Maggie Fergusson in MIL:

Tom remembers the day he decided he wanted to be a theoretical astrophysicist. He was deep into research about black holes, and had amassed a box of papers on his theories. In one he speculated about the relationship between black holes and white holes, hypothetical celestial objects that emit colossal amounts of energy. Black holes, he thought, must be linked across space-time with white holes. “I put them together and I thought, oh wow, that works! That’s when I knew I wanted to do this as a job.” Tom didn’t know enough maths to prove his theory, but he had time to learn. He was only five. Tom is now 11. At home, his favourite way to relax is to devise maths exam papers complete with marking sheets. Last year for Christmas he asked his parents for the £125 registration fee to sit maths GCSE, an exam most children in Britain take at 16. He is currently working towards his maths A-level. Tom is an only child, and at first Chrissie, his mother, thought his love of numbers was normal. Gradually she realised it wasn’t. She would take him to lectures about dark matter at the Royal Observatory in London and notice that there were no other children there. His teacher reported that instead of playing outside with other kids at breaks, he wanted to stay indoors and do sums.

One day his parents took him to Milton Keynes to have his intelligence assessed by an organisation called Potential Plus, formerly the National Association for Gifted Children. “We told him it was a day of puzzles,” Chrissie says. “It was my dream world,” Tom says. “Half a day of tests!” His mother waited while he applied his mind to solving problems. When they were shown the results, Tom’s intelligence put him in the top 0.1% in Britain. Precocious children are often dismissed as the product of pushy, middle-class parents. Nurture and environment clearly do play an important role in any child’s intellectual development. Talk to your child about politics over the dinner table and he is likely to develop confident opinions about the way the world should be run. Suggest that your toddler think of slices of cake in terms of angles and she may well display an early aptitude for mathematics. Practice can make perfect. The child with a gift for playing the piano who practises five hours a day is more likely to end up performing at Carnegie Hall than the equally gifted one who plays for just 20 minutes a week.

More here.

Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker:

The work of the AgeLab is shaped by a paradox. Having been established to engineer and promote new products and services specially designed for the expanding market of the aged, the AgeLab swiftly discovered that engineering and promoting new products and services specially designed for the expanding market of the aged is a good way of going out of business. Old people will not buy anything that reminds them that they are old. They are a market that cannot be marketed to. In effect, to accept help in getting out of the suit is to accept that we’re in the suit for life. We would rather suffer because we’re old than accept that we’re old and suffer less.

This paradox is, well, old. Heinz, back in the nineteen-fifties, tried marketing a line of “Senior Foods” that was, essentially, baby food for old people. It not only failed spectacularly but, as Coughlin puts it, poisoned an entire category. The most perverse of these failures is perhaps that of the pers, or personal-emergency-response system, a category of device—best known for the hysterically toned television ad in which an elderly woman calls out, “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up!”—designed as a neck pendant that summons emergency services when pressed. It is simple and effective. “The problem is that no one wants one,” Coughlin says. “The entire penetration in the U.S. of the sixty-five-plus market is less than four per cent. And a German study showed that, when subscribers fell and remained on the floor for longer than five minutes, they failed to use their devices to summon help eighty-three per cent of the time.” In other words, many older people would sooner thrash on the floor in distress than press a button—one that may summon assistance but whose real impact is to admit, I am old.

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Arundhati Roy in The Guardian:

I am truly honored to have been invited by PEN America to deliver this year’s Arthur Miller Freedom to Write Lecture. What better time than this to think together about a place for literature, at this moment when an era that we think we understand – at least vaguely, if not well – is coming to a close.

As the ice caps melt, as oceans heat up, and water tables plunge, as we rip through the delicate web of interdependence that sustains life on earth, as our formidable intelligence leads us to breach the boundaries between humans and machines, and our even more formidable hubris undermines our ability to connect the survival of our planet to our survival as a species, as we replace art with algorithms and stare into a future in which most human beings may not be needed to participate in (or be remunerated for) economic activity – at just such a time we have the steady hands of white supremacists in the White House, new imperialists in China, neo-Nazis once again massing on the streets of Europe, Hindu nationalists in India, and a host of butcher-princes and lesser dictators in other countries to guide us into the Unknown.

While many of us dreamt that “Another world is possible”, these folks were dreaming that too. And it is their dream – our nightmare – that is perilously close to being realized.

More here.

Heather Murphy in the New York Times:

The scent of lily of the valley cannot be easily bottled. For decades companies that make soap, lotions and perfumes have relied on a chemical called bourgeonal to imbue their products with the sweet smell of the little white flowers. A tiny drop can be extraordinarily intense.

If you can smell it at all, that is. For a small percentage of people, it fails to register as anything.

Similarly, the earthy compound 2-ethylfenchol, present in beets, is so powerful for some people that a small chunk of the root vegetable smells like a heap of dirt. For others, that same compound is as undetectable as the scent of bottled water.

These — and dozens of other differences in scent perception — are detailed in a new study, published this week in the journal PNAS.

More here.

Narges Bajoghli in Foreign Policy:

What Americans don’t understand is that the groups that we support in the region are not our mercenaries,” Ali, a high-ranking member of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), said when I recently asked him about one of the stated goals of the Trump administration’s sanctions against Iran: to curtail the country’s ability to financially support militias in the region. He continued, “The Americans think everything is about money. They think we buy loyalty in the region, because that’s how they buy loyalty.”

In the decade that I did research with cultural producers in Iran’s preeminent military force, the IRGC, I saw a steady flow of filmmakers loyal to Hezbollah and Iraqi Shiite and Kurdish groups travel through regime cultural centers in Tehran. (They all agreed to speak with me on the condition of anonymity. The first names used here are pseudonyms.) Mehdi, an Iranian pro-regime filmmaker, had lived in Lebanon to make films with Hezbollah media producers. When they visited him in Tehran, they spoke fluent Persian and navigated the city with familiar ease. Iraqi filmmakers would regularly come to spend time in Tehran at editing studios tied to the paramilitary Basij organization.

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Doreen Carvajal at Tablet:

“La Petite Irène” was plundered from the Chambord castle on orders of Goering, an obsessive collector who was not a fan of Renoir because Nazis considered his impressionist style degenerate. But he still used the valuable art for trading: Goering swapped the portrait in 1942 for a Florentine Tondo with a Paris gallery dealer who was one of his chief art procurers. Some historians contend that the painting was then bought by another Swiss gallery owner who held it along with others for Bührle because of the growing risks of buying plundered art.

After the war, the portrait ended up in a 1945 Munich collection point for spoils of war and then at a 1946 exhibition of plundered masterpieces at l’Orangerie in Paris. It was there that Irène Cahen d’Anvers spotted the tender version of herself, a work that she hunted for after the war, calling it a delightful memory of her youth. She had survived the occupation, cloistered in her Parisian apartment.

more here.

James Carroll at The Atlantic:

The body knows when it’s in love, and the body knows when it’s ensnared in something beyond endurance. My body knew last summer, as the revelations in Ireland provoked a visceral collapse of faith.

Pope Francis, challenged by the disgrace of his close ally, the now-defrocked Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, of Washington; by accusations, like Viganò’s, of his own complicity in the cover-up of sexual abuse; and by the moral wreckage of the Church around the world, responded with silence, denial, and a business-as-usual summoning of crimson-robed men to Rome.

Events in subsequent months only magnified the scale of the Church’s failure. With maddening equilibrium, Pope Francis acknowledged, in response to a reporter’s question early this year, that the rape of nuns by priests and bishops remains a mostly unaddressed Catholic problem. In Africa, once AIDS became common, priests began coercing nuns into becoming sexual servants, because, as virgins, they would likely not carry the HIV virus. It was reportedly common for such priests to sponsor abortions when the nuns became pregnant. “It’s true,” Francis said calmly. “There are priests and bishops who have done that.”

more here.

Rosemary Hill at the LRB:

The mood of the 1850s and 1860s was vigorous. Muscularity, ‘reality’ and ‘go’ were the admired qualities in art, in science and in life. Problems were there to be solved. Railway companies driving cuttings through the landscape split open dramatic rock strata. Geology and fossil-hunting were crazes, seaside holidaymakers collected shells and fished in rock pools. The world was immanent with new realms of knowledge, and as the meaning of ‘evolution’ shifted towards what was soon called Darwinism, the older meaning still haunted it. From his home in Biddulph Grange in Staffordshire, James Bateman corresponded with Darwin in the course of constructing his Geological Gallery, which opened to the public in 1862. In it the phases of biblical creation were illustrated with geological specimens and fossils in bays labelled ‘Day One’, ‘Day Two’ etc. Neither Bateman nor many of his contemporaries believed in the literal truth of Genesis, but this metaphorical account of ‘development’ as the slow unfolding of God’s creation could hold together science and religion. The churches of the High Victorian years glowed and bristled with inset marble and polished minerals.

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Daily Kos in AlterNet:

One of the most influential thinkers of all time, the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle possessed a wide-ranging and insatiable curiosity. Most of his philosophy is what we would now call science: he wrote on biology, astronomy, zoology, physics, and psychology, to name just a few subjects. He also made important contributions to ethics and political theory. Unfortunately, the only works by Aristotle that have survived appear to be his lecture notes. The 17th-century English philosopher John Locke was a pioneering political thinker. He had a major influence on the U.S. Founding Fathers and provided the philosophical justification for the American Revolution.

According to Aristotle, the goal of human life is eudaimonia. The Greek word eudaimonia is often translated as “happiness,” but a better translation might be “success”—not success at a particular activity but success at life. For Aristotle, eudaimonia means putting intellectual and moral excellence into action over a lifetime. For Aristotle, the success of a person’s friends, family, and fellow-citizens is part of the person’s success. I don’t just mean that a person needs help from others to be successful. We might say that Aristotle thinks of society as a team. Just as a person can win at baseball only by winning along with their baseball team, so a person can win at life only by winning along with their society. In fact, in the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle says that even after a person has died, the success or failure of their friends and family continues to affect how successful their life was (though Aristotle adds that this effect will not be enough to make a successful person unsuccessful).

More here.

George Musser in Nautilus:

It’s not just in politics where otherwise smart people consistently talk past one another. People debating whether humans have free will also have this tendency. Neuroscientist and free-will skeptic Sam Harris has dueled philosopher and free-will defender Daniel Dennett for years and once invited him onto his podcast with the express purpose of finally having a meeting of minds. Whoosh! They flew right past each other yet again. Christian List, a philosopher at the London School of Economics who specializes in how humans make decisions, has a new book, Why Free Will Is Real, that tries to bridge the gap. List is one of a youngish generation of thinkers, such as cosmologist Sean Carroll and philosopher Jenann Ismael, who dissolve the old dichotomies on free will and think that a nuanced reading of physics poses no contradiction for it.

List accepts the skeptics’ definition of free will as a genuine openness to our decisions, and he agrees this seems to be at odds with the clockwork universe of fundamental physics and neurobiology. But he argues that fundamental physics and neurobiology are only part of the story of human behavior. You may be a big bunch of atoms governed by the mechanical laws, but you are not just any bunch of atoms. You are an intricately structured bunch of atoms, and your behavior depends not just on the laws that govern the individual atoms but on the way those atoms are assembled. At a higher level of description, your decisions can be truly open. When you walk into a store and choose between Android and Apple, the outcome is not preordained. It really is on you.

Skeptics miss this point, List argues, because they rely on loose intuitions about causation. They look for the causes of our actions in the basic laws of physics, yet the concept of cause does not even exist at that level, according to the broader theory of causation developed by computer scientist Judea Pearl and others. Causation is a higher-level concept. This theory is fully compatible with the view that humans and other agents are causal forces in the world. List’s book may not settle the debate—what could, after thousands of years?—but it will at least force skeptics to get more sophisticated in their own reasoning.

More here.

Siena, age 3 months

I carried my baby down the dark
road between the moon
and pond. She cried as if she wanted
some better balance
of light and water.
………………………… I tried
to sing her what quiet
I could from those places.
But she cried
as if she needed calm
from far below me,
below the search for balance,
……………………………… ……….deep
into rock, down where centers
meet, where I could no more
extract it than she would know
if she saw it. As if she knew
I could grasp at the loss
as ballast against falling
or floating any sudden way.
………………………………….…. Or
that I could hold her close
against both our uneven places
and sway and sway and sway and sway

Mike Chrisman
from 5 Minute Pieces
Arms Library Reading Series
Shelburne Falls, MA, 1998

Sylvia Gindick at Bookforum:

In Lucy Ives’s second novel, Loudermilk, a charismatic dumbass scams his way into a prestigious MFA poetry program by submitting the work of his antisocial companion. The real writer, who hates the sound of his own voice, follows the oversexed, symmetrically featured dumbass to school and continues to write for him. It’s a fun setup, but the book aims for more than just comedy. Ives, who once described herself as “the author of some kind of thinking about writing,” examines the conditions that produce authors and their work while never losing a sense of wonder at the sheer mystery of the written word.

Through canny third-person narration, Ives cycles through the perspectives of five characters as the book progresses: Harry, the “real poet” (whose voice tends to break into an “unintelligible croak”); Loudermilk, the charming but “hollow hero” (whose speech is littered with creative iterations of “dude,” “dick,” and “fuck”); Clare, the brooding early-success who fears she can no longer write (“What I’ve lost is so easy to name as to make it impossible to speak about.”); Anton, the pompous try-hard who always thinks he’s the best writer in the room (“heir apparent to the poem-based sector of the American humanities multiverse”); and Lizzie, the precocious daughter of poetry professors (“I’m just curious, so sue me!”).

more here.

Henry Farrell and Bruce Schneier in the Boston Review:

The Internet was going to set us all free. At least, that is what U.S. policy makers, pundits, and scholars believed in the 2000s. The Internet would undermine authoritarian rulers by reducing the government’s stranglehold on debate, helping oppressed people realize how much they all hated their government, and simply making it easier and cheaper to organize protests.

Today, we live in darker times. Authoritarians are using these same technologies to bolster their rule. Even worse, the Internet seems to be undermining democracy by allowing targeted disinformation, turning public debate into a petri dish for bots and propagandists, and spreading general despair. A new consensus is emerging that democracy is less a resilient political system than a free-fire zone in a broader information war.

This despairing, technologically determinist response is premature. The Arab Spring wasn’t the twilight of dictatorship, yes, but today isn’t the twilight of democracy, either. Still, we agree that to the extent democracy has revealed systemic weaknesses, we should be working overtime to repair them.

More here.

Eric Bulson at the TLS:

In May 1975, Michel Foucault watched Venus rise over Zabriskie Point while Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Gesang der Jünglinge (Song of the Youths) blared from the speakers of a nearby tape recorder. Just a few hours earlier he had ingested LSD for the first time and was in the process of undergoing what he saw as “one of the most important experiences” of his life. And he wasn’t alone. Two newly acquired companions had brought Foucault to Death Valley for this carefully choreographed trip complete with a soundtrack, some marijuana to jumpstart the effects, and cold drinks to combat the dry mouth. It was all spurred on by the hope that Foucault’s visit to “the Valley of Death”, as he called it, would elicit “gnomic utterances of such power that he would unleash a veritable revolution in consciousness”.

For decades, the details of this trip have remained sketchy. The most extensive account appeared in James Miller’s 1993 biography, The Passion of Michel Foucault, but anyone following the footnotes would have realized that the specifics, the ones above included, were based almost entirely on the documentary evidence of a self-proclaimed disciple, Simeon Wade.

more here.

Ian Sample in The Guardian:

Scientists have created the world’s first living organism that has a fully synthetic and radically altered DNA code.

The lab-made microbe, a strain of bacteria that is normally found in soil and the human gut, is similar to its natural cousins but survives on a smaller set of genetic instructions.

The bug’s existence proves life can exist with a restricted genetic code and paves the way for organisms whose biological machinery is commandeered to make drugs and useful materials, or to add new features such as virus resistance.

More here.

Ben Ehrenreich in Topic:

Ashraf had been gone for more than a decade when he and Fat’hiya first heard about a fertility clinic in Ramallah that had begun helping the wives of Palestinian prisoners become pregnant with sperm smuggled out of Israeli jails. (Israeli prisoners are permitted conjugal visits; Palestinians are not.) The couple discussed it, Fat’hiya says, but neither of them was convinced it was a good idea.

The next time she visited Ashraf, she says with a smile, “he surprised me.” Prisoners are allowed to buy gifts of food for their visitors. Ashraf handed her a bag of cookies. “He had it there,” already prepared, she said. “He said, ‘Do it.’”

Fat’hiya stands, jogs suddenly from the room, and comes back with the wrapper from a pack of chocolate hazelnut Quadratini wafers, the very pack she smuggled out of the prison that day. Her son, Amir, who is now five, wide-eyed and serious, squirms on the sofa beside her. “That’s why he’s so sweet,” she says, pulling the boy to her lap.

More here.

Maya Jasanoff at the NYRB:

To understand this Calcutta—a city in decline—it’s helpful to start from a different beginning. In her innovative new book, Empire and Ecology in the Bengal Delta, Debjani Bhattacharyya, a professor of history at Drexel University, describes how Bengalis had their own story about Calcutta’s origins. “Legend has it that the city was born when the ocean started churning, and a tortoise,” pressed between the mountains and the force of Ananta, the infinite, “gasped out a deep breath.” Its breath made the Bengal Delta, a vast 40,000-square-mile area where the Ganges and Brahmaputra rivers seep into the Bay of Bengal. This legend, like the legend of Job Charnock, also carries an element of truth: Calcutta rests on shifting ground. It should be no surprise that its fortunes have shifted too.

Bengalis have many words for the kinds of terrain that emerge and disappear between the river’s shifting channels, including char, for the new sedimentary deposits turned up by every monsoon; chechra bhanga, for the silt that emerges when the floodwaters recede; and chapa bhanga, for large chunks of land that the water breaks off and carries away.

more here.

Beauty

Art, poetry
Strive for beauty

To bring alive
The henna on a hand
The anklet on a foot
To make immortal
A beloved’s look
A lover’s torment

This is my canvas
What I do best
With color and line
With rhythm and rhyme

Wait, you say
There are worlds
Beyond henna and anklet
Beyond lovers and beloveds
Pestilence, war, death, deprivation
Inequality, injustice, oppression, starvation
Will you not speak
of such worlds?

I hesitate
Afraid
With color and line
With rhythm and rhyme
To render them so beautiful
That looking over your shoulder
You might say
Guernica
Ah, what a lovely painting
And leaving
Pass me an Iliad
To enjoy on the way

by Anjum Altaf
from Transgressions, Poems inspired by Faiz Ahmen Faiz
LG Publishers, 2019