Walking Away From Explosions in Slow Motion

It’s all you can do. The world is always
behind you, the catastrophe of time,
the exchange of air & fire, the wave
of force raising the hair on the back of
your neck, a rivulet of sweat unseen
by all the eyes on your unseeing gaze,
the blank face that says I’m walking away,
I’m getting away with something: all those

opportunities to find your body
framed by boiling galaxies of flame,
untouched by shrapnel, not above it all
but out in front of it, like the future
itself, walking away. Fucking badass.
Fuck no you don’t look back; you can’t look back.
A cinder in your eye might ruin the shot.
A world might suddenly taste of salt.

by Gregory Crosby
from Walking Away From Explosions in Slow Motion
The Operating System, 2018.

Scott Alexander in Slate Star Codex:

Suppose A and B are debating some issue, and B is part of a group especially closely linked to the issue. For example:

1. A plumber and a teacher are debating a proposed pay cut for teachers.
2. A man and a woman are debating abortion.
3. An atheist and a Jew are debating the peace process in Israel.
4. A white person and a black person are debating slavery reparations.
5. A citizen and an undocumented immigrant are debating immigration policy.
6. King Edward and a Jew are debating whether to expel all the Jews from England.
7. You and a KKK Grand Wizard are debating whether the KKK should be banned as a hate group.
8. A scientist and a tobacco company executive are debating whether cigarettes are dangerous.

Who is more biased? A or B?

More here.

Timothy Taylor at Edge:

Polythetic entitation is a way of understanding fuzzy-edged groups of things, the products of human technology. It is easiest to understand by contrast with a biological entity, such the sub-phylum vertebrata. If you want to know whether the cat asleep on your chair is a vertebrate, you check whether it has a backbone. If it does, it is. This is an example of monothetic classification, where a particular attribute—the backbone—is sufficient grounds for making the call and (and this is important) at the same time, a necessary attribute.

Compare that situation with wanting to know whether the piece of furniture the cat is asleep on is actually a chair. That may sound crazy, as you know it is a chair. But you do not know it in the same way as you know that the cat is a vertebrate because—as it turns out—there is no single attribute that is at once sufficient and necessary to define your piece of furniture as a chair. It seems natural to dispute this. Does a chair have four legs, or three, or some other support? Refine the target to four-legged chairs and we find there are four-legged tables—which are not chairs—so possessing four legs could never be a sufficiently exclusive characteristic to define the object in front of you as a chair. There has to be a place to sit on a chair, but a sofa has to have that too, as does a stool.

More here.

Dan Sinykin in Public Books:

Fifty years ago, almost every publisher in the United States was independent. Beginning in the late 1960s, multinational corporations consolidated the industry. By 2007, four out of every five books on bookstore shelves were published by one of six conglomerates: corporate entities that hold businesses from different industries under one governing financial structure. I call this period—from, roughly, RCA’s purchase of Random House at the end of 1965 until the release of the Amazon Kindle and the 2007–8 financial crisis—the conglomerate era.¹

The conglomerate era was full of prophecies about the coming death of literature, or, on the other hand, its continued flourishing. Literature, said the doomsayers, needed some freedom from commerce to survive. Otherwise we’d be left with only cookbooks and celebrity memoirs. Novelists, especially, rattled their swords. They even convinced the US Senate, in 1980, to hold a hearing about breaking up the conglomerates. E. L. Doctorow argued on behalf of PEN that “the concentration into fewer and fewer hands of the production and distribution of literary work is by its nature constricting to free speech and the effective exchange of ideas and the diversity of opinion.” Publishers countered that—either in spite or because of their consolidations—more and more diverse literature was being published than ever.

The terms of the debate have remained remarkably constant. Literature will die or flourish. Meanwhile, under pressure over time, literature transformed. Into what?

More here.

Tear It Down

We find out the heart only by dismantling what
the heart knows. By redefining the morning,
we find a morning that comes just after darkness.
We can break through marriage into marriage.
By insisting on love we spoil it, get beyond
affection and wade mouth-deep into love.
We must unlearn the constellations to see the stars.
But going back toward childhood will not help.
The village is not better than Pittsburgh.
Only Pittsburgh is more than Pittsburgh.
Rome is better than Rome in the same way the sound
of racoon tongues licking the inside walls
of the garbage tub is more than the stir
of them in the muck of the garbage. Love is not
enough. We die and are put into the earth forever.
We should insist while there is still time. We must
eat through the wildness of her sweet body already
in our bed to reach the body within the body.

by Jack Gilbert
from The Great Fires: Poems 1982-1992
Alfred A. Knopf, 2001

Christopher Lebron at The Nation:

Charles Mills’s Black Rights/White Wrongs represents the culmination of more than two decades of work on the philosophy of race and social justice. Mills received his PhD from the University of Toronto in 1985, working with the left-wing philosophers Frank Cunningham and Daniel Goldstick on the concept of ideology in Marx and Engels. In the following years, liberal political philosophy would be strongly challenged. A growing number of feminists argued that liberal normative theorists were engaged in a form of selective historical imagination, erasing everyone but white males from the story of political society’s origins.

Already fluent in Marxist thought and politics, Mills was strongly influenced by these arguments, particularly as they were delivered in Carole Pateman’s The Sexual Contract; and in his first book, The Racial Contract, Mills initiated a searing critique of modern liberal theory. Despite its progressive intonations, he argued, the tradition had consistently obscured the history of racism and white supremacy in liberal societies, thereby turning a blind eye to racial inequality while embracing Enlightenment values without qualification.

more here.

Karen Olsson at The Paris Review:

Trying to explain my work to a non-mathematician, he wrote, would be like trying to explain a symphony to someone who can’t hear. Later he would rely on another metaphor, calling math “art in a hard material.”

Mathematics is an artistic endeavor, his words suggest. Yet Simone was skeptical. What kind of art? What is the material? Even poets have language, but your work seems to rely on sheer abstraction, she wrote her brother.

That math is an art, that one of its signature qualities is its beauty—these are ideas that continue to be articulated by mathematicians, even as non-mathematicians may wonder, as Simone did, what that could possibly mean. I myself become wary when a mathematician or scientist speaks about the beauty of her discipline, since it can seem vague and high-handed, if not wrong.

more here.

Thomas de Monchaux at n+1:

Pei’s stature among architects is hard to convey. However visually entertaining their work, the likely legacies of other American so-called starchitects shrink—some to triviality—beside the decades of modern design that Ieoh Ming Pei produced, from his earliest built work in 1948 to his last project sixty years later. By the time he co-designed the Museum of Islamic Art in Doha in 2008, he was among the last practicing students of a teacher from the Bauhaus. Walter Gropius taught, and later taught beside, Pei at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Gropius had arrived there in 1937. Pei, the scion of a Suzhou banking family who left Shanghai in 1935 for undergraduate study at Penn and MIT, arrived at Harvard in 1942. His classmates included Paul Rudolph and Philip Johnson.

Modernism in design was not conceived as a style but a refutation of the historicist stylistic revivals that had defined the previous four centuries of architecture in the developing West, forts and factories notwithstanding. Early modern buildings valued user experience over signifying appearance, which enabled them to apply new efficiencies in industrial engineering and standardized manufacturing.

more here.

John Schwartz in The New York Times:

Climate change is certainly an urgent challenge. Rising levels of greenhouse gases are raising temperatures worldwide, leading to shifting weather patterns that are only expected to get worse, with increased flooding and heat waves, and drought and wildfiresafflicting millions. The task of reversing that accumulation of greenhouse gases is vast, and progress is painfully slow. The idea of a moon shot for climate has been gaining supporters. Beto O’Rourke and Kirsten Gillibrand use the idea in their presidential campaigns, as did Michael Bloomberg in unveiling his recently announced $500 million Beyond Carbon campaign. In a commencement speech this year at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology he said, “It is time for all of us to accept that climate change is the challenge of our time.” He concluded, “It may be a moon shot — but it’s the only shot we’ve got.”

Does the enduring metaphor fit the task of countering the grinding destructiveness of a warming planet?

Climate presents more complicated issues than getting to the moon did, said John M. Logsdon, historian of the space program and founder of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University. In 1970, Dr. Logsdon wrote a book, “The Decision to Go to the Moon,” that laid out four conditions that made Apollo possible. In the case of the space program, the stimulus was the first human spaceflight of the Russian cosmonaut Yuri A. Gagarin, which filled Americans with dread of losing the space race. In an interview, Dr. Logsdon said it has to be “a singular act that would force action, that you couldn’t ignore.” Other moon shot prerequisites, he said, include leaders in a position to direct the resources necessary to meet the goal on “a warlike basis,” with very deep national pockets — people like President Kennedy, who began the program, and Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, who brought it to fruition. Finally, Dr. Logsdon said, “the objective has to be technically feasible.” Scientists and engineers had told Mr. Kennedy that “there were no technical show stoppers in sending humans to the moon — it would just take a hell of a lot of engineering.”

More here.

Simon Tisdall in The Guardian:

John Bolton, White House national security adviser and notorious Iraq-era hawk, is a man on a mission. Given broad latitude over policy by Donald Trump, he is widely held to be driving the US confrontation with Iran. And in his passionate bid to tame Tehran, Bolton cares little who gets hurt – even if collateral damage includes a close ally such as Britain. So when Bolton heard British Royal Marines had seized an Iranian oil tanker off Gibraltar on America’s Independence Day, his joy was unconfined. “Excellent news: UK has detained the supertanker Grace I laden with Iranian oil bound for Syria in violation of EU sanctions,” he exulted on Twitter. Bolton’s delighted reaction suggested the seizure was a surprise. But accumulating evidence suggests the opposite is true, and that Bolton’s national security team was directly involved in manufacturing the Gibraltar incident. The suspicion is that Conservative politicians, distracted by picking a new prime minister, jockeying for power, and preoccupied with Brexit, stumbled into an American trap.

In short, it seems, Britain was set up.

As a result, Britain has been plunged into the middle of an international crisis it is ill-prepared to deal with. The timing could hardly be worse. An untested prime minister, presumably Boris Johnson, will enter Downing Street this week. Britain is on the brink of a disorderly exit from the EU, alienating its closest European partners. And its relationship with Trump’s America is uniquely strained. Much of this angst could have been avoided. Britain opposed Trump’s decision to quit the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran, the trigger for today’s crisis. It has watched with alarm as the Trump-Bolton policy of “maximum pressure”, involving punitive sanctions and an oil embargo, has radicalised the most moderate Iranians.

More here.

Troy Jollimore in the New York Times:

“America’s epic,” the poet Campbell McGrath writes, “is the odyssey of appetite.” It’s a good line, both clever and seductive, though in the wrong hands it’s the sort of thing that could be merely reductive. But McGrath knows the ins and outs of appetite as deeply, and as thoroughly, as he knows the highways and byways of America. He has spent decades exploring both. “Nouns & Verbs: New and Selected Poems” is a rich and invigorating sampling of the poetic results of these explorations.

America is McGrath’s primary subject, as it was Walt Whitman’s. (There are few poets today who seem to have inherited such a healthy measure of the Whitmanic spirit.) Like Whitman, like America, McGrath ranges in his work from the beautiful to the brash, from the expansive to the intimate. It encompasses sprawling vistas, urban conflagrations and tiny, tender dioramas. Because he loves driving cross-country, it is, too, a poetry of motels, small towns, remote outposts and roadside attractions.

More here.

Philip Pilkington in Inference Review:

GENERAL EQUILIBRIUM THEORY, or GET, is the metatheory on which all of mainstream economics rests; it remains very abstract, and it has been carefully studied by only a small number of economists. Invented by the French economist Leon Walras in 1899, GET was neglected for half a century as economists dealt with the intensifying business cycle, the emergence of central banks, and the Great Depression. The economists who began to take notice of it in the 1950s tended to be applied mathematicians, or, at least, economists with strongly analytical gifts.¹ In the 1960s, a debate arose between John Maynard Keynes’s students at Cambridge University and mathematical economists at MIT. Known as the Cambridge capital controversies, the debate called into question the presumption that aggregation functions defined over microeconomic models could coherently yield a macroeconomic model of the economy.²

Controversy and critique led economists to micro-founded models in which micro and macroeconomic theories were, at least, presumptively consistent. The standard micro-founded economic model, used by many central banks and presented to graduate students, is the dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model.

More here.

Jay Tolson in The Hedgehog Review:

Who is secular man, and why is he so unhappy?

Those are the questions animating The Unnamable Present, a short but wide-ranging book on the puzzles of late modernity and the ninth volume of Roberto Calasso’s extended commentaries on, among many other related topics, the mythical-religious wellsprings of human civilizations. Chairman of Italy’s distinguished literary house Adelphi Edizione, Calasso is too good a historian to say that Homo saecularis emerged only in recent centuries. The lineaments of the type have existed since Paleolithic times, present as what Calasso calls a “perpetual shadow.” The shadow has been cast by the figure dominating most of the human record, Homo religiosus, defined by the sociologist Mircea Eliade as one who “always believes there is an absolute reality, the sacred, which transcends this world but manifests itself in the world, thereby sanctifying it and making it real.”

What has changed dramatically in recent centuries, Calasso writes, is that “the shadow has been transformed into normal man, who finds himself a solitary, hapless protagonist at the center of the stage.” Unlike the many varieties of Homo religiosus—Calasso mentions Vedic man, born owing four debts, above all those to the Hindu gods—Homo saecularis “owes nothing to anyone,” stands alone, free to do what he wishes “so long as it is lawful.”

More here.

Steven Pinker at his own website:

Artificial intelligence is an existence proof of one of the great ideas in human history: that the abstract realm of knowledge, reason, and purpose does not consist of an élan vital or immaterial soul or miraculous powers of neural tissue. Rather, it can be linked to the physical realm of animals and machines via the concepts of information, computation, and control. Knowledge can be explained as patterns in matter or energy that stand in systematic relations with states of the world, with mathematical and logical truths, and with one another. Reasoning can be explained as transformations of that knowledge by physical operations that are designed to preserve those relations. Purpose can be explained as the control of operations to effect changes in the world, guided by discrepancies between its current state and a goal state. Naturally evolved brains are just the most familiar systems that achieve intelligence through information, computation, and control. Humanly designed systems that achieve intelligence vindicate the notion that information processing is sufficient to explain it—the notion that the late Jerry Fodor dubbed the computational theory of mind.

More here.

Temma Ehrenfeld in AlterNet:

‘The pursuit of Happiness’ is a famous phrase in a famous document, the United States Declaration of Independence (1776). But few know that its author was inspired by an ancient Greek philosopher, Epicurus. Thomas Jefferson considered himself an Epicurean. He probably found the phrase in John Locke, who, like Thomas Hobbes, David Hume and Adam Smith, had also been influenced by Epicurus. Nowadays, educated English-speaking urbanites might call you an epicure if you complain to a waiter about over-salted soup, and stoical if you don’t. In the popular mind, an epicure fine-tunes pleasure, consuming beautifully, while a stoic lives a life of virtue, pleasure sublimated for good. But this doesn’t do justice to Epicurus, who came closest of all the ancient philosophers to understanding the challenges of modern secular life.

…Epicureans did focus on seeking pleasure – but they did so much more. They talked as much about reducing pain – and even more about being rational. They were interested in intelligent living, an idea that has evolved in our day to mean knowledgeable consumption. But equating knowing what will make you happiest with knowing the best wine means Epicurus is misunderstood. The rationality he wedded to democracy relied on science.

…Its principles read as astonishingly modern, down to the physics. In six books, Lucretius states that everything is made of invisible particles, space and time are infinite, nature is an endless experiment, human society began as a battle to survive, there is no afterlife, religions are cruel delusions, and the universe has no clear purpose. The world is material – with a smidgen of free will. How should we live? Rationally, by dropping illusion. False ideas largely make us unhappy. If we minimise the pain they cause, we maximise our pleasure.

More here.

Knvul Sheikh in The New York Times:

Lodestone, a naturally-occurring iron oxide, was the first persistently magnetic material known to humans. The Han Chinese used it for divining boards 2,200 years ago; ancient Greeks puzzled over why iron was attracted to it; and, Arab merchants placed it in bowls of water to watch the magnet point the way toMecca. In modern times, scientists have used magnets to read and record data on hard drives and form detailed images of bones, cells and even atoms. Throughout this history, one thing has remained constant: Our magnets have been made from solid materials. But what if scientists could make magnetic devices out of liquids? In a study published Thursday in Science, researchers managed to do exactly that. “We’ve made a new material that has all the characteristics of an ordinary magnet, but we can change its shape, and conform it to different applications because it is a liquid,” said Thomas Russell, a polymer scientist at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and the study’s lead author. “It’s very unique.”

Using a special 3D printer, Dr. Russell and his colleagues at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory injected iron oxide nanoparticles into millimeter-scale droplets of toluene, a colorless liquid that does not dissolve in water. The team also added a soap-like material to the droplets, and then suspended them in water. The soap-like material caused the iron oxide nanoparticles to crowd together on the surface of the droplets and form a semisolidshell. “The particles get stuck in place, like a traffic jam at 5 o’clock,” Dr. Russell said. Next, the scientists placed the droplets on a stirring plate with a spinning bar magnet, and observed something extraordinary: The solid magnet caused the positive and negative poles of the liquid magnets to follow the external magnetic field, making the droplets dance on the plate. When the solid magnet was removed, the droplets remained magnetized.

The motion of liquid droplets can also be guided with external magnets. Thus employed, liquid magnets could be useful for delivering drugs to specific locations in a person’s body, and for creating “soft” robots that can move, change shape or grab things.

More here.