https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2KjoqyZSJ3A

Clifton Mark in Aeon:

Although widely held, the belief that merit rather than luck determines success or failure in the world is demonstrably false. This is not least because merit itself is, in large part, the result of luck. Talent and the capacity for determined effort, sometimes called ‘grit’, depend a great deal on one’s genetic endowments and upbringing.

This is to say nothing of the fortuitous circumstances that figure into every success story. In his book Success and Luck (2016), the US economist Robert Frank recounts the long-shots and coincidences that led to Bill Gates’s stellar rise as Microsoft’s founder, as well as to Frank’s own success as an academic. Luck intervenes by granting people merit, and again by furnishing circumstances in which merit can translate into success. This is not to deny the industry and talent of successful people. However, it does demonstrate that the link between merit and outcome is tenuous and indirect at best.

More here.

Emily Conover in Science News:

On a warm summer evening, a visitor to 1920s Göttingen, Germany, might have heard the hubbub of a party from an apartment on Friedländer Way. A glimpse through the window would reveal a gathering of scholars. The wine would be flowing and the air buzzing with conversations centered on mathematical problems of the day. The eavesdropper might eventually pick up a woman’s laugh cutting through the din: the hostess, Emmy Noether, a creative genius of mathematics.

At a time when women were considered intellectually inferior to men, Noether (pronounced NUR-ter) won the admiration of her male colleagues. She resolved a nagging puzzle in Albert Einstein’s newfound theory of gravity, the general theory of relativity. And in the process, she proved a revolutionary mathematical theorem that changed the way physicists study the universe.

It’s been a century since the July 23, 1918, unveiling of Noether’s famous theorem. Yet its importance persists today. “That theorem has been a guiding star to 20th and 21st century physics,” says theoretical physicist Frank Wilczek of MIT.

Noether was a leading mathematician of her day. In addition to her theorem, now simply called “Noether’s theorem,” she kick-started an entire discipline of mathematics called abstract algebra.

More here.

Scott Aaronson in Shtetl-Optimized:

I’ve of course been following the recent public debate about whether to build a circular collider to succeed the LHC—notably including Sabine Hossenfelder’s New York Times column arguing that we shouldn’t.  (See also the responses by Jeremy Bernstein and Lisa Randall, and the discussion on Peter Woit’s blog, and Daniel Harlow’s Facebook thread, and this Vox piece by Kelsey Piper.)  Let me blog about this as a way of cracking my knuckles or tuning my violin, just getting back into blog-shape after a long hiatus for travel and family and the beginning of the semester.

Regardless of whether this opinion is widely shared among my colleagues, I like Sabine.  I’ve often found her blogging funny and insightful, and I wish more non-Lubos physicists would articulate their thoughts for the public the way she does, rather than just standing on the sidelines and criticizing the ones who do. I find it unfortunate that some of the replies to Sabine’s arguments dwelled on her competence and “standing” in physics (even if we set aside—as we should—Lubos’s misogynistic rants, whose predictability could be used to calibrate atomic clocks). It’s like this: if high-energy physics had reached a pathological state of building bigger and bigger colliders for no good reason, then we’d expect that it would take a semi-outsider to say so in public, so then it wouldn’t be a further surprise to find precisely such a person doing it.

Not for the first time, though, I find myself coming down on the opposite side as Sabine. Basically, if civilization could get its act together and find the money, I think it would be pretty awesome to build a new collider to push forward the energy frontier in our understanding of the universe.

More here.

Sean Alan Cleary at Public Books:

It was a December 17, 2012, review in the New Republic that called it. In the course of largely panning Roberto Bolaño’s Woes of the True Policemanas an incomplete work that “showed [its] seams,” the reviewer, Sam Carter, declared that the immortal Bolaño was—finally—dead. It’d been nine years and 10 novels translated since the author’s death from liver failure, and now his illustrious second life in the American literary public’s eye had ended.¹ “We have enough,” the review concluded.

The posthumous wave of translations and publications that had kept Bolaño alive for American audiences had crashed—or, at least the “Bolaño Bubble,” as Carter called it, had burst. A New York Times review declared that Woes has an appeal that “is to completists only,” and, if it were an album, that it would be akin to “a collection of outtakes, alternate versions, and demos.” The book’s publisher, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, had described Woes as Bolaño’s “last, unfinished novel” and added an explanatory note that laid out the rummaging done among his papers to put the thing together.

more here.

Margaret Busby at The Guardian:

Time was when the perception of published writers was that all the women were white and all the blacks were men (to borrow the title of a key 1980s black feminist book). At best, there was a handful of black female writers – Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Maya Angelou – who were acknowledged by the literary establishment. This was the climate in which, more than 25 years ago, I compiled and published Daughters of Africa. It was critically acclaimed, but more significant has been the inspiration that 1992 anthology gave to a fresh generation of writers who form the core of its sequel, New Daughters of Africa.

The critic Juanita Cox told me: “I received Daughters of Africa as a birthday gift from my father. Two things immediately struck me about the book. It was huge and it contained women like me.

more here.

Francine Prose in Lapham’s Quarterly:

In 1924 a young man named Gyula Halász left Brasov, Transylvania—his Hungarian hometown, annexed by Romania in the aftermath of World War I—and moved to Paris. There he began to call himself Brassaï and discovered his vocation as a photographer working in black and white and almost entirely at night.

In an overcoat specially designed with pockets large enough to hold twenty-four glass negatives, and with cigarettes that he used to time the long exposures—“a Gauloise for a certain light, a Boyard if it was darker”—he walked the streets of Paris, its neighborhoods and suburbs, sometimes with his friend Henry Miller but mostly by himself. He knocked on strangers’ doors and asked to take pictures from their windows; he was arrested three times. He returned to his apartment only once the sun rose or when his supply of glass plates ran out.

If, as Diane Arbus said, “a photograph is a secret about a secret,” Brassaï soon discovered which secrets he wanted to tell—confidences revealed (and withheld) about the after-hours lives of raffish Parisians who frequented the low-life cafés, the high-end brothels and cross-dressers’ clubs; about the workers who repaired and maintained the systems that enabled the city to function; about the way that the light from a street lamp illuminated a long deserted staircase descending a hill in Montmartre.

More here.

Sam Fallon in The Chronicle of Higher Education:

In recent weeks, Donald Trump’s pursuit of a border wall between the United States and Mexico has worked its way back in time — to the Middle Ages. Trump has happily agreed that his proposal is a distinctly “medieval solution.” “It worked then,” he declared in January, “and it works even better now.” That admission proved an invitation to critics, who inveighed against the wall as, in the words of the presidential hopeful Senator Kamala Harris, Trump’s “medieval vanity project.” The response from medievalists was swift and withering — not just for the president, but also for his opponents. Calling the wall “medieval” was misleading, wrote Matthew Gabriele, of Virginia Tech, in The Washington Post, “because walls in the actual European Middle Ages simply did not work the way Trump apparently thinks they did.” On CNN.com, David M. Perry, of the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, insisted that “walls are not medieval.” And in Vox, Eric Weiskott, of Boston College, urged readers to “take it from a professor of medieval literature: calling things you don’t like ‘medieval’ is inaccurate and unhelpful.”

Readers who doubted that the moment demanded a defense of the Middle Ages could be forgiven. In a political battle of such high human stakes, the question of whether calling Trump’s proposal “medieval” constituted “an insult to the Middle Ages” (as the Voxheadline put it) might seem worryingly beside the point. But the wave of furious responses was entirely predictable. In their parochial, self-serious literalism, they exemplify a style that increasingly pervades public writing by humanities scholars — a style that takes expertise to be authoritative and wields historical facts, however trivial or debatable, as dispositive answers to political questions. Such literalism is bad rhetoric, a way of dissolving argument into trivia. It’s also bad history: At root, it betrays the humanities’ own hard-won explanations of how we have come to know the past.

More here.

Leah Griesmann at The Quarterly Conversation:

Mixed Korean: Our Stories, published by Truepeny Press, is an anthology featuring forty mixed Korean authors, and while not limited to Korean adoptees, adoptee voices feature prominently in the collection. In “Half Korean: My Story”, author Tanneke Beudeker writes about growing up half-Korean and half-African American in an adoptive Dutch family in the Netherlands, her childhood joy destroyed when white kids at her Christian school ostracize her for her race. “My parents tried to support me by talking to the teacher, and they did what most parents would do: they kept telling me sticks and stones may break by bones but words will never harm me. But they did, words broke my heart.” Though Beudeker eventually finds a meaningful career working with mentally challenged children, she still finds as an adult, “Even the slightest thing can trigger that old, familiar feeling of not being part of the herd.”

more here.

The Barbarians are Coming

War chariots thunder, horses neigh, the barbarians are coming.

What are we waiting for, young nubile women pointing at the wall,
    the barbarians are coming.

They have heard about a weakened link in the wall.
    So, the barbarians have ears among us.

So deceive yourself with illusions: you are only one woman,
holding one broken brick in the wall.

So deceive yourself with illusions: as if you matter,
that brick and that wall.

The barbarians are coming: they have red beards or beardless
with a top knot.

The barbarians are coming: they are your fathers, brothers,
teachers, lovers; and they are clearly an other.

The barbarians are coming:
If you call me a horse, I must be a horse.
If you call me a bison, I am equally as guilty.

When a thing is true and is correctly described, one doubles
the blame by not admitting it: so, Chuangtzu, himself,
was a barbarian king!

Horse, horse, bison, bison, the barbarians are coming—

and how they love to come.
The smells of the great frontier exalt in them!

by Marilyn Chin
from Modern American Poetry

Alan Malachowski in Aeon:

The American Pragmatist Richard Rorty (1931-2007) advocated a therapeutic approach to philosophy throughout his career. He leaned quietly towards such an approach even in the early days, when his writings blended unobtrusively with a self-confident analytic tradition that certainly did not see any need for therapy. But it later became obvious in what is often regarded as his most important work: Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979).

In that still-controversial and exciting book, Rorty aimed to reveal how philosophical problems stem from unconscious assumptions and beguiling imagery embedded in the language used to set them up. By showing that these are disposable products of culture and history rather than unavoidable concomitants of thought, he sought to free fellow philosophers from the stifling clutches of questions handed down by what he dubbed the Plato-Kant tradition. Rorty further hoped that their accompanying self-image as impartial arbiters of deep truths would follow suit. For he thought this lofty self-appraisal could only encourage questions that inevitably turn into fruitless scholastic obsessions. His overriding therapeutic intention at that stage seemed to be to rescue philosophy from itself.

Naturally, philosophers themselves were resistant.

More here.

Ted Nordhaus and Alex Trembath in The Breakthrough:

Is climate change more like an asteroid or diabetes? Last month, one of us argued at Slate that climate advocates should resist calls to declare a national climate emergency because climate change was more like “diabetes for the planet” than an asteroid. The diabetes metaphor was surprisingly controversial. Climate change can’t be managed or lived with, many argued in response; it is an existential threat to human societies that demands an immediate cure.

The objection is telling, both in the ways in which it misunderstands the nature of the problem and in the contradictions it reveals. Diabetes is not benign. It is not a “natural” phenomena and it can’t be cured. It is a condition that, if unmanaged, can kill you. And even for those who manage it well, life is different than before diabetes.

This seems to us to be a reasonably apt description of the climate problem. There is no going back to the world before climate change. Whatever success we have mitigating climate change, we almost certainly won’t return to pre-industrial atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases, at least not for many centuries. Even at one or 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming, the climate and the planet will look very different, and that will bring unavoidable consequences for human societies. We will live on a hotter planet and in a climate that will be more variable and less predictable.

More here.

Randall Kennedy in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

Ronald S. Sullivan Jr. is the faculty dean of Winthrop House, one of the 12 undergraduate dormitories in which most students live during their final three years at Harvard College. The faculty deans are mentors, guardians, and counselors — truly in loco parentis. They are responsible for their house’s overall social environment and manage a staff charged with facilitating the well-being of the students.

Sullivan, the first black faculty dean at Harvard, is also a clinical professor at Harvard Law School, where I have taught for over three decades. In addition to those roles, Sullivan engages in private legal practice. He helped win an acquittal in the double-murder prosecution of the professional football player Aaron Hernandez (a convicted murderer in a different case, who eventually committed suicide). He represented the family of Michael Brown, whose death at the hands of a police officer in Ferguson, Mo., fueled the Black Lives Matter movement. At the invitation of the Brooklyn district attorney, he designed and adopted a conviction-review program that freed scores of improperly imprisoned people. Sullivan is, in short, an imposing, deeply respected figure in the legal community.

Recently, however, Sullivan has encountered harsh criticism. The problem stems from his recent decision to represent a person now singularly identified as the face of sexual malevolence: Harvey Weinstein.

More here.

A Unified Berlin

The Junior Minister waved a hand
…………………….. toward the courtyard where, he said,
………………………………… Goering’s private lion used to live.
………………..…… With him we climbed Parliament’s steps,

walls pockmarked still with bullet holes.
……………………..In the conference room the Social Democrats
………………………………… passed trays of petit fours and coffee.
……………………..We were perhaps insufficient, he said.

His voice, uninflected: they shipped
……………………..my father to Stalingrad. Forty days
………………………………… and dead. In the room,
……………………..the transcriptionist, the translator,

and security stationed against
……………………..the wall. Some time passed.
………………………………… In East Germany, he said, at least
……………………..it was always terrible. Bad luck, he said,

to be on that side of the wall. Even
……………………..the apples were poison. We were
………………………………… to understand this was a little joke.
……………………..He brought the teacup to his mouth,

but did not drink. His fingernails
……………………..were tapered and very clean.
………………………………… When you are the victim, he said,
……………………..it doesn’t matter who is killing you.

by Ann Townsend
from Poets.org

Geoff Dyer at Literary Hub:

And the title is not just a sonorous bit of rhetoric plucked from Shakespeare by producer Elliott Kastner, who needed something better than the “awful fucking title” MacLean had come up with (Castle of Eagles). Kastner’s title cleverly inverts or, as is said in the world of agents and double agents, “turns” the intended sense of the lines in Richard III: “The world is grown so bad / That wrens make prey where eagles dare not perch,” words that Burton could have enunciated with the clarity Larry Olivier would later bring to the voice-over of all twenty-six episodes of The World at War, starting with the famous opening shots of Oradour-sur-Glane (“Down this road, on a summer day in 1944, the soldiers came . . .”), a clarity Eastwood neither attempts nor envies, especially since the English officers in the briefing all look like they’re kitted out in uniforms from the previous war or a shelved episode of Dad’s Army while he lounges at the back in something much sharper, more contemporary, more American-looking, sporting a post-Elvis haircut and wearing the shoulder flashes, as Wymark points out, of the American Ranger Division.

more here.

Sudip Bose at The American Scholar:

In 1942, the American composer Alan Hovhaness attended a master class at Tanglewood led by Bohuslav Martinů. In his early 30s at the time, Hovhaness had already written a considerable amount of music, including a symphony that the BBC Symphony Orchestra performed to some acclaim—the conductor of that concert, Leslie Heward, had proclaimed Hovhaness a “young genius.” Martinů’s class, however, was the province of Leonard Bernstein, Aaron Copland, and other such hungry wolves. One day, a recording of Hovhaness’s symphony was played, eliciting a response that was derisive in the extreme. Copland could barely listen, chatting loudly throughout. Bernstein was even crueler: when the symphony concluded, he went to the piano, played a mocking minor scale, and declared, “I hate this dirty ghetto music.”

Hovhaness fled Martinů’s class, humiliated and chastened. On more than one previous occasion, he had responded to criticism with self-flagellation, destroying hundreds of early manuscripts in total. But he was also convinced about the correctness of his artistic aims.

more here.