by Daniel Ranard

We're surrounded by algorithms. Facebook uses an algorithm to curate your newsfeed, credit agencies use an algorithm to compute your credit score, and soon an algorithm may replace you in the driver's seat. As algorithms come to dictate larger swaths of life, it's important to understand exactly what they are, and especially how they're drastically changing.

On one hand, algorithms are nothing new. An algorithm is just a precise set of instructions for carrying out a task. Any chef with a cookbook already follows the written algorithms within: add two cups of water, mix until smooth. Unlike computer algorithms, these instructions are written in a language meant for humans, so they still retain some ambiguity: how should you go about lifting the cup, and what does it mean to mix until smooth? While most of us have the know-how to surmount these ambiguities, computers are designed to follow much more precise instructions. And unlike cookbook recipes, computer algorithms don't concern the manipulation of physical objects like cups and bowls, but rather the manipulation of abstract objects like numbers and bits. A computer algorithm might say: "Take two numbers as inputs, multiply the larger one by seven, then add them," and so on. Though a modern computer is designed to convert these instructions into physical manipulations of the electricity within, one might also use an abacus, or pen and paper. Indeed, some of today's algorithms have been around for centuries: the way a computer calculates square roots is not so different from the method prescribed by Hero of Alexandria.

So while we built bigger and better equipment to execute our algorithms in the 20^th century, the central idea of the algorithm had remained unchanged for millenia. What would algorithms of the future hold? First, let's take a diversion and explain where we thought the most advanced algorithms were likely headed, decades ago. Then, we'll see how the recent success of machine learning methods has changed that vision for many, even posing new questions about the nature of knowledge and explanation.

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by Brooks Riley

by Dwight Furrow

The explosion of interest in the aesthetics of food and beverages over the past several decades inevitably raises the question whether certain culinary preparations or wines can be considered works of art. I have argued elsewhere that indeed food and wine can be works of art. But within the wine and food world many winemakers and chefs prefer to think of themselves as craft persons rather than artists, and in philosophy there is substantial resistance to including food and wine in the category of a fine art. The question of how we distinguish a craft from an art is thus germane to this debate.

Unfortunately, traditional ways of drawing the distinction between craft and the fine arts are inadequate. In fact, a too sharply drawn distinction between art and craft will mischaracterize both. Nevertheless, I think there is a distinction to be made between art and craft and at least some wines and culinary preparations are best viewed as works of art.

As Larry Shiner has pointed out, both the term "fine art" and the term "craft" are relatively recent inventions. ""Craft" as the name of a category of disciplines only goes back to the late nineteenth century when it emerged partly in reaction to machine production, and partly in reaction to the fine art academies' exclusion of the "minor," "decorative," or "applied" arts." Fine art, according to Shiner, was a phrase used to market works of art to the emerging middle class marking off craftwork, works that are merely useful, from works that were "the appropriate object of refined taste."

In the past we might have used the type of material being worked on to distinguish art from craft. Paint on canvas, words on a page, notes played by instruments were candidates for works of art. The transformation of wood, clay, metals or fabric was craft. But since the birth of installations and the expansion of materials used for artistic expression, artists today work in media such as textiles, plastics, metals and wood. So the type of material will no longer suffice to mark the distinction. Why then not food or wine as candidates for artistic expression?

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by Katrin Trüstedt

On Friday, February 16, 2018, the screening of a documentary film titled The Rest I Make Up at MoMA's Doc Fortnight festival created something like a theatrical event. Moving images of the largely unknown avant-garde playwright Maria Irene Fornes (she goes by Irene) cast a spell on the audience that reacted with tears, laughter, and frenetic applause. The images of her, making up stories, walking down the street Cuba style, flirting with the camera, or questioning the whole filming project while lying on her bed, seemed to turn the basement film theater into an actual theatrical space, one that has always been Irene Fornes’s true habitat. The love story that this film is – the story of her love for the theater, for Cuba, for Susan Sontag, and, ultimately, for the film maker Michelle Memran – seemed to affect everyone in the audience, old friends as well as those who barely knew her name. And yet, as the event of this film had everyone so captivated (including me), I couldn't help but wonder: what exactly is the relation of an artist like Fornes to an institution like MoMA?

The title of this film The Rest I Make Up seems to perfectly capture a feature of her art essential to this relation. It points to a making up of stories and theater worlds that was the work of this writer, as well as to a practice as part of her now dealing with dementia: If she can't remember, she makes it up. Behind the charm and nonchalance with which she graces the screen, one senses an abyss of an unknown, terrifying darkness. It makes its presence felt in silences, glances, or the state that her kitchen is in. When Michelle and Irene return from their visit in Cuba, they stop in Miami to see Irene's sister; Irene cannot tell her about having just visited their family. She does not remember. But the title also seems to address the way Fornes's avant-garde theater used to work in the niche of the Off-Off-Broadway scene (and "Off-Off-MoMA," if you will): improvised and without support, institutionally or financially, it was experimentally "made up" as the productions moved along. Besides writing and directing the plays, Fornes would, for instance, also often do the costumes, with whatever happened to be there. And ultimately, the title also seems to speak to the filmmaking project itself. When I first met Michelle in Berlin about 15 years ago, she was not sure what exactly to do with her life. How to make money. Where to go. What to make. But she knew she was captivated by this playwright Irene Fornes (it was how I learned about her), and wanted to, in some way, do something with her, about her, for her. The rest she was going to make up "as we went along". It turned out to be this film, and she turned out to be a filmmaker in the process.

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by Paul Braterman

Karl Popper

More recent strata lie on top of older strata, except when they lie beneath them. Radiometric dates obtained by different methods always agree, except when they differ. And the planets in their courses obey Newton's laws of gravity and motion, except when they depart from them.

As Isaac Asimov reportedly said, "The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' [I have found it], but 'That's funny …' " And there is nothing that distinguishes so clearly between the scientific and the dogmatic mindset as the response to anomalies. For the dogmatist, the anomaly is a "gotcha", proof that the theory under consideration is, quite simply, wrong. For the scientist, it is an opportunity. If an idea is generally useful, but occasionally breaks down, something unusual is going on and it's worth finding out what. The dogmatist wants to see questions closed, where the scientist wants to keep them open. This is perhaps why the creationist denial of science can often be found among those professions that seek decision and closure, such as law and theology.

The rights and wrongs of falsification

Dogmatists regularly invoke the name of Karl Popper, and the work he did in the 1930s. Popper placed heavy emphasis on falsifiability, denouncing as unscientific any doctrine that could not be falsified. Freud's theories, for example, were unscientific, because a patient's disagreement with its findings could be explained away as the result of repression. Marxism, likewise, he regarded as unscientific because when events failed to unfold as Marx had predicted, his followers could always say that the right historical conditions had not yet arisen. The theory that biological diversity is a product of Intelligent Design is also unscientific by this criterion, since its advocates can and do say¹ that any apparent failure of design may merely reflect our lack of insight into the motivations of the designer.

But what about theories that almost all of us would agree to regard as scientific, such as the theory of planetary motion, or atomic theory, or the theories of geology, or of the origin of species by evolution? Here, current thinking can be and at various times has been falsified by observation. But what, precisely, was falsified?

No theory exists on its own, as the philosopher-scientist Duhem pointed out over a century ago,² and when a theory fails an observational test there are two kinds of possible explanation. The fault may lie with the theory itself, or with the assumptions we make while testing it. More specifically, as Lakatos pointed out in 1970,³ every application of a theory involves ancillary hypotheses, which can range from the grandiose (the laws of nature are unchanging) to the trivial (the telescope was functioning correctly). When a theoretical prediction fails, we do not know if the fault is in one of these, rather than the core theory itself. Much of the time, we are not even aware of our ancillary hypotheses, which is one reason why we need philosophers of science.

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Diamond Stingily. Elephant Memory, 2016.

Installation.

"… combines various shades of the store-bought hair not with cute or colorful accessories but with forbidding steel chains and sturdy hooks more befitting the exhibition’s explicit allusions to the threat of violence and to the troubled threshold between public and private. A group of battered apartment doors, weary sentinels armed with baseball bats in the darkened gallery, composed the solemn suite Entryways, 2016; nearby, projected behind a section of chain link fence, footage borrowed from a 1967 documentary looped: Black schoolgirls (many with braids in their hair) sing happily at the playground, but one unnerving chanted refrain—“How did he die?”—evokes looming tragedy."

More here, here, and here.

Thanks to Anjuli Kolb for introducing!

by Mathangi Krishnamurthy

I am currently obsessed with Jordan Peterson and his videos instructing men on ways in which to be men. He goes on to inform us that in his experience, so many are men petrified by women and specifically by the specter of being dismissed by them, and how men need to fix themselves because they are probably being rejected for "real" reasons. Peterson is currently a popular figure on the internet, and in many ways, defies glib categorization. See, for example, Slavoz Zizek's as ever quick take on why Peterson captures something in popular imagination.

But my obsession with him has to do with my own interests in the ways in which gender is produced in the world, as an either or—either, it is a binary — or as fluid one that can be placed along many combinations of body, desire and soul on a world-wide, gender-wide spectrum. At a recent conference organized by QueerAbad in Ahmedabad, India, author of Sexualness, social anthropologist and activist Akshay Khanna spoke about rites of passage in academia in terms of being able to speak about gender and gender fluidity. Rightly invoking Judith Butler, and questioning the seeming need to always begin all such conversations, even in Indian academia, with her seminal work, he emphasized the need to find local language, affect, and feeling, to be able to describe forms of gendered imagination.

In teaching Butler to undergraduates—many of them often being exposed for the first time to feminist theory—I sometimes conduct an exercise bringing props such as wigs, face paint, and make-up to class, encouraging participants to experiment and play with their appearances. Many do so. As they pose and prance, I also gently suggest that they take a walk around the building and premises of one of the premier technology and science institutions in India, going as far as they dare, before returning to the safe space that is class. I sometimes daydream about appearing in class, teaching in zoot suit, suspenders, and gelled hair, but am never quite able to find similar enough courage to play. We also speak about Aravanis or Thirunangais, the community of transgender women specific to Tamil Nadu, where I teach, and the ways in which their appearance, both as an act and a phenomenon may invoke a whole set of feelings and affects in their heteronormative audiences. We agree collectively, that yes, we perform gender; we nod agreeably that gender has solidified in us over years of performative rendition; and we silently hope that our experiments in class may lead us to be more fluid in our daily lives.

And yet, over five years of teaching Butler, identity theory, and gender performativity, I am interested more than ever in the resurgence, and arguably, the never-ever-gone-ness of the unspoken norm of the gender binary, and the investment that discourses have in making them real. Here, I use real not in the sense of a "constructed" real, but in the sense of belief, inhabitation and feeling. I am, hence, obsessed with Jordan Peterson.

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by Leanne Ogasawara

When I was a young, I don't remember why, but I scribbled a poem by Osip Mandelstam on a piece of thick, mauve-color Nepalese mulberry paper. And as I wrote it, I thought to myself, "This is a poem to cross a desert with."

Depriving me of sea, of a space to run and a space to fly,
And giving my footsteps the brace of a forced land,
What have you gained? The calculation dazzles
But you cannot seize the movements of my lips, their silent sound.
–Osip Mandelstam 1935

I carried this poem around in my wallet for twenty-five years–like an amulet. Looking back, I can only wonder what in the world drew me to it when I was still so young and free-spirited…But in fact, this poem of Russian gulag captivity gave me strength during times of hardship; for contained within those few short lines is a beautiful testament to the great strength that our inner lives have to sustain us…

Fast forward twenty-five years when a forty-five year old woman scrawled one line from another poem on the back of that same mauve-color piece of mulberry paper. This time it was the famous line from Tao Yuanming's poem, Plucking chrysanthemums by the eastern fence:

採菊東籬下

A world away in spirit from Mandelstam's poem perhaps. As the poem sums up perfectly the serenity achieved by a life of cultivation –at the end of the hero's journey.

飲酒詩　　　　　陶淵明
結盧在人境　而無車馬喧
問君何能爾　心遠地自偏
採菊東籬下　悠然見南山
山氣日夕佳　飛鳥相與還
此還有真意　欲辨已忘言

Drinking Wine (#5)–Tao Yuanming
I’ve built my house where others dwell
And yet there is no clamor of carriages and horses
You ask me how this is possible– (And so I say):
When the heart is far, one is transported
I pluck chrysanthemums under the eastern fence
And serenely I gaze at the southern mountains
At dusk, the mountain air is good
Flocks of flying birds are returning home
In this, there is a great truth
But wanting to explain it, I forget the words (my trans）

That line has become a perfect touchstone for the next part of my life; another poem to cross a desert with.

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Iqbal Complains to God

by Mohammed Iqbal

Why should I map my own loss,
not think of tomorrow,
forget my profit, lose my due,
grieve, ignore a nightingale’s wail,
be silent
as a rose?
Words give me courage
‑—dust be in my mouth—
I’ve a complaint. God,
famous for praising You,
we now can’t help
but complain.
When a rose bloomed
it was unable to disperse
its scent.
We became the breeze,
we spread its essence.
Before our arrival
some bowed to trees,
others to idols—
not to a god
they couldn’t see.
Who called out Your name —
ancient Greeks, Jews, Nazarenes:
when things fell apart
did they draw their swords?
Who tore down the gates of Khaibar,
reduced Constantinople
to rubble,
turned Iran’s fire-temples cold?
Who stamped the crescent
on every heart,
who brought the idols to proclaim,
“There is no god but God?”

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by Carol A Westbrook

In what has become an overwhelming social movement, women are coming forward to tell their stories of sexual assault. "Me too," they say. #MeToo, they tweet. Though I also want to express my solidarity, I cannot say "Me too," as I don't have a story to share. I was never the victim of sexual misconduct; never had a boss hit on me; never faced the expectation of sex in return for a job or a promotion; never assaulted in any way.

On the other hand, when I was a young woman, discrimination was so prevalent it was ignorable. Putting up with discrimination was the price one had to pay for trying to make it in a man's world, for trying to do something with your life other than become a subservient wife and mother. Social attitudes were very different then. It was the 60's.

We women of the 60's had more rights and privileges than did our mothers and grandmothers– we had the vote, and a few more property rights–but we were by no means legally equal to men. Birth control was available, but abortions were not. There were many jobs which excluded women. Pregnant women had to quit when they started to "show." Married women lost control of their finances, and sometimes their bodies, too–marital rape was not even a crime in some states! Married women couldn't hold credit cards in their own name. In the 60's it was okay for a man to date his secretary or pressure his intern for sex. It may have been ill advised or downright coercive, perhaps, but not illegal.

Women were regarded as inferior members of the human race, not able to do men's work, and needing a man's protection so they could fulfill their God-given role of wife and mother. Some women accepted this role, but others of us felt that it kept us back from our full potential. We were called "feminists," but we were just women trying to carve out our own place in a man's world.

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by Brooks Riley

by Max Sirak

John Perry Barlow (JPB for short) died earlier this month.

And, in honor of his passing, but more in remembrance of his life, I want to dedicate my little sliver of cyberspace, a realm he was passionate about, to highlight three pieces of his writing and thought. First, a political document; second, a code of conduct; and lastly some lyrics.

A Child Of Boundless (Digital) Seas

JPB was a pioneer of an open, free-range internet. He, along with others, founded The Electric Frontier Foundation (EFF) (here), a "nonprofit defending digital privacy, free speech, and innovation" in 1990. He literally wrote the Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace (here) in 1996.

For those who don't want to read it, it is what it says it is. It begins with, "Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of the Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone."

The Declaration goes on to lay out the foundational premise of what the internet should be. A "global social space" independent of past tyrannies and a natural emergence of human creativity to serve as a self-regulating web of communication free from commercial enterprise and regulation.

Idealistic? Sure. Naive? Quite possibly. But don't those two usually walk, arm-in-arm, like sunshine and daydreams?

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by Christopher Bacas

We never saw Billy again. There was a new management company. They moved in their super, a tiny Mexican guy. He was always cheerful and had a female companion; daughter, sister or wife, who looked seventeen. He understood few English words and phrases. When possible, the young lady translated. If she wasn’t around (school?), I’d grab a dual-language dictionary for my requests. He always called me “Meester” and grinned sweetly at my poorly constructed and pronounced Spanish. Tenants’ collective languages: Krayol, English, Jamaican Patois, meant little real information passed to the super.

The Pre-War building crumbled around us. The steps to the 5th floor roof held small monuments: a bottle of cheap liquor, stubbed-out blunt, sometimes a slimy condom. On cold days, running the steps for exercise, dog in tow, I dodged the messes. The dog charged right through them, scattering nastiness. Sometimes, high school canoodlers, truants who left the ashen relics, blocked our path completely. Carrying my trash through the back door, I once encountered a teen couple, partially disrobed, going at it under the stairs. Another kid, holding his belt, stood nearby. As I exited with a heavy trash bag, he nodded rhythmically at me. When I returned, no one had moved. The kid in the on-deck-circle didn’t even look around.

During the coldest nights, our radiators hissed for a few minutes, then went silent for icy hours. We boiled water for nighttime baths. Small ceramic heaters crackled and hummed in the dark, blistering our throats and noses. The super looked on when we wildly pantomimed the conditions in our apartment. I’ll never know if his expression meant worry about our comfort or just our sanity.

We began regular calls to the city and our property manager, and stopped paying rent.

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by Ali Minai

A light went out in the world yesterday. Asma Jahangir — Pakistan’s icon of human rights and liberal values — passed away. In her short 66 years, she lived the length — and made the impact — of many lifetimes. If a person’s character is known by the enemies they make, her credentials are impeccable. Every dictator, every autocrat, every paternalistic preacher, every friend of the powerful hated her — and she welcomed their hatred as a badge of honor. Even in death, the barbs of her enemies ennoble her further for posterity.

In the Middle of Hosanna

snow’s piled against the generator
smooth white talus
at the foot of sheer thought in
arctic regions of mind

through glass the near tangle
of bare forsythia beneath draped wires
pole to pole is a snap of unchecked ruminations
that fold upon themselves in crazy chiaroscuro
a dispensation of light expected in a skull of whims
while further right the barrel arc of a stone wall
familiar now as arrays of spots on the back of a hand
is as solid as the conviction of crystals in a cool savanna
between here and the neighbor’s shed in the middle of
hosanna!
.

Jim Culleny
2/12/17

by Emrys Westacott

The concept of individual freedom has been central to political philosophy since the time of John Locke, who published his groundbreaking Two Treatises on Civil Government in 1689. Before then, other values were paramount—for example: conformity to God's will, the cultivation of moral virtue in the population, social stability, national power, material prosperity, the quality of the culture, or the glory of the sovereign. These are criteria by which a society might be judged and compared to other societies. The happiness of the population can also be added to this list, although this is usually assumed to be a direct consequence of some of those other goods.

But the modern liberal tradition, which begins in the 17th century with thinkers like Locke, is virtually defined by the central importance given to individual freedom and individual rights. And these come to be viewed as deal-breakers. It doesn't matter how stable the society, or how materially prosperous, or how happy the population; the fundamental rights and liberties of individuals should not be sacrificed just to secure these other goods.

Of course, who should count as an individual endowed with sacrosanct rights has, from the outset, been a topic of controversy. Even now, when no respectable thinker would defend the denial of equal rights on grounds of sex, race, or religion, there are still controversies over the rights of immigrants, children, prisoners, convicted felons, and animals.

The exact meaning of freedom has also never been agreed upon. John Stuart Mill's "harm principle" provides a basic starting point: each person should be free to do as they please so long as they do no harm to anyone else. But specifying what constitutes "harm" is difficult. Am I harming my neighbors if I erect a hideous sculpture on my front lawn? Am I harming you if I say something that offends you? Am I harming society, or a section of it, if I advocate racial segregation or deny the Holocaust?

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Rashaad Newsome. False Evidence Appearing Real, 2017. And Rozay, 2016.

Mixed media, collage on paper.

More on this amazing artist here, here, and here.

by Richard King

I was just four months old when the Pentagon Papers were published in 1971, but I remember very distinctly the mixed emotions that ran through my mind when I first clapped eyes on that historic edition of the New York Times in my local library. For here was everything I loathed and loved in one incredible revelation! On the one hand, imperialism, war and corruption. On the other, the First Amendment and the Fourth Estate. "Mother," I said, as she swiped the paper from the hands of a startled pensioner, "Mother, darling – mark this day! For though a dark cloud in the progress of our species, it has about it a silver lining that in future years will be as a beacon to good men and women of the press the world over! Dry your eyes, mother mine. Here, use my handkerchief." I was a precocious child.

It would be nice, would it not, to rewrite history in a way that made ourselves central to the story, and that made us appear more relevant and prescient and brilliant than we actually are. It would be ludicrous as well, of course, though that doesn't stop some people doing it, especially those who write for a living. I've grumbled before that the "media culpa" following the 2016 US election disguised a deep strain of self-congratulation, as the dead-tree press and major stations affected to glorify themselves with faint praise. ("If only we'd had our game-face on, this tragedy might never have happened!") Now I must return to the subject, one Steven Spielberg having entered the field with a film that polishes the MSM's image to a high and self-reflecting shine. The Post is rather good, as it happens; but it's also very, very bad.

The key points in the narrative are a matter of historical record, so I imagine we can dispense with the spoiler alerts. In 1969 military analyst Daniel Ellsberg made photocopies of ‘the Pentagon Papers', aka United States–Vietnam Relations, 1945–1967: A Study Prepared by the Department of Defense. The documents revealed, inter alia, that the US government had lied "systematically" about the ongoing war in Vietnam and that it had secretly spread the war to Cambodia and Laos. Ellsberg passed the documents to Neil Sheehan, a reporter for the New York Times, and on June 13, 1971, the Times published the first of nine excerpts from the Papers, together with editorial commentaries. On June 15, the Nixon administration sought, and was granted, a court injunction preventing further publication, so Ellsberg passed copies of the documents to Ben Bagdikian at the Washington Post. After much agonising and internal argument, and in defiance of the Attorney General, the Post began running its own series of articles on the Papers on June 18. On June 30, the Supreme Court ruled in favour of the New York Times, putting the Post (and other papers) in the clear.

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by Brooks Riley