by Ali Minai

Given where we find ourselves in this late November of 2020, it is hard to think of a book more relevant or timely than The Hype Machine by Sinan Aral. The author is the David Austin Professor of Management and Professor of Information Technology and Marketing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. As one of the world’s foremost experts on social media and its effects, Prof. Aral is the perfect person to look at how this phenomenon has changed the world and the human experience. This is what he sets out to do in his new book, The Hype Machine, published under the Currency Imprint of Random House this September, and with considerable success.

The book provides an excellent overview of where things stand with social media, its promise and its peril. For anyone looking for a single, accessibly non-technical source of information and insight on these important issues, this book is essential reading. The book is very well-organized, and the logical flow – both across and within chapters – is remarkably smooth. Overall, the book is an easy read that informs and educates the reader without getting mired in technical jargon – no mean feat for a book about a technical field that is rife with jargon. And, while a large proportion of the book simply communicates information on where things stand and how different social media platforms are shaping the lives of their users, Prof. Aral does not shy away from building a useful abstract framework in which to place all this, and to address the complex issues raised as a result. Read more »

Dylan Kwait. Surfers by Plum Island, October 2020.

Drone photograph.

With permission … thanks Dylan!

by Claire Chambers

This has been a terrible year with almost no redeeming features. I have written elsewhere about Covid-19’s hardships, both personal and political. Today, with a vaccine on the horizon and Trump defeated, I want to find some other crumbs of comfort that, as with Hansel and Gretel, might take us somewhere.

I am privileged to live with my husband Rob and two sons in our own house with a garden, and to hold down a lecturing job which is pretty secure. Rob is even more financially stable in his career, working as he does in a growth industry this pestilent year: he’s a family doctor.

But of course being a GP has brought its own share of unexpected stresses recently. In March when the UK government spectacularly failed to get PPE for medical professionals and disaster capitalists were circling, Rob bought some pyjamas from Marks and Spencer for turning into improvised surgical scrubs. He even fashioned his own visor using a piece of sponge, some plexiglass, and a coat hanger. Although he never had to use it, I won’t forget that time of helpless, abandoned terror.

Nigerian-American author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie posted a microblog to Instagram early into this crisis about her fears around the pandemic. When I read these terse words, I nodded vigorously:

My husband is a doctor and each morning when he leaves for work, I worry. My throat itches and I worry. On Facetime I watch my elderly parents. I admonish them gently: Don’t let people come to the house. Don’t read the rubbish news on WhatsApp.

Out of the two vulnerable parents Adichie was worrying about in this essay from April, it is poignant to realize that her father was to die just two months later. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Adele A Wilby

Recent protests in the US by Trump supporters since the election of Joe Biden, highlight just how political ideologies have the potential to tear seemingly ‘stable’ societies apart. A political divide however cannot always be seen as a clear-cut contradiction between the right and the left, as, for example, the way Trump supporters might assert; Biden, and Democrats more broadly, could hardly be seen to represent the left. Likewise, the right has it shades of commitment to conservatism. However, Trump’s 70 million supporters represent a congealing of far-right politics in America identifiable by the policies articulated by Trump that they endorse: anti- immigration, racism, a resurgent nationalism. While there is little doubt that such policies have been magical music to the ears of many right wingers,  for others Trump and the Republican Party do not go far enough, and it is these extreme right-wing groups that are the subject of Talia Lavin’s book Culture Warlords: My Journey into the Dark Web of White Supremacists.

Lavin opens her book with an explicit acknowledgement of her politics. She admits that she is ‘to the left of Medicare for All’. Thus, there is no pretence of ‘objectivity’ in the subject of her research and analysis: the book is an account of her one year internet engagement with a ‘sliver of a movement’ of the right-wing spectrum. Her research though adds up to a shocking yet thought provoking first-hand account of the thinking that underpins the deep hate and the almost godlike worship of violence that white supremacists profess. Read more »

A lamp lighting a storefront in Vahrn, South Tyrol, in November of 2020. And sky.

by David Kordahl

When I was seventeen years old, I took my first college science course, a summer class in astronomy for non-majors. The professor narrated his wild claims in an amused deadpan, calmly showing us how to reconstruct the life cycle of stars, and how to estimate the age of the universe. This course was at the University of Iowa, and I imagine that the professor was accustomed to intermittent resistance from students like me, whose rural, religious upbringing led them—led me—to challenge his claims. Yet I often found myself at a loss. The professor used a soft sell, and his claims seemed somewhere beyond the realm of mere politics or belief. Sure, I could spot a few gaps in his vision (he batted away my psychoanalytic interpretation of the Big Bang by saying he had never heard of Freud), but I envied him. I wished that my own positions were so easy to defend.

Seventeen years later, I’m now in the professor’s position, defending physics to doubting undergraduates. My views now are mostly easy to defend. Yet as someone who never progressed much beyond an undergrad knowledge of astronomy (I took one graduate cosmology course and left it at that), I’ll admit that some of the things that bothered me back then still bother me today. Some of the grandest claims in physics are based almost solely on astrophysical evidence, including the assertion that our standard physics accounts for less than 5% of what’s really there, with the other 95+% of mass-energy in the woolly categories of “dark energy” and “dark matter.” Such views are mainstream enough now to invite few scientific naysayers. Read more »

by Tim Sommers

Cosmology is a young science. Maybe the youngest. Some people say it started in the 1920’s when these little glowing clouds visible at certain points in the sky were found, by better and better telescopes, to be composed of billions and billions of stars, just like our own galaxy – the Milky Way – and it was then discovered that no matter what direction you looked they were all rushing away from us. More than one cosmologist has wondered if these galaxies know something that you and I don’t.

On the other hand, maybe, cosmology is the oldest science – if looking up at the stars counts. Anyway, well before the discovery of other galaxies we knew that the universe was very old and very large, but, boy, we had no idea.

Other people say cosmology began when Einstein’s General Relativity gave us some of the math we needed to talk about the universe as a whole for the first time and began to raise questions about its shape.

For me, I say, cosmology didn’t really start until the 1960s when satellites designed to detect tiny amounts of microwave radiation mapped what we now call the “cosmic microwave background radiation”. Here’s the thing that we had missed for so long, the thing that is so hard to believe that we all take for granted now – hardly worth talking about. If the galaxies are all very far apart and getting further apart all the time, doesn’t it follow that there was a time when they were all very close together? Doesn’t it follow, in fact, as most likely, that there was a starting point? Isn’t this, for the first time in the history of humanity, empirical evidence that the universe had a beginning? And if there was such a beginning would it make a sound even if no one was around to hear it? The answer is, yes, yes, and it would make a sound, it does. If you have an old radio or tv, detune it or stop between stations and hear the static, the fuzz. That’s it. That’s the sound of the cosmic microwave background radiation. It’s been there since the beginning of time.

But if the universe has a beginning, will it have an end? And how will it end? Read more »

by Pranab Bardhan

Many decades back when I was teaching at MIT, a senior colleague of mine, Paul Rosenstein-Rodan, a famous development economist, asked me at the beginning of our many long conversations what my politics was like. I said “Left of center, though many Americans may consider it too far left while several of my Marxist friends in India do not consider it left enough”. As someone from ‘old Europe’ he understood, and immediately put his hand on his heart and said “My heart too is located slightly left of center”. A 2015 study by psychologist Jose Duarte and his co-authors found that 58 to 66 per cent of social scientists in the US are ‘liberal’ (an American word, which unlike in Europe or India, may often mean ‘left of center’), and only 5 to 8 per cent are conservative. If anything, social scientists in the rest of the world are on average probably somewhat to the left of their American counterparts. If that is the case, for the world in general social democracy is likely to be an important, though not always decisive, ingredient of their ideology. In European politics and intellectual circles there was a time when social democrats were considered the main enemy of the communists, at least in their rivalry to get the attention of working classes, but now with the fading away of old-style communists, social democrats have a larger tent, which includes some socialists of yesteryear as well as liberals, besieged as they both now are by right-wing populists.

In an earlier column on “Prospects of Social Democracy in a Post-Pandemic World” I have discussed how in general the actual or potential strength of social democratic parties may change with the constraints and opportunities of such a world. In this article I go beyond the modalities of actually functioning political parties to a somewhat deeper analysis of the social democratic idea as a balance between some conflicting but also potentially complementary social values, and how this balance may be shifting in our complex world and difficult time, and how that influences the ideological positions of social scientists.

Let us go beyond the over-simple and amorphous left-right distinction (historically originating in particular ways of seating in the French National Assembly) which over the years has become quite misleading, particularly in failing to capture the multi-dimensionality of ideological positions. Let us instead start with the old-style foundational values of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity. The old simple categorization used to be that those who particularly emphasize the primacy of liberty as a social value were called liberals; socialists used to be associated with belief in the primacy of equality or ‘social justice’; and belief in the primacy of fraternity or community solidarity lent to the description of one’s being a communitarian. But things get complicated as there are multiple layers in that trinity of social values, and people, particularly social scientists, in their belief system usually mix the different ingredients of all the three in markedly varying proportions to concoct a smorgasbord that passes for their ideology. Read more »

by Ashutosh Jogalekar

I shamelessly borrow the title of this essay from my mentor and friend Freeman Dyson’s marvelous talk on birds and frogs in mathematics. Birds are thinkers who look at the big picture and survey the landscape from a great height. Frogs are thinkers who love playing around in the mud of specific problems, delighting in finding gems and then polishing them so that they become part of the superstructure that birds survey. Einstein was a bird, Hubble was a frog. Science needs both birds and frogs for its progress, but there are cases in which one kind of creature is more important than another.

Most of the great thinkers in physics of ancient times were birds. They went by the name of natural philosophers. The fact that they were birds speaks both to the raw state of scientific knowledge at that time and the attitude that these thinkers had toward what we call science, an attitude that we should resurrect. Aristotle, Plato, Newton and Kepler saw science as a seamless part of a worldview that included religion. Many of them were alchemists and astrologers. Unlike many scientists today, they saw no conflict between science and mysticism and believed both to be created by God for man to study. Newton was a supreme bird, seeing Nature as a book written by God, a puzzle whose solutions had room for both calculus and alchemy, both gravitation and an Arian rejection of the Holy Trinity. Newton kept his Arian convictions secret for fear of persecution, but there is no doubt in his own mind that they were as legitimate as his scientific inquiries. At the beginning of the third volume of his famous Principia, Newton said, “It remains that, from the same principles, I now demonstrate the system of the world”, leaving no doubt either about his ambition or his grand birdlike worldview.

Even before Newton, Francis Bacon who can rightly be called the father of the modern scientific method of fact-finding and theorizing was a superb frog. Bacon rejected the Aristotelian theorizing that had characterized much of the history of science before him and said, “All depends on keeping the eye fixed upon the facts of Nature, for God forbid that we may give out a dream of our own imagination for a pattern of the world.” Read more »

Everything passes and everything changes,
just do what you think you should do
…………………………………….… —Bob Dylan

Flux You, Heraclitus!

…. —for Brian

Another lifelong friend has died
Sunday
part of me again has vanished too

We were young together building things, partners,
carpenters in sync we drove spikes through joists
hammering steel to steel. You once exclaimed,
laughing when a shifty wind came up
snatching a sheet of ply from grips,
 “Flux you, Heraclitus!”
………………………..……… and here
that philosopher’s hard truth is word
slipping through my lips

Now I want to run my car
down the narrow sloped cleft of Main again,
windows open wide, slow roll in low
coasting as a hawk on thermals might,
to hear it’s muffler throb, hear its stutter
bouncing off stone façades
and plate glass storefronts,
shattering silence in the dark,
racket-making louder than
mere mutter

Jim Culleny
11/16/20

by Paul Braterman

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. The authors have read widely and deeply over an enormous range of topics, and blended their insights into a coherent unified account covering subjects as diverse as genetics, stratigraphy, and the fine details of chemical bonding. The result is an overview stretching from ancient foreshadowings, through Enlightenment era explorations, to the crucial developments of the mid-19^th and early 20^th-centuries, which gave us evolution science in something very close to its present form, and beyond that to the 20^th-century discoveries of the molecular basis of inheritance, and the more recent discoveries made possible by genome sequencing. Throughout, complex topics are clearly explained to a high level of technical accuracy, without oversimplification or obscurantism. The work is enlivened throughout with well-judged quotations from the scientists involved in these discoveries, including contributions often overlooked. I found two small errors¹, but these are of no importance to the narrative. I also had problems with the title and emphasis of the final chapter, The New Lamarkism; more on this later.

The authors will already be familiar to many readers. John Gribbin holds a Ph.D. in astrophysics from Cambridge, where he was part of Fred Hoyle’s research group. He is a prolific and highly successful writer on scientific topics, with In Search of Schrodinger’s Cat and its successor, Schrödinger’s Kittens and the Search for Reality among his best-known works. He and his wife Mary are both Visiting Fellows at the University of Sussex, and have written several books together regarding the history of science, including The Fellowship and Out of the Shadow of a Giant. Those last two both feature Robert Boyle and Robert Hooke, who also make short appearances here.

Evolution is a fact. Those are the, to me, very welcome first words of the Introduction. Later in the paragraph, the authors state their view that the most successful theory of evolution is that of natural selection. I prefer to refer to our understanding of evolution, avoiding the blanket expression “theory of evolution” altogether. This is not just because the word “theory” can bring with it a suggestion of uncertainty, but because there are many partial theories, including notably neutral drift in addition to natural selection, and because evolution intersects with so many other different topics, as the book itself makes clear, from molecular biology to Earth sciences. Read more »

by Mike O’Brien

I’m disappointed in my columns so far. Not to say that they’ve been completely without value; I’ve managed to turn out some decent pieces and some kind readers have taken the time to tell me as much. But, taken together, my output exhibits a fault that I had sought to avoid from the outset. It has been far too occasional, too reactive, too of the moment in an extended, torturous moment of which I very much do not wish to be. There are exculpatory circumstances, of course. These are difficult times, and we are weak and vulnerable beings, and I am nothing if not an entrenched doom-scroller with a tendency for global anxiety. This is not an apology, because a core tenet of my approach to writing is a complete disregard for my audience. You’re all lovely people, I’m sure, but in order to write I have to provisionally discount your existence. This is, rather, a confession to the only person whose opinion matters to me as a writer. And that would be myself.

I’m qualified to critique my own work because I know what it is supposed to be, and I know when it falls short because I can’t be arsed to invest more effort into it. I have the great misfortune of being able to skate by on style. I know some people enjoy fluffy exercises in style; I rather enjoy such exploits myself, and my favourite writers are all great stylists. But I had set out to do more with these columns, and so far that goal is largely unmet. I can blame the general state of emergency that has engulfed this year, for robbing me of focus and constancy, for frustrating my earnest intentions to rise above immediacy and reaction. But I’ve lived with myself long enough to know that I lacked focus and constancy long before Covid showed up, and if this was a “normal” (i.e. less obviously and acutely disastrous) year, I’d have to come up with some other excuse for the same failures. Read more »

by Fabio Tollon

I have always been deeply impressed by the way behavioural nudges can promote socially desirable outcomes. From “opt-out” retirement plans, flies in urinals, and speed camera lotteries, nudges big and small can be a force for good. But not all nudges are created equal. Nudge theory has taken the world by storm (with organizations and governments using these techniques), and so you might be forgiven for thinking that these behavioural interventions get it right most of the time. Well, as is often the case, things do in fact go wrong in the world of nudging. Thankfully, however, things going wrong is a wonderful opportunity for us to learn and improve upon our theories.

Failed behavioural interventions are actually quite widespread, but as with nudges themselves, not all failures are created equal. While it is far beyond the scope of this article for me to go into each way behavioural interventions may fail, I will highlight a few. My reason for doing so is that better appreciation of how things go wrong can be used to better understand the relevant causal features of behavioural interventions, leading to the systematic improvement of such interventions. Read more »

Ricardo Miguel Hernandez. From the series When The Memory Turns to Dust.

More here and here.

Hernandez’s work was on view at Isolo17 Gallery in Verona, Italy.

by Joan Harvey

Ariana Reines and Terry Tempest Williams, writers one would never expect to be buddies, but who bonded at Harvard Divinity School, are having a public Zoom discussion in order to sell books. It’s a lovely, friendly discussion, but I’m shocked, shocked to hear that they send each other AUDIO letters. Audio letters? When they are so good at writing? When they have the chance to write to each other? Though, okay, why not? Henry James famously dictated his novels. Reines is amazingly articulate talking off the top of her head. Still, how is the pleasure the same? Williams does mention loving to actually write letters, so perhaps I shouldn’t judge.

I think it extraordinary that letters are called letters, the name of that small denomination with which we build our words.

Mary Ruefle (in a lecture on letters that she first wrote, then spoke, and finally published in written form).

Of course there exist letters that talk of letters:

Many thanks for both letters, which arrived two days running, a tremendous treat for Kalamata, a town nobody writes to. I think people are subconsciously repelled by the letter K. It’s the reverse of the letter X, which always goes to people’s heads. Perhaps if sex were spelt seks or segs there wouldn’t be half so much fuss about it: nothing very glamorous about seks kittens or seksual intercourse but write ‘sex killer slays six’ and you’re in business.

Patrick Leigh Fermor, to his former mistress, Ricki Huston. So probably he was thinking of sex (or seks).

Most writers like to write letters. Or used to. Possibly not today. I too have been lured by texting’s immediacy. But for many of us older folks, there is still something seductive about addressing a particular person and sensibility on the other end whom you try to entertain and yet remain yourself as often as possible, and doing this at some length. And then, of course, the pleasure of getting something different but similar in return. Reciprocity. Response. There is also something enticing about the way you can put everything in, including the kitchen sink, and the clog in it, and the dog, and okay, maybe the Trogs. As well as the wind and the snow, and the election, and wish you were here. You can even complain about your bills and your health, as long as your complaining doesn’t have a demand. Read more »

by N. Gabriel Martin

When I was younger, I gravitated to conservatism’s deference to the actual. In my suspicion towards the progressive preference for ideas over what just is, it took me a long time to understand that conservatism misunderstands the future and therefore what it is attempting to achieve. Conservatism’s purported ambition to preserve the present and its roots in tradition are also efforts to bring about a different future, and therefore to change the world to suit its designs. However, it took me a long time to understand this self-contradiction at its heart.

In college I had a running argument with my friend Sky about Damien Hirst, the artist most famous at the time for suspending a great white shark in a tank of formaldehyde. Hirst was never my favourite artist (I actually like him more now than I did then), but I defended him because Sky’s dismissal appalled me. In my youth I embraced the culture as if it were a stately home I’d been welcomed into. While I was not uncritical, for me criticism had to come from a well of reverence for what was already there. It was the sanctity of established culture, tradition, and history that made criticising it worthwhile, and so criticism could never undermine that sacredness. Sky, however, criticised Hirst because she preferred a culture without him and what he was doing to it. I never understood that in my twenties, because I couldn’t understand the future.

At that time, the only way to respond to the world that made sense to me was to accept it and affirm it as it was, and comment on it as a passionate, but disinterested, observer. It wasn’t just that I revered tradition, I was also sceptical towards what I saw as the arrogance of progressivism; that it wants to improve upon things and believes it can. Read more »