Brian Gallagher in Nautilus:

Last year news came that Indian billionaire Gautam Adani was set to exploit Australian coal reserves. The deal, The New York Times reported, was the result of a successful campaign by the Adani Group, a vast conglomerate with diverse interests, to capture the hearts and minds of Queenslanders, who occupy Australia’s second-largest state. It’s a project that will, in the short term, help power development in India and Bangladesh, where renewable sources of energy can be too costly to implement. India, unlike the United States and Western Europe, “doesn’t have a choice” about whether to use coal, Adani told the Times. In the long run, relying on coal will exacerbate efforts to stem global heating, as burning coal is one of the main drivers of climate change. One billionaire’s endeavor, in other words, represents a social dilemma of global proportions. India’s reliance on coal threatens to destroy public goods—clean air, favorable weather patterns, national security—and upend cooperation efforts to develop and implement renewable energy.

Christian Hilbe, a mathematician, directs a group at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology, in Germany, where he studies the conditions under which people cooperate. His group builds predictive models inspired by social dilemmas like climate change, which involve cooperation dynamics too complex to model realistically. “We want to distill the essence or the logic of this problem, make it as simple as possible, and then understand this very simple model,” Hilbe told me in a recent interview. “We are all aware that by solving the simple model, we don’t solve the climate change problem. But still we want to understand some of the strategic calibrations taking place in the whole game.” I caught up with Hilbe shortly after he published results of his explorations in the journal Nature. In his paper, “Social dilemmas among unequals,” Hilbe—along with his co-authors from the University of Exeter Business School, the Institute for Science and Technology Austria, and Harvard—found that, among other things, extreme inequality prevents players from cooperating to provision resources for public goods. “Our findings,” the researchers concluded, “have implications for policy-makers concerned with equity, efficiency and the provisioning of public goods.” In our conversation, Hilbe broke down the thinking behind his model and the consequences of his results.

More here.

Emily Makowski in The Scientist:

In 2016, a Nature survey of 1,576 researchers revealed that more than 70 percent of them  had tried and failed to reproduce another scientist’s experiments—and more than half failed to replicate their own. These and other recent findings on the lack of reproducibility in scientific research have inspired the creation of groups such as the UK Reproducibility Network (UKRN). Launched in March 2019, the UKRN is an interdisciplinary consortium that aims to tackle this issue in order to bolster research quality. Last month, 10 UK universities became part of the UKRN, joining a network that already includes stakeholders such as the Academy of Medical Sciences, Research Libraries UK, the National Institute for Biological Standards and Control, journals including Nature and PLOS, and local networks of researchers, reports Times Higher Education. The Scientist spoke with Marcus Munafò, a biological psychologist at the University of Bristol and the chair of the UKRN’s steering group of researchers, about UKRN’s structure, activities, and future plans.

TS: There’s been a lot of talk about the reproducibility crisis over the past few years. Could you give our readers some background about what led to the creation of UKRN?

Marcus Munafò: I’m not sure I particularly like the crisis narrative. There’s been a lot of interest in whether or not the research that [people] do is as robust and replicable as it could be, and it’s healthy to reflect on whether or not we could do better. I think any enterprise should have some proportion of its effort invested in thinking about whether or not it can improve the way in which it works. So it’s much better to think of this in terms of that kind of framing.

More here.

Julian Baggini in Prospect:

In philosophical circles, there are two Bertrand Russells, only one of whom died 50 years ago. The first is the short-lived genius philosopher of 1897-1913, whose groundbreaking work on logic shaped the analytic tradition which dominated Anglo-American philosophy during the 20th century. The second is the longer-lived public intellectual and campaigner of 1914-1970, known to a wider audience for his popular books such as Why I Am Not a Christian, Marriage and Morals and A History of Western Philosophy.

The public may have preferred the second Russell but many philosophers see this iteration as a sell-out who betrayed the first. This view is best reflected in Ray Monk’s exhaustive biography. The first volume, which went up to 1921, was almost universally acclaimed, but some (unfairly) condemned the second as a hatchet-job. It was as though Monk had become exasperated by his subject.

Monk admired the logician Russell who “supports his views with rigorous and sophisticated arguments, and deals with objections carefully and respectfully.” But he despaired that in the popular political writings that dominated the second half of Russell’s life, “these qualities are absent, replaced with empty rhetoric, blind dogmatism and a cavalier refusal to take the views of his opponents seriously.” In Monk’s view, Russell “abandoned a subject of which he was one of the greatest practitioners since Aristotle in favour of one to which he had very little of any value to contribute.”

Monk’s assessment has become orthodoxy among professional philosophers. But…

More here.

George Monbiot in The Guardian:

It sounds like a miracle, but no great technological leaps were required. In a commercial lab on the outskirts of Helsinki, I watched scientists turn water into food. Through a porthole in a metal tank, I could see a yellow froth churning. It’s a primordial soup of bacteria, taken from the soil and multiplied in the laboratory, using hydrogen extracted from water as its energy source. When the froth was siphoned through a tangle of pipes and squirted on to heated rollers, it turned into a rich yellow flour.

This flour is not yet licensed for sale. But the scientists, working for a company called Solar Foods, were allowed to give me some while filming our documentary Apocalypse Cow. I asked them to make me a pancake: I would be the first person on Earth, beyond the lab staff, to eat such a thing. They set up a frying pan in the lab, mixed the flour with oat milk, and I took my small step for man. It tasted … just like a pancake.

But pancakes are not the intended product. Such flours are likely soon to become the feedstock for almost everything. In their raw state, they can replace the fillers now used in thousands of food products. When the bacteria are modified they will create the specific proteins needed for lab-grown meat, milk and eggs.

More here.

Nathan J. Robinson in Current Affairs:

What happens in the leadup to war is that government officials make claims about the enemy, and then those claims appear in newspapers (“U.S. officials say Saddam poses an imminent threat”) and then in the public consciousness, the “U.S. officials say” part disappears, so that the claim is taken for reality without ever really being scrutinized. This happens because newspapers are incredibly irresponsible and believe that so long as you attach “Experts say” or “President says” to a claim, you are off the hook when people end up believing it, because all you did was relay the fact that a person said a thing, you didn’t say it was true. This is the approach the New York Times took to Bush administration allegations in the leadup to the Iraq War, and it meant that false claims could become headline news just because a high-ranking U.S. official said them. [UPDATE: here’s an example from Vox, today, of a questionable government claim being magically transformed into a certain fact.]

More here.

Vivian Gornick at The Nation:

Greenwich Village, in the early years of the 20th century, was a working-class neighborhood that had let the bohemians in. Eastman was enchanted. Describing the crowded street scene in a letter to her mother, she wrote, “Everyone is out. Mothers and fathers and babies line the doorsteps…little girls playing…in the middle of the street, and boys running in and out, chasing each other.” And to Max, urging him to join her when he graduated from college, she wrote, “I love it so for the people that are there and the thousands of things they do and think about.” The women and men she especially loved were “all the interesting between ones who really know how to live—who are working hard at something all the time; and especially the radicals, the reformers, the students—because they are open-minded, and eager over every new movement, and because they know when it is right for them to let go and amuse themselves and because they can laugh, even at themselves.” (Pace Emma Goldman: If I can’t dance, I’m not coming to your revolution.)

Eastman was bent on living a life of meaning that would include, as she liked to say, loving hard as well as working hard. (Rosa Luxemburg said almost the identical thing when she urged socialists to make the revolution, yes, but not give up the joy of life.)

more here.

Zeina G. Halabi at Eurozine:

This dialectical reconstruction of exile is one of the most revealing portraits of Darwish. Invoking his poetry’s prophetic iconography, it evokes displacement, absence, and the privilege of representation, about who speaks for the wandering people and how. It asks the question of how exile is framed temporally, probing the conceptions of time at work in this experience. Palestine is thus revealed across three successive temporalities: historically embedded in Biblical tradition and collective memory; a signifier in the present of displacement and loss; and projected into the future by the spectral figure of the exiled poet-prophet. The scene is thus about the intertwinement of the lyrical and the political, the personal and the collective, and the spectral and messianic; all set the parameters of the intellectual-prophet.

This is where the enmeshment of the poet-prophet, Palestine, and manifold temporalities turn into a metanarrative. We watch Bitton representing Darwish; he represents the Palestinians in 1997 from the vantage point of today’s coups, revolutions, and civil wars, all of which have had an effect on the conception of the ‘prophetic intellectual’.

more here.

Joseph Horowitz at the LARB:

STEPHEN JOHNSON’S BOOK How Shostakovich Changed My Mind (2019) begins with an unforgettable story. In 2006, Johnson traveled to St. Petersburg to meet an aged clarinetist named Viktor Kozlov. Kozlov was a member of the Leningrad orchestra that somehow performed Dmitri Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 7 on August 9, 1942. The city was under Nazi siege. Hundreds of thousands had died. The survivors were starving. Only 15 members of the Leningrad Radio Orchestra remained alive. They were joined by dozens of additional instrumentalists, mainly from military bands, brought in under armed convoy. Special rations were procured. The players were so weak that the initial rehearsals lasted only 15 to 20 minutes. The 75-minute symphony, composed in wartime, mirrored the fraught moment. Kozlov remembered:

There was a lot of applause, people standing. One woman even gave the conductor flowers — imagine, there was nothing in the city! And yet this one woman found flowers somewhere. It was wonderful! The music touched people because it reflected the Siege. […] People were thrilled and astounded that such music was played, even during the Siege of Leningrad!

more here.

Deborah Copaken in The Atlantic:

By the time of her arrival at Harvard the following fall––now Liz instead of Lizzie––she was instantly college famous. Within weeks on campus, everyone knew who Liz Wurtzel was. How could you not? Particularly after the popped-cherry party she threw midyear. Or rather, our mutual friend Donal Logue threw the party, and Liz commandeered it. “So the story is we threw a huge party sophomore year in Adams House,” said Donal earlier today, when we spoke to commiserate over her death. “Liz, a freshman at the time, showed up and announced she had just lost her virginity and it was now officially the ‘Elizabeth Wurtzel lost her virginity party.’ At first, I was surprised. She seemed so wild. When I got to know her and understood her Ramaz background, her high-school life, it made sense.”

Now Donal and everyone else who knew Liz, or has encountered her work since, are trying to make sense of the idea that she’s gone. Elizabeth Wurtzel died on January 7, 2020, at the age of 52, of complications from breast cancer. When I spoke with Roberta Feldman Brzezinski, her college roommate and friend ever since, she remembered Liz as “brilliant, acerbic, volatile, and fiercely loyal. In her last years, she became a fountain of life wisdom. Why do you care how people behave? You are the star of your own drama, and everyone else is just a bit player. In her case, that was epically true.”

…Wurtzel’s 1994 memoir, Prozac Nation, forever changed the literary landscape. It redefined not only what women were allowed to write about, but when they were allowed to write about it: their messy, early decades in medias res. Mental illness was no longer something to be hidden or shameful. It was a topic like any other, to be brought out into the light. Liz was suddenly the It Girl in New York, throwing epic, unforgettable parties in her loft. Suddenly, in the same way that she’d once drawn courage from my teenage writing, I now drew courage from her literary descriptions of early adulthood. “You should write about your war-photography years,” she urged me during one of her parties. And so I did. From then on, whenever anyone wanted to criticize women memoirists for oversharing; or dismiss personal writing as lesser or not literary; or shame us for describing, in intimate detail, the joys and miseries of human love, in all of its messy glory, we’d get lumped in together or collectively shamed as examples of what not to do. As the years wore on, we sometimes even found ourselves “oversharing” on the same stage.

More here. (Note: For my niece, Alia Raza, who sat many hours by Liz’s side as she lay dying, and mourned and grieved her friend in a thousand silent ways. RIP Liz)

William Foster in Nature:

The fear of getting lost and being unable to find our way home is woven into the stories we hear as children: it can haunt us for years. Humanity’s navigational skills are poor and increasingly rarely used, leaving us to view feats of animal navigation with a mixture of envy and admiration. How do Atlantic salmon find their way back to the streams where they were born, after up to three years at sea? How do Arctic terns find their breeding sites in the far north after excursions of more than 70,000 kilometres to the Antarctic? Desert Navigator is the story of how a tiny ant (Cataglyphis spp.) became the ideal model organism for the study of animal navigation. It begins 50 years ago in a vast Saharan salt pan, where a lone, shiny black ant caught the eye of neuroethologist Rüdiger Wehner as it scuttled across the sand. Eventually, it discovered the corpse of a large fly, gripped it firmly in its mandibles, and then performed the manoeuvre that launched Wehner’s field of research.

The ant set off in a straight line, crossing more than 100 metres of the barren ground to disappear into an inconspicuous hole — the entrance to its underground colony. The only plausible explanation is that the ant knew all along exactly where it was in relation to its home nest. But how does Cataglyphis manage this, with a minute brain and no mobile phone?

Wehner unspools the answer over the book’s seven chapters, describing the astonishing subtlety, intricacy and diversity of the techniques used both by the ants in finding their way home and by researchers in discovering how they do it. The ants plot their compass direction using patterns of polarized light and gradients of colour and light intensity in the sky, along with the position of the Sun, backed up by cues from Earth’s magnetic field and the wind direction. They know where they are by counting the steps they have taken and keeping track of the direction they were following at the time. They can memorize panoramic ‘snapshots’ of landmarks, such as boulders, around their goals. Somehow, their brains integrate all this information so that their foraging journeys can be optimally organized.

More here.

A Door like a Wound

The door first appeared in my backyard,
white sentinel among anemone sheets

unfurling on clotheslines. The next morning
I found it laying on the back row of the bus,

its glass knob rotating back and forth, back, forth.
Over the weeks I saw it roosted in the hair of toddlers,

stuck in the teeth of a laughing waitress, once
in a stroller where a baby was supposed to be.

Then one morning I woke up, found it embedded
in my palm. I tweezed the knob, pushed the door open.

Inside: a small room, bay windows, garrulous daylight,
a pair of boy’s shoes, a clarinet laid across a wooden chair,

and my mother’s voice, as if from a phone off its cradle,
singing some lost, some low-sweet tune…

I went to the bathroom, turned on the faucet,
held my hand under the water as if cleaning a wound.

Now when I press my ear to where the door used to be
I hear a knock-knock, knock-knock against my skin,

and sometimes, like old bones creaking, the whine of a hinge.

by Todd Dillard
from Empty Mirror

Daniel Callcut in Prospect:

Perhaps nothing is so distrusted, in an age that prizes authenticity, as the attempt to act in a politically neutral fashion. The recent general election has brought accusations of BBC news bias to a new level of intensity. The organisation’s claims to balanced coverage, under attack from left and right, represent one more pillar of the traditional liberal order under threat of disintegration. Does anyone really believe in the idea of media impartiality anymore? Isn’t this just one more centrist idea that is collapsing not just practically but philosophically too?

The worry about impartiality being a moribund idea doesn’t just face broadcasters. It confronts everyone from teachers to judges. What do you do if the stereotypically teenage complaint, everyone is biased, is deemed to have been right all along? I think of my experience of teaching philosophy in the United States and I think it contains some useful answers. What I shall suggest is that, even if true neutrality is ultimately impossible, it is a terrible overreaction to give up on the aspiration to balance.

More here.

Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe:

Wilfrid Sellars described the task of philosophy as explaining how things, in the broadest sense of term, hang together, in the broadest sense of the term. (Substitute “exploring” for “explaining” and you’d have a good mission statement for the Mindscape podcast.) Few modern thinkers have pursued this goal more energetically, creatively, and entertainingly than Daniel Dennett. One of the most respected philosophers of our time, Dennett’s work has ranged over topics such as consciousness, artificial intelligence, metaphysics, free will, evolutionary biology, epistemology, and naturalism, always with an eye on our best scientific understanding of the phenomenon in question. His thinking in these areas is exceptionally lucid, and he has the rare ability to express his ideas in ways that non-specialists can find accessible and compelling. We talked about all of them, in a wide-ranging and wonderfully enjoyable conversation.

More here.

Peter Singer in Project Syndicate:

On January 3, the United States assassinated Qassem Suleimani, a top Iranian military commander, while he was leaving Baghdad International Airport in a car with Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, an Iraqi leader of Kata’ib Hezbollah, an Iran-backed militia. All the occupants of the car were killed.

The next day, at a special press briefing, an unnamed senior US State Department official said that Suleimani had been, for 20 years, “the major architect” of Iran’s terrorist attacks and had “killed 608 Americans in Iraq alone.” He added that Suleimani and Muhandis had been designated as terrorists by the United Nations, and that “both of these guys are the real deal in terms of bad guys.”

In 2003, US intelligence about Iraq’s supposed possession of weapons of mass destruction was completely wrong. Those errors led to the invasion of Iraq, which cleared the way for the involvement of Iran and Suleimani in the country. But let’s assume that this time the facts are as the US administration says they are. Was the double assassination ethically defensible?

More here.

John Plotz, Pu Wang, and Cixin Lui at Public Books:

JP: Can you talk about how that subculture existed? Was it connected by magazines, or was there an online culture—or was it books that you read in translation or books by other Chinese writers? What was the material connection that made you a fandom?

CL: I started my fascination with science fiction while I was a primary school student. That was still in the final years of the Cultural Revolution. There was no cultural landscape of media as we know it today. There was not even the concept of science fiction yet in China. Back then, what I read was translated science fiction from the ’50s, the period of the early People’s Republic. The early socialist period was a relatively open era, culturally. At that time, a lot of Western science fiction works were translated into Chinese.

Those first science fiction books I read belonged to my father. During the Cultural Revolution, those books were no longer considered politically orthodox enough. My father just put them underneath the bed. So, as a young boy, I sneaked under the bed and started to read those words. Among those authors were H. G. Wells and Soviet science fiction writers.

more here.

Nell Zink at n+1:

THE PLOT OF The Brothers Karamazov defies summarization. As its unmotivated twists mounted, I was reminded of Dwight Garner’s complaint, in a review of Nicotine in The New York Times, that plot for me is “there when she needs it, like a small fleet of dependable Vespas, to shuttle her characters around.” Only now did I perceive the indelible early influence of the master. Mislaid closes with a courtroom scene whose origins I had always insisted lay in Viennese operetta, but it’s obvious to me now that I borrowed the idea from Dostoyevsky. I never even heard of an operetta with a courtroom scene.

The plot: the aforementioned contemplator bludgeons the evil dad and hangs himself, pinning the crime on the ne’er-do-well eldest Karamazov brother. The truth—that a contemplator could plan something that complicated—is known only to the middle brother, and it stresses him so severely, to the point of hearing voices, that no one in court believes a word he says.

more here.

Lucy Scholes at The Paris Review:

In 1956, in a central London café, Lindsay Anderson, Karel Reisz, Tony Richardson, and Lorenza Mazzetti wrote a manifesto for what they termed the “Free Cinema” movement. Among the aims of these four young, avant-garde filmmakers was a belief in “the importance of people and the significance of the everyday.” They eschewed traditional box office appeal in favor of authentic depictions of the quotidian, particularly that of the ordinary working man and woman. Mazzetti, who died this past weekend at the age of ninety-two, was then only twenty-eight years old—she’d recently moved to England from her native Italy, and first gotten work as a potato picker. Later that year, her second film, Together—which follows two deaf-mutes through the bomb-wrecked streets of London’s East End, or as Mazzetti described it, “fields of ruins overrun by children”—would win the Prix de Recherche at Cannes Film Festival. Her first film, K (1954), “suggested by” Kafka’s Metamorphosis and made on the most shoestring of budgets while she was a student at the Slade School of Art, anticipated the Free Cinema movement, and her signature appears first on the manifesto. And yet today she’s the least commemorated of the four, and her name is often little more than a footnote to the group’s history.

more here.

Wendy Moore in The Guardian:

The history of medicine abounds with oddball characters and bizarre events. Yet few figures are quite as eccentric as the French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot and few episodes reach the levels of absurdity displayed in his demonstrations of “hysterical” women being hypnotised in Paris in the late 19th century. Charcot had begun so promisingly. Early in his career he made groundbreaking discoveries in multiple sclerosis and Parkinson’s disease, thereby earning himself the epithet “father of neurology”. But he became fixated on “hysteria”, a catch-all diagnosis that Victorian doctors applied to unconventional behaviour that defied medical explanation. For more than a decade Charcot hypnotised scores of patients, mostly women, at the Salpêtrière asylum in his quest to show their condition had a biological cause rooted in the brain. According to his twisted logic, if patients reproduced their strange antics and seizures under hypnosis this proved their illness was real not feigned and was therefore a physical not a mental disorder. Crowds of eminent doctors and scientists, the vast majority male, packed the hospital to watch Charcot induce his patients to adopt ridiculous poses and act out ludicrous scenes.

His star patient, Blanche Wittmann, known as “queen of the hysterics”, had been sexually abused as a teenager. Under hypnosis she was persuaded to cower in fear of an imaginary snake, lead her troops into battle as a pretend general and remove her clothes. It is a wonder Charcot’s spectators did not march him to the cells after these performances rather than his unfortunate victims. Yet paradoxically all this time he was surrounded by an epidemic of manic behaviour that filled psychiatric institutions and was truly caused by brain disease – neurosyphilis. While he, the founder of neurology, was obsessed with proving that mental illness was caused by lesions in the brain, patients with neurosyphilis were left to the forerunners of modern psychiatry.

In this absorbing and scholarly book, Allan Ropper and Brian Burrell home in on Charcot’s strange shows as the seminal moment when psychiatry and neurology split and began their journeys along separate but intertwining paths towards a partial convergence today.

More here.