Maria Farrell in The Conversationalist:

A few months ago, I was contacted by a senior executive who was about to leave a marketing firm. He got in touch because I’ve worked on the non-profit side of tech for a long time, with lots of volunteering on digital and human rights. He wanted to ‘give back’. Could I put him in touch with digital rights activists? Sure. We met for coffee and I made some introductions. It was a perfectly lovely interaction with a perfectly lovely man. Perhaps he will do some good, sharing his expertise with the people working to save democracy and our private lives from the surveillance capitalism machine of his former employers. The way I rationalized helping him was: firstly, it’s nice to be nice; and secondly, movements are made of people who start off far apart but converge on a destination. And isn’t it an unqualified good when an insider decides to do the right thing, however late?

The Prodigal Son is a New Testament parable about two sons. One stays home to work the farm. The other cashes in his inheritance and gambles it away. When the gambler comes home, his father slaughters the fattened calf to celebrate, leaving the virtuous, hard-working brother to complain that all these years he wasn’t even given a small goat to share with his friends. His father replies that the prodigal son ‘was dead, now he’s alive; lost, now he’s found’. Cue party streamers. It’s a touching story of redemption, with a massive payload of moral hazard. It’s about coming home, saying sorry, being joyfully forgiven and starting again. Most of us would love to star in it, but few of us will be given the chance.

More here.

Samanth Subramanian in the New Yorker:

Two things happened in Delhi on Tuesday, and the gulf between them illustrated India’s wild, alarming swerve from normalcy. At the Presidential palace, Donald Trump concluded a two-day visit by attending a ceremonial dinner: an evening of gold-leaf-crusted mandarin oranges, wild Himalayan morels, and gifts of Kashmiri silk carpets. Half a dozen miles away, northeast Delhi was convulsed with violence. Since Sunday, mobs had been destroying the shops and homes of Muslims, vandalizing mosques, and assaulting Muslims on the streets. In their chants of “Jai Shri Ram,” praising a Hindu deity, their loyalties were clear. The attackers were Hindu nationalists, part of a right wing that has been empowered by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government; many of them were even members of his party. The Delhi police, who are supervised by Modi’s home minister, seemed to side with the mobs; one video caught cops smashing CCTV cameras, while another showed them helping men gather stones to throw. Several reports said that policemen stood by while the attackers went about their business. In a few spurts, Muslims retaliated, and the streets witnessed periods of full-scale clashes. A policeman was killed, and an intelligence officer was murdered and dumped in a drain. At least thirty-eight people have died: shot, beaten, burned. At the Trump banquet, the Navy band played “Can You Feel the Love Tonight.”

The mayhem came after a winter of protest. Since early December, millions of Indians have assembled across the country to object to a new law that promises fast-tracked Indian citizenship to Pakistani, Afghan, and Bangladeshi refugees of every major South Asian faith except Islam. The law is limited in its scope but momentous in how overtly it separates Indianness from Islam. It’s a move characteristic of Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (B.J.P.) and its allied groups, who regard India’s two hundred million Muslims as an undesirable part of an ideal Hindu nation.

More here.

Kevin Townsend in The Atlantic:

David Plouffe got it very wrong in 2016. After confidently predicting Donald Trump’s defeat, the campaign manager credited with Barack Obama’s historic 2008 victory watched a reality-television star become commander in chief. Four years later, Plouffe says he rewatched that Election Night. Over and over. And after absorbing the lessons of that day, he’s written a book on what Democrats need to do to defeat Trump—a reelection battle that, as he told Edward-Isaac Dovere on the latest episode of The Ticket: Politics From The Atlantic, “probably has the biggest stakes the country’s ever known.” They discuss the president’s reelection campaign, the state of the Democratic Party, and a nomination fight that’s suddenly become a two-man race.

Several Highlights

• Plouffe on the Democratic candidates: “There’s gonna be a lot of pressure on Joe Biden and his campaign if he’s the nominee. Likewise with Bernie. And they should have it. If you don’t win this election, it’s shameful. You are the person above all … We all have a role to play, but that nominee and their campaign leadership better win. Because the consequences for the planet and for this country are hard to put into words.”
• Plouffe on President Trump’s campaign: “I have studied every incumbent presidential reelection carefully, was part of one … Incumbent presidents have amazing advantages and weaponry. And this guy’s obsessed with being reelected. It’s all he cares about … The menace is looming, and he is ready for this battle. But there are more than enough voters to get rid of him.”
• Plouffe on general-election debates: “I assume Trump is going to do them, because how can he not be part of that circus and spotlight? They are going to just be geriatric cage matches. I mean, it is going to be something for the history books.”

More here.

In Another World

In another world I want to be a father without
passing through the eternal insanity of mourning
my children, without experiencing the ritual
of watching my children return home as bodies
folded like a prayer mat, without spending my
nights telling them the stories of a hometown
where natives become aliens searching for
a shelter. I want my children to spread a mat
outside my house and play without the walls
of houses ripped by rifles. I want to watch my children
grow to recite the name of their homeland like Lord’s
Prayer, to frolic in the streets without being hunted like
animals in the bush, without being mobbed to death.
In another world I want my children to tame grasshoppers
in the field, to play with their dolls in the living room,
to inhale the fragrance of flowers waving as wind blows,
to see the birds measure the sky with their wings.

by Rasaq Malik
from Literary Hub

Naureen Ghani in Plos Blogs: 

The brain is wider than the sky,

 For, put them side by side,

The one the other will include

  With ease, and you beside

 “CXXVI”by Emily Dickinson

Emily Dickinson (1830-86). Complete Poems.

 Neuroscientist Gerald Edelman used these lines by poet Emily Dickinson to begin a discussion on consciousness in his book Wider than the Sky: The Phenomenal Gift of Consciousness. Edelman won the Nobel Prize in Medicine at the age of 43 for his work on the chemical structure of antibodies. As Edelman writes, his role as a scientist transforms into that of a poet. He strives to see the impact of the world on his spirit while teasing out the relations between the world and the brain. Poetry and science, in truth, are two sides of the same coin. They represent two manifestations of the fundamental urge to understand the natural world.

In my senior year as an undergraduate student at Columbia University, I chose to take the course Grid, Fold, Crystal: Poetic Modeling taught by Professor Michael Golston for two reasons. The first reason was that I had missed taking English courses, something that was not included in my curriculum as an engineering student. The second reason was that the course sounded the most scientific among all the courses offered by the English and Comparative Literature department. In reality, I had no idea what the course title meant but was eager to find out. As I came to learn, Grid, Fold, Crystal: Poetic Modeling was an exploration of the intersections between poetry and science. Grid is a reference to “Grids” by Professor Rosalind Krauss, which argues that the grid led to the evolution of modern art.

More here.

Holly Case in East-Central Europe Past and Present:

In the 2017 film Star Wars: The Last Jedi, the character Finn plans to sacrifice himself for the rebel cause by flying into the glowing-hot core of a giant weapon trained on the rebel hideout. As his rickety vessel speeds toward the target, he is sideswiped off his path by another rebel, Rose. When Finn asks Rose why she prevented his self- sacrifice, she replies: “That’s not how we’re going to win. Not fighting what we hate, [but] saving what we love.” It is difficult to imagine such a scene appearing in earlier Star Wars episodes.

Something in the zeitgeist has shifted decidedly in the direction of saving. From Saving Private Ryan (1998) to Children of Men (2006), Son of Saul (2015), and 1917 (2019), in landscapes of devastation and collapse of the social order, the heroic gesture is now to save something or someone very particular from generalized destruction. The current preservationist impulse is characterized by the desire to keep history, nature, nations, cities, rights, memories, and relationships in place. But what are its origins, and where will it lead?

More here.

Peter Tatchell at the IAI:

The huge success of the Netflix teen drama series, Sex Education, is partly fuelled by the poor quality of sex ed lessons in schools. Young people are fed up with prudish, vague and incomplete information from their teachers – and parents. So they are turning to the often explicit TV series to get answers.

During my recent school talks on human rights, more than half the pupils said they had watched Sex Education, mostly because their classes about sex were, in their words, “crap, boring and out-of-touch.”

Little wonder that millions of young people are entering adulthood emotionally and sexually ill-prepared. Too many subsequently endure disordered relationships, ranging from unfulfilling to outright abusive.

The result? Much unhappiness – and sometimes mental and physical ill-health.

A lot of relationship and sex education (RSE) still concentrates on the biological facts of reproduction and on using a condom to prevent HIV. Relatively little teaching is actually about sex – or feelings and relationships.

More here.

Amanda Fortini at The Believer:

Las Vegas is a place about which people have ideas. They have thoughts and generalizations, takes and counter-takes, most of them detached from any genuine experience and uninformed by any concrete reality. This is true of many cities—New York, Paris, Prague in the 1990s—owing to books and movies and tourism bureaus, but it is particularly true of Las Vegas. It is a place that looms large in popular culture as a setting for blowout parties and high-stakes gambling, a place where one might wed a stripper with a heart of gold, like Ed Helms does in The Hangover, or hole up in a hotel room and drink oneself to death, as Nicolas Cage does in Leaving Las Vegas. Even those who would never go to Las Vegas are in the grip of its mythology. Yet roughly half of all Americans, or around 165 million people, have visited and one slivery weekend glimpse bestows on them a sense of ownership and authority.

more here.

Henrietta L Moore at Literary Review:

How do those of us who have enough to eat account for hunger? We often imagine it’s about drought, famine, lack of rain, corruption and incompetence. We need to be much more imaginative. Hunger is about land-grabbing, cartels, early marriage, immunisation, genetically modified crops, child development, slums, climate change, subsidies, chemical pollution, derivative markets, deforestation, child labour, food banks and much, much more. Systemic hunger is about the failure of our food systems and the fact that one half of the world is eating the food of the other half. This is not new. In the 19th century, Europe improved its food availability and quality by importing foodstuffs grown elsewhere.

more here.

Jason Farago at the NYT:

The blur is as close as Mr. Richter has ever come to a stylistic signature, and it recurs here in seascapes, landscapes, and street scenes; portraits of his daughter Betty, her head resting on a table like meat on the butcher block, or his ex-wife, the artist Isa Genzken, nude and from behind; and smaller canvases of Sabine Moritz, his current wife, nursing their newborn in the manner of a Madonna and Child.

Hard not to see the influence of Renaissance Italy in these landscapes, portraits and quasi-religious scenes. Hard not to feel, too, their aloofness and sterility. Always, the blur serves as the mark of faith and doubt in painting.

more here.

James Nguyen in iai:

Suppose that you’re interested in how false beliefs – ‘fake news’ – spread across a population. The problem is extraordinarily complicated. What people come to believe depends on a myriad of factors: which news outlets they read; who their friends and colleagues are; their ability to distinguish between fact and fiction; their social media echo chamber; and so on. A very good way of investigating a complicated phenomenon is to model it. This involves the construction of a simplified version of it and the investigation of the behaviour of that simplified version in order to draw conclusions about the actual system of interest. Both of these steps require a curious and playful outlook. 

We can play around with different ways to model the spread of fake news. A creative suggestion is to model it as a disease. A simple way to do this is to take a toy model from epidemiology, e.g. the susceptible, infected, recovered (SIR) model, and to reinterpret it. We might divide the population into three groups: those who believe some relevant falsehood, those who are susceptible to coming to believe it if they are influenced by someone who already does; and those who won’t be persuaded. The first group are infected; the second are susceptible; and the third recovered/immune. By playing with the model, investigating what follows from the equations that are used to present it, we discover that model populations can develop ‘herd immunity’: by keeping the proportion of susceptibles low enough (where ‘low enough’ depends on the rate at which the disease spreads and the rate at which those infected recover) we can avoid epidemics. By applying the model to the spread of fake news in the world an analogous conclusion is reached: in order to avoid it becoming epidemic we can work on (i) lowering the proportion of people in the population who are susceptible to believing it; (ii) decreasing the rate at which it is spread; and (iii) increasing the rate at which those who believe it ‘recover’. By playing with the model – both in terms of thinking of creative ways to represent the original system, and investigating the result – we have simplified a complex question into something more tractable.  

More here.

Heidi Ledford in Nature:

A person with a genetic condition that causes blindness has become the first to receive a CRISPR–Cas9 gene therapy administered directly into their body. The treatment is part of a landmark clinical trial to test the ability of CRISPR–Cas9 gene-editing techniques to remove mutations that cause a rare condition called Leber’s congenital amaurosis 10 (LCA10). No treatment is currently available for the disease, which is a leading cause of blindness in childhood. For the latest trial, the components of the gene-editing system – encoded in the genome of a virus — are injected directly into the eye, near photoreceptor cells. By contrast, previous CRISPR–Cas9 clinical trials have used the technique to edit the genomes of cells that have been removed from the body. The material is then infused back into the patient. “It’s an exciting time,” says Mark Pennesi, a specialist in inherited retinal diseases at Oregon Health & Science University in Portland. Pennesi is collaborating with the pharmaceutical companies Editas Medicine of Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Allergan of Dublin to conduct the trial, which has been named BRILLIANCE.

…For now, the use of CRISPR–Cas9 in the body is a significant jump from treating cells in a dish, says Fyodor Urnov, who studies genome editing at the University of California, Berkeley. “It is akin to space flight versus a regular plane trip,” he says. “The technical challenges, and inherent safety concerns, are much greater.”

More here.

Why Latin Should Still Be Taught in High School

Because one day I grew so bored
with Lucretius, I fell in love
with the one object that seemed to be stationary,
the sleeping kid two rows up,
the appealing squalor of his drooping socks.
While the author of De Rerum Natura was making fun
of those who fear the steep way and lose the truth,
I was studying the unruly hairs on Peter Diamond’s right leg.
Titus Lucretius Caro labored, dactyl by dactyl
to convince our Latin IV class of the atomic
composition of smoke and dew,
and I tried to make sense of a boy’s ankles,
the calves’ intriguing
resiliency, the integrity to the shank,
the solid geometry of my classmate’s body.
Light falling through blinds,
a bee flinging itself into a flower,
a seemingly infinite set of texts
to translate and now this particular configuration of atoms
who was given a name at birth,
Peter Diamond, and sat two rows in front of me,
his long arms, his legs that like Lucretius’s hexameters
seemed to go on forever, all this hurly-burly
of matter that had the goodness to settle
long enough to make a body
so fascinating it got me
through fifty-five minutes
of the nature of things.

by Christopher Bursk
from The Improbable Swervings of Atoms
University of Pittsburgh Press

James K. Galbraith in Project Syndicate:

When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, the United States was surprised and unprepared, but it was quickly freed of its illusions. The same does not hold true for the COVID-19 epidemic. The attack is underway and our defenses are down – but so far our illusions remain intact.

That will soon change as the infection rate and death toll rise, while the stock market sinks. Global supply chains have been disrupted by events in China, and India has just banned the export of certain generic drugs. Medical masks are already in short supply, and everyday items such as hand sanitizer have become difficult to find. The heavily globalized, consumer- and finance-driven US economy was not designed for a pandemic.

The country’s medical system has it even worse. America has vast health-care capacity, but millions of people are uninsured, underinsured, undocumented, or simply reluctant to go to the doctor or emergency room, owing to the cost of co-payments, deductibles, and uncovered fees. In a pandemic – where every infected person is a threat to the entire population – this is a formula for disaster.

More here.

Justin E. H. Smith at his own site:

I think I’m finally ready to come out as a Voynich scholar. I’ve been studying hi-res scans of the manuscript off and on for four years or so, and I’ve been reading the so-called secondary literature for about a year. What compels me to come out is the discovery over this past year that for the most part commentators really do not know what they are doing. They divide roughly into two camps: the cryptographers and information scientists, on the one hand (the “quants”, as we say), and on the other hand the ravers and enthusiasts, the people who do not know how to distinguish between gut feelings and real evidence. There seem to be very few proper palaeographers writing about this text: that is, people who know how to attend to handwriting and codicological evidence until plausible patterns of intention begin to emerge. It may be that such people are scared away by the ravers; one need only briefly glance at a list of all the time-travel, Illuminati, and UFOlogical theories the manuscript has inspired to see that it is a real intellectual danger zone. For me it is however a wonderful case study and autoexperiment in the use of abductive inference. I do not yet think I know anything with certainty that no other researcher has established before me. But over time a picture is emerging that leads me to lend significant credence to some explanations over others.

I am, say, 85-90% certain that the manuscript is not a hoax, or, if it is a hoax, it is one that was perpetuated long before the manuscript came into Wilfrid Voynich’s possession in 1912. I am attracted to the idea that, if it is a hoax, this was a hoax perpetuated on Athanasius Kircher, the one-time owner of the manuscript who was known to hastily claim to have cracked other codes (e.g., Egyptian hieroglyphics), and whom his contemporaries may have wanted to expose in his rashness by sending him a nonsense text to interpret. But this is a low-probability explanation. I am, say, 80-90% certain that the text was in the possession of a German, Dutch, or Flemish scholar who knew Latin, but that the manuscript itself is not written in any of these languages.

More here.

Gene Seymour at Bookforum:

Of all these correspondents, however, Albert Murray was the one who best drew out of Ellison both the literary lion and the streetwise sophisticate at his most unbuttoned and inventive. Murray was a couple years behind Ellison at Tuskegee and was teaching literature there when they began corresponding in 1950. While on the home stretch of Invisible Man, Ellison, feeling super-relaxed, concedes to Murray, as he could to no one else, that the book has become “just a big fat ole Negro lie, meant to be told during cotton picking time over a water bucket full of corn, with a dipper passing back and forth at a good fast clip so that no one, not even the narrator himself, will realize how utterly preposterous the lie actually is.” In Murray (a novelist and critic of comparable stature whose own side of the decade-long exchange can be found in 2000’s Trading Twelves), Ellison found a boon companion with whom he could comfortably revel in the foot-stomping, jump-dancing, blues-shouting verities of their shared cultural references and unfurl freewheeling inquiries into the literary masters (Hemingway, Malraux, and Faulkner, among others) who had nourished them since their respective youths.

more here.

Daniel Leisegang at Eurozine:

In mid-January, The New York Times revealed that hundreds of law enforcement agencies and private companies across the world use a software called Clearview. It allows images of people to be identified within seconds, together with their name, address, occupation and contacts. The revelations are controversial for two reasons. First, Clearview identifies people using its own database of more than 3 billion private photos. By comparison, the FBI photo database has ‘only’ 640 million photos. The Clearview AI company scrapes the images from freely accessible internet sources – Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, as well as news and company websites – without people knowing. Second, it is not officially known which authorities actually use Clearview. So far, the software has been operating beyond the bounds of political or legal oversight.

If the programme were to appear in app stores, users could potentially identify anyone they wished: on the underground, on the street, at a protest.

more here.

Howard Davies at Literary Review:

Setting aside these internecine disputes, after the very long durée of his historical exegesis, what is Piketty’s main thesis? It is that the sharp growth in inequality of income and, especially, wealth we have seen in most Western societies in recent years is unsustainable. Furthermore, our traditional political parties find it impossible to engage with the problem. Taking the UK as an example, he argues that the two main parties are now led by the ‘Brahmin Left’, with Labour having become the party of the highly educated, its working-class roots withered, and the ‘Merchant Right’, who cling to the belief that loosely regulated free markets will deliver prosperity for all, one day. He argues that the trickle-down theory on which that latter assumption is based has given way to a trickle-up phenomenon, with the rich getting richer and the incomes of the middling sort stagnating.

more here.