Reeves et al in Nature:

There has never been more anxiety about the effects of our love of screens — which now bombard us with social-media updates, news (real and fake), advertising and blue-spectrum light that could disrupt our sleep. Concerns are growing about impacts on mental and physical health, education, relationships, even on politics and democracy. Just last year, the World Health Organization issued new guidelines about limiting children’s screen time; the US Congress investigated the influence of social media on political bias and voting; and California introduced a law (Assembly Bill 272) that allows schools to restrict pupils’ use of smartphones.

All the concerns expressed and actions taken, including by scientists, legislators, medical and public-health professionals and advocacy groups, are based on the assumption that digital media — in particular, social media — have powerful and invariably negative effects on human behaviour. Yet so far, it has been a challenge for researchers to demonstrate empirically what seems obvious experientially. Conversely, it has also been hard for them to demonstrate that such concerns are misplaced.

…According to a 2019 systematic review and meta-analysis³, over the past 12 years, 226 studies have examined how media use is related to psychological well-being. These studies consider mental-health problems such as anxiety, depression and thoughts of suicide, as well as degrees of loneliness, life satisfaction and social integration. The meta-analysis found almost no systematic relationship between people’s levels of exposure to digital media and their well-being. But almost all of these 226 studies used responses to interviews or questionnaires about how long people had spent on social media, say, the previous day.

More here.

Robert Reich in The American Prospect:

If climate change, nuclear standoffs, assault weapons, hate crimes, mass killings, Russian trolls, near-record inequality, kids locked in cages at our border, and Donald Trump in the White House don’t occasionally cause you feelings of impending doom, you’re not human.

But I want you to remember this: As bad as it looks—as despairing as you can sometimes feel —the great strength of this country is our resilience. We bounce back. We will again. We already are.

Not convinced?

First, come back in time with me to when I graduated college in 1968. That year, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated. Our cities were burning. Tens of thousands of young Americans were being ordered to Vietnam to fight an unwinnable and unjust war, which ultimately claimed over 58,000 American lives and the lives of over 3 million Vietnamese. The nation was deeply divided. And then in November of that year, Richard Nixon was elected president.

I recall thinking this nation would never recover. But somehow we bounced back.

More here.

Timothy Stoll at Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews:

The German word Bildung is notoriously difficult to render in English. Its most common meaning is perhaps ‘education,’ though in a more capacious sense than what happens exclusively in schools and universities. It is related to the German for ‘image’ (Bild) and the verb meaning ‘to form, shape, construct’ (bilden), and so suggests, when applied to a human being, a kind of quasi-aesthetic formation of one’s character. The complexities and ambiguities of the term provide a considerable obstacle to those interested in late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century German ethical thought, in which the ideal of Bildung plays a crucial role. In this splendid book, Jennifer Herdt has thus provided a valuable service in tracing the ways in which the concept of Bildung figures in the work of some of the most prominent thinkers of the period. With verve and impressive erudition, Herdt details how the notion of Bildung originated in the German pietist movement in the seventeenth century, and blossomed into a more (though perhaps not entirely) humanistic ideal in the subsequent work of Herder, Wilhelm von Humboldt, Schiller, Goethe, and Hegel. Though these figures differ in many crucial respects, they are united by the idea that human beings are “oriented toward a telos conceived as the harmonious development of all their various capacities . . . into a balanced, unified whole” (p. 82).

more here.

Tyler Malone at The Hedgehog Review:

Perhaps it’s no surprise that the Great American Novel was born in 1868, only a few years after the end of the Civil War. Writing in The Nation, John William DeForest formulated the notion, defining it not just as the best novel by an American author but as “the picture of the ordinary emotions and manners of American existence.” DeForest argued that Hawthorne, whom he lauded as having “the greatest of American imaginations,” fell short of achieving the accolade. Although books such as The Scarlet Letter were “full of acute spiritual analysis,” the characters belonged to “the wide realm of art rather than to our nationality.” Indeed, DeForest found them to be “as probably natives of the furthest mountains of Cathay or of the moon as of the United State of America.” The Great American Novel, he determined, must take up the “task of painting the American soul within the framework of a novel.”

That the formulation of the Great American Novel came in the wake of a bloody conflict that split the country in two reveals much: Americans yearned for myths that would renew their sense of common purpose, that would encourage them to reexamine their foundational values and guiding principles, their darkest sins and loftiest aspirations.

more here.

Carina del Valle Schorske at VQR:

In his treatise The Poetics of Space, the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard claims “a house in a big city lacks cosmicity.” Only the rambling, breezy chateaus of the countryside provided the space necessary for his daydreaming to develop into something more substantial, like thought, where quiet corners the boy never had to clean became chapels consecrated to his own heroic becoming. In the urban apartment, “Home has become mere horizontality. The different rooms that compose living quarters jammed into one floor all lack” some essential humanizing feature from which literature might emerge. My mother shares his skepticism regarding the literary potential of our apartment. She suggests I consider the illustrious history of the neighborhood instead, a world Bachelard might have recognized as worthy if he’d ever been uptown.

Washington Heights became Washington Heights in the middle of the nineteenth century, when rich New Yorkers began to build estates on the dramatic high points of Manhattan far from the tumult of downtown docks and slums, the slave market on Wall Street.

more here.

Sandy Allen in Guernica:

I have read before with fascination about the neurology of London cab drivers. Prospective London cabbies must memorize a preposterous amount of geographic information in order to pass the rigorous cab driver exam. Researchers have put drivers in brain scanners, wondering, is there something inherently different about their brains that allows them to memorize so much? Or does the memorization change their brains? They’ve found that in London cabbies’ brains, the area associated with memory is larger. This raises an enormous question, one that medicine still hasn’t figured out: when it comes to what happens inside our skulls, what makes an individual fall into or out of some standard called “normal?”

I thought about this on a Friday morning in early 2016, after my red-eye landed at Heathrow and I walked to find a cab. There was a particular museum just south of London that I desperately wanted to go to. For some months, I’d been visiting its website over and over. More recently, I’d been trying to convince my boyfriend that we needed to go to London for a weekend. He had some days off coming up and the means to go, I reasoned. It’d be romantic. “Plus,” I said, as if it were an afterthought, “I can go to that museum I’ve wanted to go to!”

The day we were to fly was also the day I was supposed to file a draft of my first book to my publisher. In the days leading up to the deadline, I hardly slept. I woke early and worked continuously, eventually closing my eyes past midnight but rising again in the dark, making another pot of coffee and continuing on. I paced the apartment. I read aloud to myself. I printed pages and wrote profanity in the margins. I muttered and cursed. I looked out the windows and wept. I handed in the draft just hours before we left for the airport.

I felt good! I felt great! The book was done! I told anyone who asked, and some who didn’t. Some weeks later, my editors would summon me and make clear, as gently as they could, that the work wasn’t finished, not at all. As they explained this to me in a small conference room over the course of an hour and a half, I tried not to cry. I managed to hold back tears until I was on the train home, and then kept at it for many days after. Eventually I’d tear the draft apart and rewrite the book entirely. Some months later, I’d do it again. The actual “the book is finished!” feeling wouldn’t arrive for another year and a half.

More here.

Racists

Vas en Afrique! Back to Africa! The butcher we used to patronize in the
………. Rue Cadet market
beside himself, shrieked at a black man in an argument the rest of the
………. import of which I missed
but that made me anyway for three years walk an extra street to a shop
………. of definitely lower quality
until I convinced myself that probably I’d misunderstood that other thing
………. and could come back.
Today another black man stopped, asking something again that I didn’t
………. catch, and the butcher,
who at the moment was unloading his rotisserie, slipping the chickens
………. off their heavy spit,
as he answered—how get this right?—casually but accurately brandished
………. the still-hot metal,
so the other, whatever he was there for, had suddenly to lean away a little,
………. so as not to flinch.

by C.K. Williams
from Collected Poems
Noonday Press, 1994

Tony Wood in The Nation:

To begin with, it was the journalism that enabled him to make a precarious living while he wrote fiction, often at night. Yet even after the global success of his 1967 novel One Hundred Years of Solitude, he continued to write articles, commentaries, and reported pieces at an impressive rate. In Spanish, his collected Obra Periodística—not including three book-length works of reportage—spans five volumes, comprising more than 3,000 pages. The Scandal of the Century is the first English-language selection from this vast body of work. Long overdue, it provides a fairly representative slice of García Márquez’s journalistic output. In the first half, we track his movements across the globe, from 1940s Colombia through a string of international assignments in the ’50s and ’60s: Rome, Paris, Budapest, Caracas, and Havana, among many others. In the latter half, we find a more rooted García Márquez, largely through the columns he wrote for El País in the ’80s from Mexico City, where he lived much of the time from the ’70s onward.

More here.

Sara Chodosh in Popular Science:

In 2004, two Amish children—siblings, in fact—died while playing. They weren’t doing anything particularly dangerous, just normal recreation, but somehow they both passed away suddenly.

When their autopsies came back negative for any known underlying cause of death, the local Medical Examiner’s office reached out to the Windland Smith Rice Sudden Death Genomics Laboratory, a specialized lab at the Mayo Clinic that investigates exactly these types of unexpected deaths. Even they couldn’t figure out what exactly happened.

But in the intervening 15-odd years, a lot has changed technologically. So when two other siblings died more recently, the Mayo Clinic had better tools at their disposal. And they’ve now solved the mystery.

More here.

A. S. Hamrah at n+1:

Orpheus is a film that deals in the interpretation of signs and meaning. It is one of the few films that deals with that in a direct and palpable way. Others from the same period as Orpheus are detective films and film noirs. This decoding is not just subtext nor is it merely somehow inscribed in the film for us to discover using our critical faculties. It is the film’s subject matter. That’s why Orpheus was also called, when it came out, “a detective story from the beyond.”

The poet Orpheus, played by Jean Marais, one of Cocteau’s lovers, here in a contemporary-to-1950 setting, becomes obsessed with transcribing the random words and numbers he hears on his car radio. He doesn’t know it at first, but these are emanations from beyond reality. In other words, they are poetry.

more here.

Robert Scheer in TruthDig:

It is nearly impossible to live in today’s world without having come across mention of the legendary Noam Chomsky. His work as a linguist, historian, political activist and philosopher, which spans nearly a century, has had an immeasurable impact on contemporary world views. Not only have his more than a hundred books become the basis for a vast milieu of modern thought, but he himself has become a widely admired public figure whose thoughtful take on current events is as crucial as ever in our increasingly hostile, chaotic sociopolitical climate.

While he and Robert Scheer, the renowned left-wing thinker and Truthdig’s award-winning editor in chief, are both well known in progressive circles for their lifelong work challenging systems of oppression and false narratives about American exceptionalism, until now, the two had never had a public conversation. In a remarkable two-part interview, Chomsky and Scheer meet to discuss topics ranging from the type of dystopian future we face to the unfortunate, brutal success of the U.S. empire.

More here.

Blame

Where no question possibly remains—someone crying, someone dead
…………… —blame asks: whose fault?
It’s the counterpart, the day-to-day, the real life, of those higher faculties
…………… we posit,
logic, reason, the inductions and deductions we yearningly trace the lines
…………… of with our finger.
It also has to do with nothing but itself, a tendency, a habit, like smoking
…………… or depression:
the unaccountable life quirks forecast in neither the sour milk nor the
…………… parent’s roaring bead.
Relationship’s theodicy: as the ever-generous deity leaves the difficult
…………… door of faith ajar
in a gesture of just-fathomable irony, so our beloved other, in the pain
…………… of partial mutuality,
moves us with its querulous “Look what you made me do!” towards the
…………… first glimpse of terrible self.

by C.K. Williams
from C.K. Williams Selected Poems
Noonday Press, 1994

Roger Scruton in City Journal (Winter 2009):

Wherever the Western vision of political order has gained a foothold, we find freedom of expression: not merely the freedom to disagree with others publicly about matters of faith and morality but also the freedom to satirize solemnity and to ridicule nonsense, including solemnity and nonsense of the sacred kind. This freedom of conscience requires secular government. But what makes secular government legitimate?

That question is the starting point of Western political philosophy, the consensus among modern thinkers being that sovereignty and law are made legitimate by the consent of those who must obey them. They show this consent in two ways: by a real or implied “social contract,” whereby each person agrees with every other to the principles of government; and by a political process through which each person participates in the making and enacting of the law. The right and duty of participation is what we mean, or ought to mean, by “citizenship,” and the distinction between political and religious communities can be summed up in the view that political communities are composed of citizens and religious communities of subjects—of those who have “submitted.” If we want a simple definition of the West as it is today, the concept of citizenship is a good starting point. That is what millions of migrants are roaming the world in search of: an order that confers security and freedom in exchange for consent.

That is what people want; it does not, however, make them happy. Something is missing from a life based purely on consent and polite accommodation with your neighbors—something of which Muslims retain a powerful image through the words of the Koran. This missing thing goes by many names: sense, meaning, purpose, faith, brotherhood, submission. People need freedom; but they also need the goal for which they can renounce it. That is the thought contained in the word “Islam”: the willing submission, from which there is no return.

More here.

Robert Service in Science:

Hit certain crystalline materials with a jolt of electricity and they will change shape. Squeeze them and they will jolt you right back. Scientists have used these so-called piezoelectrics for decades in ultrasound medical imaging; the materials are so sensitive that they can pick up the motion of sound waves moving through tissue. Now, researchers have come up with a simple new way to make potent transparent piezoelectrics, which could lead to improved medical imagers, invisible robots, and touch screens that power themselves.

Piezoelectrics are made up of either myriad tiny crystallites or single crystals of a variety of materials including ceramics and polymers. In both cases, a mix of atoms arrange themselves into a simple crystalline unit—typically the size of a handful of atoms—that’s repeated over and over. Inside each of these building blocks, the atoms are arranged in a so-called electric dipole, with more positive charges on one side and more negative charges on the other.

…That improved performance could lead to more sensitive photoacoustic imaging devices, which could aid doctors in everything from breast cancer and melanoma detection to the tracking of blood flow for the treatment of vascular diseases, Kothapalli says. Chen and his colleagues report that the advance could also inspire transparent actuators for invisible robotics and screens that power themselves when touched.

More here.

Kent Anhari in The New Atlantis:

According to the best-known telling of the tale, Hippasus, a Pythagorean of the fifth century b.c., was drowned in the sea by his fellow philosophers while on a fishing voyage. Hippasus had disclosed a secret that, if made public, risked destroying the credibility of his school’s commitment to a cosmos governed by perfect mathematical harmony: The relationship between a diagonal of a square and its side cannot be represented as a ratio — it is “irrational.” This legend sets the stage in Irrationality: A History of the Dark Side of Reason, Justin E. H. Smith’s urgent missive to a Brahmin class wracked with anxieties about a world that seems to have lost its grip on reason.

Smith, a philosopher of science at Paris Diderot University, is motivated by an urgent sense that a milestone reassessment of the Enlightenment’s legacy, and of the role of reason in public life, is underway in the United States and elsewhere. The emergence of prominent public voices with open counter-Enlightenment sympathies — such as Steve Bannon and Peter Thiel — and the resurgence of jingoistic populism are good reasons to take notice. So too is the fierce battle being fought between self-styled defenders of the open society, such as Steven Pinker and Jordan Peterson (however tenuous their grasp of the philosophies they claim to champion), and heirs to the left-wing critical tradition that views Enlightenment ideals as instruments for the powerful to oppress the marginal.

More here.

Ian Sample in The Guardian:

Be warned. If the rise of the robots comes to pass, the apocalypse may be a more squelchy affair than science fiction writers have prepared us for.

Researchers in the US have created the first living machines by assembling cells from African clawed frogs into tiny robots that move around under their own steam.

One of the most successful creations has two stumpy legs that propel it along on its “chest”. Another has a hole in the middle that researchers turned into a pouch so it could shimmy around with miniature payloads.

“These are entirely new lifeforms. They have never before existed on Earth,” said Michael Levin, the director of the Allen Discovery Center at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts. “They are living, programmable organisms.”

Roboticists tend to favour metal and plastic for their strength and durability, but Levin and his colleagues see benefits in making robots from biological tissues. When damaged, living robots can heal their wounds, and once their task is done they fall apart, just as natural organisms decay when they die.

More here, including amazing video.