Christopher Benfey in the New York Review of Books:

In a glass case at the Musée Rodin, displaying preparatory studies, my attention settled on a terra-cotta fragment identified as “The Thinker’s Right Foot.” His foot! Suddenly, I had a completely different feel for The Thinker. And I found myself wondering whether Rodin, too, had felt that the success of the sculpture might depend in some crucial way on getting the feet right. In one of his two major statements on The Thinker, when he recalled moving from his original concept of Dante in earflaps to something more universal, Rodin wrote: “I conceived another thinker, a naked man; seated upon a rock, his feet drawn under him, his fist against his teeth, he dreams.” The sequence here—the rock, the feet, the fist, the teeth, the dream—implies that thinking, as Rodin conceived of it, emerges from the feet and moves upward and inward. I looked carefully at the Thinker’s right foot, how the big toe slides under the adjacent, sheltering toe to get a better grip.

I half-remembered an essay Georges Bataille wrote on “The Big Toe,” in which he noted that man, “though the most noble of animals… has feet, and these feet independently lead an ignoble life.” Bataille touches here on what one might call the cultural history of feet. Feet are base; they are in touch with dirt, everything that humans, in their vanity, wish to rise above.

More here.

Jean-Pierre Dupuy in Inference Review:

DANIEL ELLSBERG is well known for releasing the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times and the Washington Post. Their publication led indirectly to the Watergate scandal and the downfall of Richard Nixon. Less well known is that in 1961, while working for the RAND Corporation as an economist specializing in rational choice theory, Ellsberg was seconded to the White House and the Pentagon to work alongside Robert McNamara drawing up plans for a nuclear war. This period is the subject of Ellsberg’s new book.

When he left RAND in January 1970, Ellsberg made copies of all the documents in his safe, not only those pertaining to the Vietnam War.¹ It seemed obvious to him that making known the horrifying risks involved in American nuclear strategy was much more important than denouncing the Vietnam scandal. Upon reflection, Ellsberg elected to release the Vietnam papers first. At the beginning of the book, he explains this decision in pragmatic terms, namely the urgency of ending an absurd war. But the remainder of the book suggests another, deeper reason: a feeling of helplessness. Despite the inherent dangers of nuclear weapons, it seemed to Ellsberg that the world remained “blind to apocalypse,” as Günther Anders has put it.²

The Doomsday Machine is a fantastic book, albeit one with an extraordinary omission: the index contains no entry for “deterrence,” a concept that is usually integral to any discussion about nuclear warfare.

More here.

C.J. Polychroniou in Truthout:

Noam, what are some of the tangible and intangible factors that seem to be pushing the country — socially, politically and economically — backward rather than forward?

Noam Chomsky: Trump’s diatribes successfully inflame his audience, many of whom apparently feel deeply threatened by diversity, cultural change, or simply the recognition that the White Christian nation of their collective imagination is changing before their eyes. White supremacy is nothing new in the U.S. The late George Frederickson’s comparative studies of white supremacy found the U.S. to be almost off the chart, more extreme even than Apartheid South Africa. As late as the 1960s the U.S. had anti-miscegenation laws so extreme that the Nazis refused to adopt them as a model for their racist Nuremberg laws. And the power of Southern Democrats was so great that until ‘60s activism shattered the framework of legal racism — if not its practice by other means — even New Deal federal housing programs enforced segregation, barring Black people from new housing programs.

It goes back to the country’s origins. While progressive in many ways by the standards of the day, the U.S. was founded on two brutal racist principles: the most hideous system of slavery in human history, the source of much of its wealth (and England’s too), and the need to rid the national territory of Native Americans, whom the Declaration of Independence explicitly describes as “the merciless Indian savages,” and whom the framers saw as barring the expansion of the “superior” race.

More here.

Richard Lea at The Guardian:

Born in an Ohio steel town in the depths of the Great Depression, Morrison carved out a literary home for the voices of African Americans, first as an acclaimed editor and then with novels such as The Bluest Eye, Song of Solomon and Beloved. Over the course of a career that garnered honours including the Pulitzer prize, the Nobel prize, the Légion d’Honneur and a Presidential Medal of Freedom presented to her in 2012 by her friend Barack Obama, her work became part of the fabric of American life as it was woven into high school syllabuses up and down the country.

The house where Morrison was born in 1931 stands about a mile from the gates of the Lorain steel factory in Ohio – the first of a series of apartments the family lived in while her father added odd jobs to his shifts at the plant to make the rent. He defied his supervisor and took a second unionised job so he could send his daughter to college. After studying English at Howard University and Cornell, she returned to Washington DC to teach, marrying the architect Howard Morrison and giving birth to two sons.

more here.

Francis Gooding at the LRB:

‘We have already exited the state of environmental conditions that allowed the human animal to evolve in the first place,’ Wallace-Wells writes, ‘in an unsure and unplanned bet on just what that animal can endure. The climate system that raised us, and raised everything we now know as human civilisation, is now, like a parent, dead.’ He is not a climate scientist, so is perhaps less circumspect than he might be: the data here is designed to scare us. ‘I am alarmed,’ he writes. Who isn’t? We know exactly where we are, despite the continuous chatter of doubt and denial. Wallace-Wells is scathing about the oil industry, whose disinformation clogs public discourse and waylays political processes: ‘A more grotesque performance of corporate evilness is hardly imaginable, and, a generation from now, oil-backed denial will likely be seen as among the most heinous conspiracies against human health and well-being as have been perpetrated in the modern world.’

How on earth are we supposed to think about all this horror? How do we plan for the future or raise children knowing what we know? The magnitude and implications of climate change short-circuit the imagination. Wallace-Wells cites the novelist Amitav Ghosh, who has suggested that we fail to put climate change into proper perspective because we don’t yet have the stories to comprehend it.

more here.

Jenny Uglow at the TLS:

The laughter of Morrison’s characters disguises pain, deprivation and violation. It is laughter at a series of bad, cruel jokes. The real joke in naming Sula’s neighbourhood “The Bottom”, when it perches on barren Ohio uplands is that, in many senses it really is “the bottom” after all. Nothing is what it seems; no appearance, no relationship, can be trusted to endure.

The two earlier novels, although they anticipate the complicated and wide-ranging concerns of Song of Solomon, explore in particular the process of growing up black, female and poor. Avoiding generalities, Toni Morrison concentrates on the relation between the pressures of the community, patterns established within families (especially the models provided by mother and grandmother), and the developing sense of self. The central figures in Sula are childhood friends Sula Peace and Nel Wright, who share all their experiences until, following the death of her mother and Nel’s marriage, Sula leaves. She returns ten years later, having grown to reject convention while Nel has moulded herself into respectable domesticity; their “magical” reunion is followed by long years of bitterness.

more here.

The Most of it

He thought he kept the universe alone;
For all the voice in answer he could wake
Was but the mocking echo of his own
From some tree-hidden cliff across the lake.
Some morning from the boulder-broken beach
He would cry out on life, that what it wants
Is not its own love back in copy speech,
But counter-love, original response.
And nothing ever came of what he cried
Unless it was the embodiment that crashed
In the cliff’s talus on the other side,
And then in the far distant water splashed,
But after a time allowed for it to swim,
Instead of proving human when it neared
And someone else additional to him,
As a great buck it powerfully appeared,
Pushing the crumpled water up ahead,
And landed pouring like a waterfall,
And stumbled through the rocks with horny tread,
And forced the underbrush—and that was all.

by Robert Frost
from A Book of Luminous Things
Harvest Books, 1996

Meera Subramanian in Nature:

Crawford Lake is so small it takes just 10 minutes to stroll all the way around its shore. But beneath its surface, this pond in southern Ontario in Canada hides something special that is attracting attention from scientists around the globe. They are in search of a distinctive marker buried deep in the mud — a signal designating the moment when humans achieved such power that they started irreversibly transforming the planet. The mud layers in this lake could be ground zero for the Anthropocene — a potential new epoch of geological time.

This lake is unusually deep for its size so its waters never fully mix, which leaves its bottom undisturbed by burrowing worms or currents. Layers of sediment accumulate like tree rings, creating an archive reaching back nearly 1,000 years. In high fidelity, it has captured evidence of the Iroquois people, who cultivated maize (corn) along the lake’s banks at least 750 years ago, and then of the European settlers, who began farming and chopping down trees more than five centuries later. Now, scientists are looking for much more recent, and significant, signs of upheaval tied to humans. Core samples taken from the lake bottom “should translate into a razor-sharp signal”, says Francine McCarthy, a micropalaeontologist at nearby Brock University in St Catherines, Ontario, “and not one blurred by clams mushing it about.” McCarthy has been studying the lake since the 1980s, but she is looking at it now from a radical new perspective.

Crawford Lake is one of ten sites around the globe that researchers are studying as potential markers for the start of the Anthropocene, an as-yet-unofficial designation that is being considered for inclusion in the geological time scale.

More here.

Connie Bruck in The New Yorker:

“A lie is a lie is a lie,” Whoopi Goldberg said. It was May 2nd, and she was on the set of “The View,” the daytime talk show that she co-hosts. The subject was Attorney General William Barr, who had argued that the special counsel Robert Mueller’s report was not as alarming as it seemed—endorsing Donald Trump’s claim that there had been “no collusion, no obstruction” in the Russia case. Goldberg was incredulous. “Our parents taught us, if you lie, there are consequences,” she said. “When are consequences coming back?”

Her guest, the attorney Alan Dershowitz, offered an answer that combined legal analysis and political handicapping. “They come back in November of 2020, when we all go to the polls and we vote against people that we think lied,” he said. “But it would be a terrible thing”—he held up a finger for emphasis—“to criminalize lies.”

Dershowitz is a frequent guest on shows like “The View”; for decades, he has been a frequent guest just about everywhere. If you are a television producer putting together a segment about a celebrated criminal case, Dershowitz is an ideal booking. Intellectually nimble and supremely confident, he is an emeritus professor at Harvard Law School but also an occasional reader (and subject) of the tabloids.

More here.

Ashutosh Jogalekar in The Curious Wavefunction:

My colleague Patrick Riley from Google has a good piece in Nature in which he describes three very common errors in applying machine learning to real world problems. The errors are general enough to apply to all uses of machine learning irrespective of field, so they certainly apply to a lot of machine learning work that has been going on in drug discovery and chemistry.

The first kind of error is an incomplete split between training and test sets. People who do ML in drug discovery have encountered this problem often; the test set can be very similar to the training set, or – as Patrick mentions here – the training and test sets aren’t really picked at random. There should be a clear separation between the two sets, and the impressive algorithms are the ones which extrapolate non-trivially from the former to the latter. Only careful examination of the training and test sets can ensure that the differences are real.

Another more serious problem with training data is of course the many human biases that have been exposed over the last few years, biases arising in fields ranging from hiring to facial recognition. The problem is that it’s almost impossible to find training data that doesn’t have some sort of human bias (in that context, general image data usually works pretty well because of the sheer number of random images human beings capture), and it’s very likely that this hidden bias is what your model will then capture.

More here.

Sonia Faleiro in the New York Review of Books:

One night in May, a strange and seemingly inexplicable thing happened in India. A divisive and ineffectual prime minister returned to power with a historic mandate.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s triumph on May 23 was conclusive. His Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) won more than 300 of the 543 seats in the lower house of Parliament. But Modi had spent the last five years letting India down. Very little he had said on the 2014 campaign trail turned out to be true and virtually nothing he promised was delivered.

The prime minister had pledged to create 10 million jobs each year, but under him the country has experienced its highest rate of unemployment in forty-five years, with more younger and better-educated people than ever before stranded helplessly. His hasty decision to void the largest currency bills, in 2016, removing more than 80 percent of the money in circulation was supposed to curb corruption, but it cost more than a million jobs and did nothing to prevent graft in India or make business more transparent.

More here.

Alison Willmore in BuzzFeedNews:

The Cannes Film Festival has been an adoring showcase for Quentin Tarantino ever since he was anointed with the big prize, the Palme d’Or, for Pulp Fiction in 1994. That only made the discomfort of his tense exchange with New York Times reporter Farah Nayeri at this year’s event more telling. Tarantino’s latest film, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, made its world premiere at the festival in May, where it received a six-minute standing ovation. The filmmaker and his cast were holding court at the subsequent press conference when Nayeri pressed Tarantino about why the movie’s woman lead, Margot Robbie (playing real-life Manson family murder victim Sharon Tate), had so little dialogue in the shaggy 1960s-set showbiz comedy.

“This is a person with great acting talent, and yet you haven’t given her many lines in the movie,” Nayeri said, citing Robbie’s roles in I, Tonya and The Wolf of Wall Street. “I guess that was a deliberate choice on your part. And I just wanted to know why that was that we don’t hear her speak that much.” Tarantino didn’t reply to Nayeri so much as refuted her whole line of questioning. “Well, I just reject your hypotheses,” he said, leaving Robbie to smooth over the awkward moment by speaking about the challenge of playing a character who’s mostly by herself in her biggest scenes.

It was, to be fair, an oddly phrased question. Tarantino didn’t write the script around the cast; Once Upon a Time features a range of famous faces in much smaller roles than Robbie’s; and even with a writer as verbose as Tarantino, counting lines is not a surefire way to measure the quality of a part. But his curtness in dismissing the concerns of a woman journalist (dredging up memories of his painfully testy exchange with critic Jan Wahl in 2003) made the exchange explode across the internet. And it reignited a conversation that’s dogged the director for years and that has, post-#MeToo, risen in volume: As a filmmaker, is Tarantino bad to — or for — women?

More here.

Noah Knopf in Harvard Political Review:

It took me three tries to understand even a little of Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf’s famous 1925 modernist novel set on a single day in London. Even now, when I try to explain the book, I tend to sound like a stereotypical rambling undergraduate literary analyst, parroting lecture slides and pontificating on the meaning of life — if Good Will Hunting saw me at a bar, he’d take me outside. But confusing as it is, this is a book that makes me walk around differently. Here’s why:

“Fear no more the heat o’ the sun
Nor the furious winter’s rages.”

Fear no more the heat of the sun ⎯ it’s a line from Shakespeare’s Cymbeline, from a funeral song about embracing death and escaping the torments of life. Clarissa Dalloway, Mrs. Dalloway’s title character, happens to catch a glimpse of the lyric through the glass of a shop window as she putters about London making arrangements for her party that night. Clarissa really wants this party to be good, but she is mocked, derided; everyone thinks it’s frivolous to care so much about throwing a party for society elites.

It takes the suicide of a man she has never met for Clarissa to understand that her doubters are dead wrong. The news arrives during the party, and, stunned, she retires upstairs. But after the shock melts away, Clarissa actually feels “glad that he had done it; thrown it away. He made her feel the beauty; made her feel the fun.” Death is not to be feared, that’s true, and it’s a theme repeated enough that the concept likely doesn’t shock anyone. But the suicide helps Clarissa realize that life isn’t to be feared either: the energies, passions, and flames of human interaction are the best things we have in this world, particularly in the face of London’s constantly ticking clocks, which serve as a reminder of the thrilling knowledge that death might strike at any minute. Clarissa’s party is not frivolous. It’s actually the most important thing. Her guests await: “Fear no more the heat of the sun. She must go back to them.”

More here. (Note: The review from last year is a reminder to re-read Mrs. Dalloway yet again this summer. I just did. You should too. Magnificent.)

Ceremonias De La Superviviencia

at the movies    my eye      on the Exit sign
on the aisles    the doorways     the space
between the seat in front of me and my legs
how far could I crawl
before I die?

wednesday   after it happened
I went to a work event at a gay bar     I stood
near the exit when I could   when I couldn’t
I stood near a window   I made sure I could
open and fit through    made sure I could
jump out and land on the roof
of the building next door
just in case
after the event
my coworker was leaving
thought about hugging him     but I don’t
I   waived       asked myself
is this the last time I’m going to see him?

two weeks after the massacre
my partner is getting ready to attend Pride
I am   staying home

I watch him pick out his outfit         I sit
quietly on the couch    when he is dressed
he holds me    I hold him a little longer
ask myself
is this the last time I’m going to see him?
he leaves       I feel as if I should go with him
just in case

Read more »

David Wootton in Lapham’s Quarterly:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.
—The Declaration of Independence

These words, from Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence, are so familiar that it is easy to assume their meaning is obvious. The puzzle lies in the assertion that we have a right to pursue happiness. John Locke, in his Two Treatises of 1690, said we are all created equal and have inalienable rights, including those to life and liberty. But for Locke the third crucial right was the right to property. In Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding, also published in 1690, he wrote about the pursuit of happiness, but it follows from his account there that there can be no right to pursue happiness because we will pursue happiness come what may. The pursuit of happiness is a law of human nature (of what we now call psychology), just as gravity is a law of physics. A right to pursue happiness is no more necessary than a right for water to run downhill.

Jefferson meant, I think, that we have a right to certain preconditions that will allow us to pursue happiness: freedom of speech, so we can speak our minds and learn from others; a career open to talents, so our efforts may be rewarded; freedom of worship, so we may find our way to heaven; and a free market, so we can pursue prosperity. Read this way, Jefferson’s right to the pursuit of happiness is an elaboration of the right to liberty. Liberty means not only freedom from coercion, or freedom under the law—or even the right to participate in politics—it is also a right to live in a free community in which individuals themselves decide how they want to achieve happiness. The “public happiness” to which Jefferson aspired can therefore be attained, since public happiness requires liberty in this expanded sense.

Jefferson was well aware that being free to pursue happiness does not mean that everyone will be happy. And yet we trick ourselves into thinking we know what is needed to be happy: a promotion, a new car, a vacation, a good-looking partner. We believe this even though we know there are plenty of people with good jobs, new cars, vacations, and attractive partners, and many of them are miserable.

More here.