“Many American men…do not have enough awakened or living warriors
inside to defend their soul houses.” —Robert Bly

Old Self

I chanced across my old self
today. He was sitting in the second
floor office where I used to work —
at the typewriter, young, thin guy,
in his late twenties, white shirt, narrow
dark tie, serious demeanor, writing
an essay against the Viet Nam war.

I came up the stairs and saw him —
a decent human being, diligent,
not remotely aware of the ambush
life had waiting — not knowing
he’d permit himself to be taken
prisoner and then, in confusion,
do desperate things, betray
what he loved — and that nothing
would enable him to survive
as he was.

I passed the open door
and wanted to cry out — warn him,
force the warriors to raise
their spears. But even hearing
my shout, he would have only
hesitated, then turned back to
his devoted, lonely and interminable
work.

by Lou Lipsitz
from Seeking the Hook
Signal Books, 1997

Chang Che in Quillette:

In 1831, Alexis de Tocqueville took a 10-month trip to the United States to study the American penal system. In the resulting book—Democracy in America—he singled out one noteworthy feature: “Amongst the novel objects that attracted my attention during my stay in the United States, nothing struck me more forcibly than the general equality of conditions.” Although he ignored the fact of slavery, his reference to economic equality among white Americans was, at the time, accurate. According to economic historians Peter H. Lindert and Jeffrey G. Williamson, the share of national income going to the top one percent was less than 10 percent.

Today, the share of national income going to the top one percent has doubled, while median wages have remained largely stagnant. In the last 40 years, CEO wages have grown nearly 100 times the rate of wages for average workers. The popularity of left-wing candidates like Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders—both with significant redistributive policies at the core of their platform—reflects the moral concerns many have about high levels of income inequality.

But no moral case for economic equality will convince those on the Right. What is at stake is an idea of fairness. It is unfair, so the thought goes, for others to live off one’s labor without making an equally productive contribution to society. This appeal to fairness trumps any moral case for income redistribution. There is, however, another case for relative equality of conditions that appeals to the same idea of fairness that’s appealed to by the opponents of redistribution.

More here.

Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe:

The Greek statesman Demosthenes is credited with saying “I am a citizen of the world,” and the idea that we should take a cosmopolitan view of our common humanity is a compelling one. Not everyone agrees, however; in the words of former British Prime Minister Theresa May, “If you are a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere.” On the other side of the political spectrum, groups who share a feature of identity — race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and others — find it useful to band together to make political progress. Kwame Anthony Appiah is a leading philosopher and cultural theorist who has thought carefully about the tricky issues of cosmopolitanism and identity. We talk about how identities form, why they matter, and how to negotiate the difficult balance between being human and being your particular self.

More here.

Morgan Meis in The Porch Magazine:

You should sit low, not on a chair or a stool or a couch. A small crate will do the job. Or anything that is lower than 9.5 inches from the ground. You can’t shave or cut your hair. You can’t have sex. You shouldn’t take a shower, though you may do some light swabbing of your especially funky bits, as well as dousing your feet and hands in cold water now and again. You can’t greet people in the normal way. You definitely cannot work. No freshly laundered clothes. The list of things you cannot do is long.

What you can do is mourn. You can weep and wail, and you are encouraged to talk about the loved one who has recently died. You aren’t to take care of yourself, but to allow everyone else– family, the community–take care of you. You are to throw yourself helplessly upon other people, and you are to confront the feelings of sorrow and loss, to bring them to the surface and let those intense feelings have their place.

This is sitting shiva. It’s how observant Jews have been dealing with grief since ancient times.

In Ari Aster’s recent film Midsommar, a terrible thing happens. A young woman named Dani (Florence Pugh) loses her sister and parents in a ghoulish suicide/homicide. Hellish stuff, the stuff of nightmares. If anyone has ever needed help grieving, it is Dani. If anyone has ever needed a community to fall back upon, it is Dani. Does she get it? Of course not. She is, like many people living in the contemporary, globalized, post-modern world, more or less without a community in any functional sense of the word.

More here.

Kinton Ford at n+1:

GEORGE STEINER IS A CHARMING but monstrous narcissist. In November 2001, I spent an amazing evening with him and the Celebrated Poet at the Professor of Poetry’s house. Things got started when another Professor, the Poet, and an Artist (the Poet’s spouse), complained laughingly about the xerox machine in the University English Department. This led to an interesting and moving story of Steiner’s about his Czech students copying out Middlemarch by hand since access to copying was extremely difficult in Prague: the Czech xerox machines were controlled by the state, lest any samizdat activities got going.

more here.

Sophie Duncan at Literary Review:

Men not reading women’s writing is widespread, and they begin not reading early. In the university applications that cross my desk, it’s common for male candidates not to mention a single female author, despite otherwise showing evidence of wide and ambitious reading. The opposite is rare.

As it turns out, though, without women, men wouldn’t have much to read at all. Women are responsible for fiction’s survival, as Helen Taylor details in Why Women Read Fiction. We buy, borrow, download and lend the majority of fiction books, from classic literature to romance, erotica and saga writing. Taylor has surveyed more than four hundred female readers, documenting their responses to fiction and their urgent, frequently furtive efforts to scrape out space for reading. Most movingly, a number of Taylor’s respondents stress the conflict between reading and domestic labour: a former library development manager confessed she can only read ‘when I’ve done everything else (washing, Hoovering etc)’, while others recall having faced accusations of ‘sneaking off’ or rudeness for choosing reading over angelic housewifery.

more here.

Francesca Wade at the Paris Review:

“I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman,” wrote Virginia Woolf in A Room of One’s Own (1929). In that essay, commenting on the fact that women’s lives are “all but absent from history,” she argues that this is not only a consequence of the ways women have been deprived of the material conditions under which their talents can prosper but also reveals the sort of events and lives historians have traditionally considered worth remembering—primarily, the public activities of “great men.” Perusing the index of G. M. Trevelyan’s History of England, Woolf looks up “position of women” and is dismayed to find only a smattering of references, mostly to customs of arranged marriage, wife-beating, and the fictional heroines of Shakespeare. Flicking through chapters on wars and kings, she wonders why so little room is left for women’s activities in the events that “constitute this historian’s view of the past.” It was clear to Woolf that new histories were needed, which would examine the reality of women’s lives, their relationships and activities, and the forces that thwarted their ambitions.

more here.

What It’s Like

And once, for no special reason,
I rode in the back of the pickup.
leaning against the cab.
Everything familiar was receding
fast—the mountain,
the motel, Huldah Currier’s
house. And two stately maples. . . .

Mr. Perkins was having a barn sale,
and cars from New Jersey and Ohio
were parked along the sandy shoulder
of Route 4. Whatever I saw
I had already passed. . . .
(This must be what life is like
at the moment of leaving it.}

Jane Kenyon
from Collected Poems
Greywolf Press, 2005

Katarina Zimmer in The Scientist:

Sometime around 2 billion years ago, a bacterium slipped inside a larger cell, started producing energy there, and became the indispensable powerhouse we know today as the mitochondrion, so the working theory goes. But that old story now has a new twist. Scientists have detected the organelles outside of cells, apparently functioning perfectly well while drifting around the blood of healthy people, according to findings published recently (January 19) in The FASEB Journal. The researchers who made the discovery propose that the independent mitochondria may be released by cells for signaling purposes, although more work is needed to validate that hypothesis. “It’s very exciting. . . . I think altogether the combined evidence is pretty strong that they definitely are whole mitochondria,” remarks Martin Picard, a physiologist at Columbia University who wasn’t involved in the new research. “I think there’s a lot more work to be done to know . . . whether they have a functional role to play,” he adds.

The findings were the result of a multi-year project led by Alain Thierry, an oncologist who researches the development of cancer biomarkers at the French National Institute of Health and Medical Research. About seven years ago, he and his colleagues were studying cell-free mitochondrial DNA—long known to circulate in human blood—as a potential diagnostic marker for cancer.

More here.

Glenn Rifkin in The New York Times:

When Homer Plessy boarded the East Louisiana Railway’s No. 8 train in New Orleans on June 7, 1892, he knew his journey to Covington, La., would be brief. He also knew it could have historic implications. Plessy was a racially mixed shoemaker who had agreed to take part in an act of civil disobedience orchestrated by a New Orleans civil rights organization. On that hot, sticky afternoon he walked into the Press Street Depot, purchased a first-class ticket and took a seat in the whites-only car. The civil rights group had chosen Plessy because he could pass for a white man. It was asserted later in a legal brief that he was seven-eighths white. But a conductor, who was also part of the scheme, stopped him and asked if he was “colored.” Plessy responded that he was. “Then you will have to retire to the colored car,” the conductor ordered.

Justin E. H. Smith in his personal blog:

I believe there is much to be learned philosophically from the study of languages that are spoken by only a small number of people, who lack a high degree of political self-determination and are relatively powerless to impose their conception of history, society, and nature on their neighbours; and who also lack much in the way of a textual literary tradition or formal and recognisably modern institutions of knowledge transmission: which for present purposes we may call “indigenous” languages.

This is of course going to be a hard sell, given that the great majority of Anglophone philosophers do not even recognize the value of learning German, Latin, Arabic, Sanskrit, or Chinese, and believe that they can penetrate as deeply as one might possibly go into fundamental philosophical questions from a standpoint of monolingualism. German, Latin, and the others are cosmopolitan languages, and historically all cosmopolitan languages, rightly or wrongly, have functioned as vehicles of what most discerning people are prepared to recognise as philosophy. But there is a significant difference even among the five cosmopolitan languages I’ve listed, which can begin to point us towards the even greater difference between all five of these, on the one hand, and, say, Yanomami, Ainu, Ket, or Sámi on the other: the first three cosmopolitan languages may be grouped together, as having a long legacy of shared and standardised terminology such that problems of translation between them are relatively small; by contrast, while there is to some extent a legacy of translation from Sanskrit towards Chinese, often via Tibetan, for the most part philosophical terminology has developed in these languages independently and without any felt need to establish cross-linguistic equivalencies.

More here.

Elizabeth Svoboda in Undark:

On the Puerto Rican island of Cayo Santiago, it’s the monkeys, not the humans, who are in charge. Yet this palm-fringed haven — home to about 1,000 rhesus macaques—can feel strangely similar to a weekend watering hole or middle-school cafeteria. Among these gregarious macaques, cliques, best-friend pairs, and social climbers are all much in evidence, giving scientists a close look at the primate origins of our drive to affiliate.

As science journalist Lydia Denworth visited places like Cayo, she grew convinced that humans’ social connectedness was far more deep-rooted, and far more biological, than experts had long assumed. For centuries, Denworth notes in “Friendship: The Evolution, Biology, and Extraordinary Power of Life’s Fundamental Bond,” our desire to make friends “was considered purely cultural, an invention of human society — and modern human society at that.”

But Denworth marshals new evidence that in friendship, as in so many areas, we’re not all that different from our primate forebears. Friendship isn’t just “the leavening in our lives”; it evolved because it has a direct bearing on our mental and physical health. Among the Cayo macaques, biologist Lauren Brent reports, those with the strongest social networks have lower levels of stress hormones — a factor known to buffer against disease.

More here.

Heather Alberro in Scroll.in:

The annual World Economic Forum in Davos brought together representatives from government and business to deliberate how to solve the worsening climate and ecological crisis. The meeting came just as devastating bush fires were abating in Australia. These fires are thought to have killed up to one billion animals and generated a new wave of climate refugees. Yet, as with the COP25 climate talks in Madrid, a sense of urgency, ambition and consensus on what to do next were largely absent in Davos.

But an important debate did surface – that is, the question of who, or what, is to blame for the crisis. Famed primatologist Dr Jane Goodall remarked at the event that human population growth is responsible, and that most environmental problems wouldn’t exist if our numbers were at the levels they were 500 years ago.

This might seem fairly innocuous, but its an argument that has grim implications and is based on a misreading of the underlying causes of the current crises. As these escalate, people must be prepared to challenge and reject the overpopulation argument.

More here.

Kelly Richman-Abdou in My Modern Met:

For years, artist and photographer Fong Qi Wei has been skillfully slicing photographs into awe-inspiring scenes showcasing the passage of time. Known as “time slice” photographs, each work of art combines several photos taken at different times of day to produce a single, strikingly cohesive composition.

To create each piece, Wei snaps several photographs of the same location over a period of several hours. He then digitally divides the images and extracts a single strip from each. Finally, he pieces together these strips, creating a harmonized scene that beautifully depicts a range of time.

While time slice photography is a prevalent practice among contemporary artists, Wei’s work is renowned for its creative compositions. Rather than simply combining the “slices” into vertical stripes, the artist experiments with angles, shapes, and placement. Some are arranged into ray-like formations, for example, while others are split into series of circles.

More here.

Birds of Texas

I like to be alone in someone else’s house,
practicing my cosmic long-distance wink.
I send it out toward a mirror
some distracted bored cosmonaut dropped
on an asteroid hurtling
closer to our star. No one watches
me watching thousands
of television hours, knitting
a golden bobcat out of
tiny golden threadlets. These good
lonely days everything
I’ve claimed I’ve seen
for me to use it glows.
I’m waiting for the love
of Alice Ghostley, who keeps
in various faces and guises
appearing amid the plot machines,
always to someone more beautiful
and central in complex futile relation.
They call her plain but to me her name
sounds full of distant messages
beamed a thousand years ago,
only now to flower. Penultimate
cigarette, high desert breezes,
I’ve written all my plans and vows
on careful scraps of paper piled
beneath weirdly heavy little black rocks
I gathered on many slow walks
into town to ask no one who
would bother naming this particular
time between later afternoon
and twilight. Crazed bee, I know
the name of the plant you are in!
Salvia! Also, the jay is not blue,
nor the sky or indigo bunting,
within particles and feathers sun
gets lost making expert holographers
out of us all. Passarina, I saw
your dull blaze from the railing flash
and an insect disappeared. Afternoon
once again slipped into
the gas station like it did those old
days it had a body that moved
and smoked among the people,
whistling a cowboy song concerning
long shadows, happy and unfree.

by Matthew Zapruder
All rights reserved.

Philip Ball in Prospect Magazine:

Most AI systems used today—whether for language translation, playing chess, driving cars, face recognition or medical diagnosis—deploy a technique called machine learning. So-called “convolutional neural -networks,” a silicon-chip version of the highly-interconnected web of neurons in our brains, are trained to spot patterns in data. During training, the strengths of the interconnections between the nodes in the neural network are adjusted until the system can reliably make the right classifications. It might learn, for example, to spot cats in a digital image, or to generate passable translations from Chinese to English. Although the ideas behind neural networks and machine learning go back decades, this type of AI really took off in the 2010s with the introduction of “deep learning”: in essence adding more layers of nodes between the input and output. That’s why DeepMind’s programme AlphaGo is able to defeat expert human players in the very complex board game Go, and Google Translate is now so much better than in its comically clumsy youth (although it’s still not perfect, for reasons I’ll come back to).

In Artificial Intelligence, Melanie Mitchell delivers an authoritative stroll through the development and state of play of this field. A computer scientist who began her career by persuading cognitive-science guru Douglas Hofstadter to be her doctoral supervisor, she explains how the breathless expectations of the late 1950s were left unfulfilled until deep learning came along. She also explains why AI’s impressive feats to date are now hitting the buffers because of the gap between narrow specialisation and human-like general intelligence. The problem is that deep learning has no way of checking its deductions against “common sense,” and so can make ridiculous errors. It is, say Marcus and Davis, “a kind of idiot savant, with miraculous perceptual abilities, but very little overall comprehension.” In image -classification, not only can this shortcoming lead to absurd results but the system can also be fooled by carefully constructed “adversarial” examples. Pixels can be rejigged in ways that look to us indistinguishable from the original but which AI confidently garbles, so that a van or a puppy is declared an ostrich. By the same token, images can be constructed from what looks to the human eye like random pixels but which AI will identify as an armadillo or a peacock.

More here.