.

More here.