John Horgan in Scientific American:

A dozen years ago I flew to Europe to speak at a conference on science’s limits. The meeting’s organizer greeted me with a tirade about James Watson, co-discoverer of the double helix, who had just stated publicly that blacks are less intelligent than whites. “All our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours,” Watson told a journalist, “whereas all the testing says not really.”

At first I thought my host, a world-famous intellectual whose work I admired, was condemning Watson. But no, he was condemning Watson’s critics, whom he saw as cowards attacking a courageous truth-teller. I wish I could say I was shocked by my host’s rant, but I have had many encounters like this over the decades. Just as scientists and other intellectuals often reveal in private that they believe in the paranormal, so many disclose that they believe in the innate inferiority of certain groups.

That 2007 incident came back to me as I read Superior: The Return of Race Science by British journalist Angela Saini (who is coming to my school Nov. 4, see Postscript). Superior is a thoroughly researched, brilliantly written and deeply disturbing book.

More here.

Jonathan Lethem in the New York Review of Books:

Edward Snowden, late in the pages of his memoir, Permanent Record, describes his sensation at being personally introduced to XKEYSCORE, the NSA’s ultimate tool of intimate, individual electronic surveillance. Among the NSA’s technological tools (some of which Snowden aided in perfecting), XKEYSCORE was, according to Snowden, “the most invasive…if only because [the NSA agents are] closest to the user—that is, the closest to the person being surveilled.” For nearly three hundred pages, the memoir has built to this scene, foreshadowed in the preface, in which the whistleblower-in-the-making sees behind the curtain:

I sat at a terminal from which I had practically unlimited access to the communications of nearly every man, woman, and child on earth who’d ever dialed a phone or touched a computer. Among those people were about 320 million of my fellow American citizens, who in the regular conduct of their everyday lives were being surveilled in gross contravention of not just the Constitution of the United States, but the basic values of any free society.

The steady approach to Snowden’s come-to-Jesus encounter with XKEYSCORE is as meticulous as the incremental unveiling of the terror of Cthulhu in an H.P. Lovecraft tale.

More here.

Susanna Kaysen at n+1:

What is smoking for? People who don’t smoke think it’s for feeding an addiction, and they’re right. Once you’ve started smoking, it’s hard to stop. But that’s a narrow definition. There’s a physical addiction and there’s also a spiritual addiction. Perhaps you could call it a metaphysical addiction.

To have a cigarette is to step out of day-to-day existence and into a private, solitary existence. It’s just you and your cigarette. Hello, says the cigarette, You’ve come to visit me. And you say, Yes, hello—but really, you know that you’ve come to visit yourself. The cigarette is a method of being alone and listening to yourself, of having nobody but yourself to listen to or to be with.

It’s also a way to stop time. Time spent smoking is not real time. Nothing else is happening. There is no progress. There is no trying to start something or complete something or even forget something.
Since smokers have been excommunicated from indoor life, this contemplative aspect of smoking has come to the fore.

more here.

Alan Rusbridger at the TLS:

Apart from his short video outing himself in 2013, Snowden has tended to keep himself out of the public eye, preferring that the material speak for itself. He is, in many respects, the opposite of Julian Assange – a figure with whom he is often bracketed. The founder of WikiLeaks wanted to be a player: impresario, editor, publisher, activist, leaker, information anarchist and troublemaker. Snowden, by contrast, simply wanted to get his documents into the hands of journalists, and to leave them to make the choices about what to publish.

Given his past reticence, this book is a surprisingly personal autobiography as well as a primer on the way modern states now operate in the digital sphere. Snowden lifts the veil on his family and upbringing (his mother worked for the NSA), and writes of his early fascination with computers, which began at the age of six when his parents – both of whom had top secret security clearances – gave him a Nintendo.

more here.

Meilan Solly in Smithsonian:

Around 1568, Florentine nun Plautilla Nelli—a self-taught painter who ran an all-woman artists’ workshop out of her convent—embarked on her most ambitious project yet: a monumental Last Supper scene featuring life-size depictions of Jesus and the 12 Apostles.

As Alexandra Korey writes for the Florentine, Nelli’s roughly 21- by 6-and-a-half foot canvas is remarkable for its challenging composition, adept treatment of anatomy at a time when women were banned from studying the scientific field, and chosen subject. During the Renaissance, the majority of individuals who painted the biblical scene were male artists at the pinnacle of their careers. Per the nonprofit Advancing Women Artists organization, which restores and exhibits works by Florence’s female artists, Nelli’s masterpiece placed her among the ranks of such painters as Leonardo da Vinci, Domenico Ghirlandaio and Pietro Perugino, all of whom created versions of the Last Supper “to prove their prowess as art professionals.”

Despite boasting such a singular display of skill, the panel has long been overlooked. According to Visible: Plautilla Nelli and Her Last Supper Restored, a monograph edited by AWA Director Linda Falcone, Last Supper hung in the refectory (or dining hall) of the artist’s own convent, Santa Caterina, until the house of worship’s dissolution during the Napoleonic suppression of the early 19th century. The Florentine monastery of Santa Maria Novella acquired the painting in 1817, housing it in the refectory before moving it to a new location around 1865. In 1911, scholar Giovanna Pierattini reported, the portable panel was “removed from its stretcher, rolled up and moved to a warehouse, where it remained neglected for almost three decades.”

More here.

Theodore Dalrymple in City Journal:

Simon draws attention to “the extreme ambivalence we now feel towards beauty both within and outside art,” and continues: “We distrust it; we fear its power; we associate it with compulsion and uncontrollable desire of a sexual fetish. Embarrassed by our yearning for beauty, we demean it as something tawdry, self-indulgent, or sentimental.”

All that is necessary for ugliness to prosper is for artists to reject beauty.

Lenin abjured music, to which he was sensitive, because it made him feel well-disposed to the people around him, and he thought it would be necessary to kill so many of them. Theodor Adorno said that there could be no more poetry after Auschwitz. Our view of the world has become so politicized that we think that the unembarrassed celebration of beauty is a sign of insensibility to suffering and that exclusively to focus on the world’s deformations, its horrors, is in itself a sign of compassion. Reynolds was not tortured by such considerations.

More here.

Helen Joyce in the New York Review of Books:

It all began with a book review. Last year, I read an article by David Aaronovitch in The Times of London about Michael Pollan’s How to Change Your Mind. The book concerns a resurgence of interest in psychedelic drugs, which were widely banned after Timothy Leary’s antics with LSD, starting in the late 1960s, in which he encouraged American youth to “turn on, tune in, and drop out.” In recent years, though, scientists have started to test therapeutic uses of psychedelics for an extraordinary range of ailments, including depression, addiction, and end-of-life angst.

Aaronovitch mentioned in passing that he had been intrigued enough to book a “psychedelic retreat” in the Netherlands run by the British Psychedelic Society, though, in the event, his wife put her foot down and he canceled. To try psychedelics was something I’d secretly hankered after doing ever since I was a teenager, but I was always too cautious and risk-averse. As I got older, the moment seemed to pass. Today I am a middle-aged journalist working in London, the finance editor of The Economist, a wife, mother, and, to all appearances, a person totally devoid of countercultural tendencies.

And yet… on impulse, I arranged to go. Only after I booked did I tell my husband. He was bemused, but said it was fine by him, as long as I didn’t decide while I was under the influence that I didn’t love him anymore. My eighteen-year-old son thought the whole thing was hilarious (it turns out that your mother tripping is a good way to make drugs seem less cool).

More here.

John Preskill in Quanta:

A recent paper from Google’s quantum computing lab announced that the company had achieved quantum supremacy. Everyone has been talking about it, but what does it all mean?

In 2012, I proposed the term “quantum supremacy” to describe the point where quantum computers can do things that classical computers can’t, regardless of whether those tasks are useful. With that new term, I wanted to emphasize that this is a privileged time in the history of our planet, when information technologies based on principles of quantum physics are ascendant.

The words “quantum supremacy” — if not the concept — proved to be controversial for two reasons. One is that supremacy, through its association with white supremacy, evokes a repugnant political stance. The other reason is that the word exacerbates the already overhyped reporting on the status of quantum technology. I anticipated the second objection, but failed to foresee the first. In any case, the term caught on, and it has been embraced with particular zeal by the Google AI Quantum team.

More here.

John Lanchester in the London Review of Books:

The People’s Republic of China had its seventieth birthday on 1 October. ‘Sheng ri kuai le’ to the world’s biggest and most populous example of … of … well, actually, that sentence is hard to finish. There’s no off-the-shelf description for China’s political and economic system. ‘Socialism with Chinese characteristics’ is the Chinese Communist Party’s preferred term, but the s-word makes an odd fit with a country that is the world’s most important market for luxury goods, has the second largest number of billionaires, stages the world’s biggest one-day shopping event, ‘Singles’ Day’, and is home to the world’s biggest, fastest-expanding, spendiest, most materially aspirational middle class. Look at the UN’s Human Development Index: after seventy years of communist rule, China’s inequality figures are dramatically worse than those of the UK and even the US. Can we call that ‘socialism’?

It’s equally hard to claim China as a triumph of capitalism, given the completeness of state control over most areas of life and the extent of its open interventions in the national economy – capital controls, for instance, are a huge no-no in free-market economics, but are central to the way the CCP runs the biggest economy in the world. This system-with-no-name has been extraordinarily successful, with more than 800 million people raised out of absolute poverty since the 1980s. Growth hasn’t slowed down since the global financial crisis – or, as those cheeky scamps at the CCP tend to call it, the Western financial crisis. While the developed world has been struggling with low to no growth, China has grown by more than six per cent a year and a further eighty million mainly rural citizens have been raised out of absolute poverty since 2012. There is a strong claim that this scale of growth, sustained for such an unprecedented number of people over such a number of years, is the greatest economic achievement in human history.

More here.

Claudia Dryfus interviews Carl Safina at the NYT:

Among things, that they are capable of anticipation. For instance, they show much excitement when I simply touch my car keys, which might well signal that they are going to some place interesting, like the beach. That proves that they have imagination and even memory.

Another thing — and this shouldn’t surprise — they can be quite emotional. Some years ago, I lived with someone with a dog. Before we broke up, we argued a lot. Once, we took her dog to the beach and we started bickering there. That dog just basically collapsed into a pile of leaves and would not get up. She did not want to be with us! And we weren’t even yelling at her. She just did not want to be a part of an unhappy scene.

That showed me that they can have a real-time valuation of their experiences. They know what they prefer to avoid.

more here.

Peter Schjeldahl at The New Yorker:

The Vatican, Kremlin, and Valhalla of modernism—home of the faith, the sway, and the glamour—that is the Museum of Modern Art is reopening, after an expansion that adds forty-seven thousand square feet and many new galleries, inserted into an apartment tower next door and built on neighboring land gobbled from the late, by some of us lamented, digs of the American Folk Art Museum. Far more, though still a fraction, of moma’s nonpareil collection is now on display, arranged roughly chronologically but studded with such mutually provoking juxtapositions as a 1967 painting that fantasizes a race riot, by the African-American artist Faith Ringgold, with Picasso’s gospel “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon” (1907). The renovation is a big deal for the global art world, and certainly for New York. It runs up against problems old and new. Generously enlarged quarters will only marginally relieve a chronic crush of visitors, the museum victimized by its own charisma. Enhanced representations of art by women, African-Americans, Africans, Latin-Americans, and Asians can feel tentative, pitched between self-evident justice and noblesse oblige. But such efforts are important and must continue. We will have a diverse cosmopolitan culture or none worth bothering about.

more here.

Cedric Johnson at nonsite:

The economic appeal of the Trump campaign, and his success in parts of the Midwestern industrial heartland has provoked a rash of explanations and invective centered on the “white working class.” But the “angry white worker” line misses too much. Trump did not grow the GOP base substantially, though he outperformed McCain in 2008 and Romney in 2012 by over 2 million votes. More importantly, Trump did not secure a larger share of the white vote than Romney did. Trump performed well among blue collar voters, former Obama voters, wealthy whites, non-unionized workers in coal country, the steel-producing belt and Right to Work states, building trades and contractors, proto-entrepreneurs, and minorities. One-third of Latino voters supported Trump, as did 13% of African American men.

The answer to why Trump was elected lies in the ideological crisis of the Democratic party, and more specifically in the implosion of Hillary Clinton’s campaign, both problems having their root in the New Democrats’ neoliberal political agenda and pro-corporate strategic and governing priorities.

more here.

Nina Allan in The Guardian:

I’d never heard the word before. Stillicide,” a corporate executive named Steven thinks to himself around a third of the way through Cynan Jones’s fragmented, marvellously compressed novel of the same title. “Water falling in drops. I challenge myself to get it into a sentence for the [journalists].” I had not heard the word before either, though Jones helpfully opens with a dictionary definition. And it is this image of dripping water and its powers of erosion that comes to define his book as a whole, both as a novel that confronts the challenge of describing what climate crisis might look like, and in the way a slow accretion of pertinent detail gathers cataclysmic momentum.

Stillicide takes place in the near future, when phases of extreme weather have plunged Britain into an alternating cycle of flood and drought. As temperatures continue to rise, smaller rural communities are becoming unsustainable, while the logistics of feeding and watering the growing city population has come to dominate the economic agenda. Steven is a PR spokesman for the corporation in charge of supplying an unnamed city with potable water. Previous attempts to augment the overstretched supply – an overground pipeline, an armoured freight train – have become the focus of terrorist activity, with raiding parties from the countryside violently advancing the demands of those who live beyond the urban centres. A new plan is hatched: an iceberg is to be towed from the Arctic and brought to an “ice dock” where its abundance of pure drinking water can be tapped and distributed. It is hoped that the iceberg will be largely immune from attacks by vigilantes and climate protestors. Moreover, meltwater from the berg – stillicide – can be utilised to irrigate agricultural land throughout the duration of its passage.

More here.

Robert Burton in Nautilus:

In wondering what can be done to steer civilization away from the abyss, I confess to being increasingly puzzled by the central enigma of contemporary cognitive psychology: To what degree are we consciously capable of changing our minds? I don’t mean changing our minds as to who is the best NFL quarterback, but changing our convictions about major personal and social issues that should unite but invariably divide us. As a senior neurologist whose career began before CAT and MRI scans, I have come to feel that conscious reasoning, the commonly believed remedy for our social ills, is an illusion, an epiphenomenon supported by age-old mythology rather than convincing scientific evidence. If so, it’s time for us to consider alternate ways of thinking about thinking that are more consistent with what little we do understand about brain function. I’m no apologist for artificial intelligence, but if we are going to solve the world’s greatest problems, there are several major advantages in abandoning the notion of conscious reason in favor of seeing humans as having an AI-like “black-box” intelligence.

But first, a brief overview as to why I feel so strongly that purely conscious thought isn’t physiologically likely. To begin, manipulating our thoughts within consciousness requires that we have a modicum of personal agency. To this end, rather than admit that no one truly knows what a mind is or how a thought arises, neuroscientists have come up with a number of ingenious approaches designed to unravel the slippery relationship between consciousness and decision-making. In his classic 1980s experiments, University of California, San Francisco, neurophysiologist Benjamin Libet noted a consistent change in brain wave activity (a so-called “ready potential”) prior to a subject’s awareness of having decided to move his hand. Libet’s conclusion was that the preceding activity was evidence for the decision being made subconsciously, even though subjects felt that the decision was conscious and deliberate. Since that time his findings, supported by subsequent similar results on fMRI and direct brain recordings, have featured prominently in refuting the notion of humans possessing free will. However, others presented with the same evidence strongly reject this interpretation.

More here.

Dear No. 24601

The future is an eye that I don’t dare look into
Last night I dreamed I was a ball of fire
and woke up on the wrong side of the room
this is a recurring dream
I share an apartment with my twin sister
Enclosed is a photo of us on a tandem bike
I forget which one I am
Sometimes I wake up believing I am her
she is me
and there is nothing about the day to indicate otherwise
Weeks stack up this way
As a girl I did not do well with other children
Unable to see the fun in games
which were only ever maddening
I paid close attention to the weather
delighting in hail and not much else
save a prized collection of Hummel figurines
derived from the pastoral sketches
of Sister Maria Innocentia Hummel
German Franciscan nun and talented artist
Her simple peaceful works
drew the enduring hatred of Hitler himself
You know Hummel translates as ‘bumblebee’ in German
and they say she was always ‘buzzing around’
What do you think do we grow into our names
or does kismet know a thing
One name can mean too much
the other not nearly enough
The details make a difference
like sitting on the white cushion
as opposed to the blue
white is pure of course
but my soul’s been in the bargain bin since Russia
and Lenin’s tomb
I had a moment there
among the balustrades
and once that moment had expired
it graduated
from a moment to a life

by Sophie Collins
from Poetry International, 2019

Sanjay G. Reddy in Foreign Policy:

RCTs cannot reveal very much about causal processes since at their core they are designed to determine whether something has an effect, not how. The randomistas have attempted to deal with this charge by designing studies to interpret whether variations in the treatment have different effects, but this requires a prior conception of what the causal mechanisms are. The lack of understanding of causation can limit the value of any insights derived from RCTs in understanding economic life or in designing further policies and interventions. Ultimately, the randomistas tested what they thought was worth testing, and this revealed their own preoccupations and suppositions, contrary to the notion that they spent countless hours listening to and in close contact with the poor. It is not surprising that economists doing RCTs have therefore been centrally concerned with the effects of incentives on individual behavior—for instance, examining the idea that contract teachers who fear losing their jobs will be more effective than those with a guarantee of employment.

But valuable innovations in everyday life, whether on the small or large scale, are likely to result from explorations of a more open-ended kind. This requires that people experiment with the institutions of which they are a part, which is not the same as conducting randomized experiments on other people. Policies (and reforms of policies) that go beyond one dimension are essential in a complex environment. For instance, better schools are likely to result both from measures dealing with teachers’ employment and ones dealing with curriculum, community participation, and funding arrangements. RCTs simply cannot advise us on how best to combine all of these, let alone on how to think creatively about them. Better schools may also result from changes that result from improvements in other domains beyond the individual school—for instance, safer neighborhoods, better drug policy, or lessened poverty. The actions needed to achieve better outcomes may sometimes only be possible to undertake at a level going much beyond the locality. A good example is provided by the iodization of salt, which has contributed not only to better health but may also have improved educational outcomes.

More here.

Sharon Weinberger in the New York Times:

In 1955, R. Gordon Wasson set off for southern Mexico to experience a sacred Indian ceremony rumored to provide a “pathway to the divine.” Wasson later extolled the mystical effects of what he called the “magic mushroom,” the Mexican plant used in the ceremony, in a 1957 photo-essay for Life magazine.

Wasson’s article, read by millions, helped set the stage for an eventual cultural revolution that peaked with Timothy Leary, the former Harvard professor who proselytized for LSD and called on Americans to “turn on, tune in, drop out.” The seminal role Wasson’s trip played in promoting mind-bending drugs and the accompanying cultural revolution has been described before, including in Michael Pollan’s recent book, “How to Change Your Mind,” but a new biography by Stephen Kinzer, a former foreign correspondent for The New York Times, adds a key detail to this fascinating history.

“Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control” describes how, unbeknown to Wasson, the spy agency was funding his travel. In fact, Wasson’s trip “would electrify mind control experimenters in Washington whose ambitions were vastly different from his own.”

More here.

Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe:

Like so many technological innovations, the internet is something that burst on the scene and pervaded human life well before we had time to sit down and think through how something like that should work and how it should be organized. In multiple ways — as a blogger, activist, fiction writer, and more — Cory Doctorow has been thinking about how the internet is affecting our lives since the very beginning. He has been especially interested in legal issues surrounding copyright, publishing, and free speech, and recently his attention has turned to broader economic concerns. We talk about how the internet has become largely organized through just a small number of quasi-monopolistic portals, how this affects the ways in which we gather information and decide whether to trust outside sources, and where things might go from here.

More here.