by Libby Bishop

In a speech in St Petersburg, Alexander von Humboldt called for the first large-scale research project across Russia to investigate the effects of deforestation on climate. The year was 1829. This project embodied the key features of Humboldt's methods: empirical, comparative and collaborative. He was part of the Republic of Letters, an international community of scholars that exchanged the scientific ideas. Earlier, he had made a five-year voyage to the Americas where he identified 2000 new species, discovered the magnetic equator, and explored live volcanoes. Hungry for yet more knowledge, he wanted comparative data from the East as well. Despite being nearly 60 years old, Humboldt travelled 10,000 miles in six months into Russia collecting data on the climate effects of deforestation, irrigation, and silver smelting. He was even expert at data visualisation, as his Naturgemälde (“painting of nature”) demonstrates by showing plant names and zones on Chimboraza, a peak in the Andes that he climbed. This diagram exemplified his approach: data-driven, fusing science and art. Doggedly, he sought to unify and connect, resisting the tendency of Enlightenment science to divide and classify (Wulf 2015). By sharing his data in the belief that knowledge should advance public, not private, interests, he was ahead of his time.

Humboldt would have revelled in the volume and variety of big data available to us today. He faced dangers from jaguars, earthquakes, and altitude sickness; our challenges are of another kind. Humboldt collected data primarily about natural phenomena, and thus he did not have to worry about privacy and risks to research subjects from disclosing their data. Today, much of the data needed to further research in key areas, such as health, is about people. Protecting privacy is indeed a hard problem, but we can look to Humboldt's courage and ingenuity as a model for how to approach our data challenges. As he would have done, we must find and promote ways to deploy personal data for public good while protecting privacy. In Europe, this work will go forward under new rules recently announced governing the protection of personal data.

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by Hari Balasubramanian

I've lived in Massachusetts for 8 years now, and I've always been struck by the density and variety of trees here – maples, oaks, birches, beeches, chestnuts, hickories, white pines, pitch pines, hemlocks, firs. Look in any direction and your view is likely to be blocked by a tangle of trees: in the winter and early spring crisscrossing, leafless branches form a haze of brown and gray; in the summer, when the leaves have returned, there is a lush, impenetrable wall of green.

Apparently this wasn't always the case: in the mid 1800s, the naturalist and writer Henry David Thoreau, the author of Walden, was “able to look out of his back door in Concord [now on the outskirts of Boston] and see all the way to Mount Monadnock in New Hampshire because there were so few trees to block his view.” In Natural History of Western Massachusetts, Stan Freeman writes:

“in the early 1800s Massachusetts may have looked much like a farm state in the Midwest, such as Kansas and Indiana. Farm fields, barren of trees, stretched from horizon to horizon…”

Also consider this. In 1871, when the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) surveyed the stone fences that European farmers in the Northeast had constructed, they found 33,000 miles of such fences in Massachusetts alone! That number should make clear just how much land was put under the plough.

Things changed quickly, though. As the United States expanded westward in the 19th century, fulfilling its so called Manifest Destiny, the Midwest emerged as a major player in agriculture. Midwestern crops could be sent back east by railroad. The farmers of the New England, unable to compete, abandoned their lands. The forests grew back, hiding the thousands of miles of stone fences.

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by Richard King

‘If you want a vision of the future,' O'Brien tells a broken Winston Smith in Nineteen Eighty-Four, ‘imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever.'

Alternatively, you might consider this scenario, from the comedy sketch show That Mitchell and Webb Sound on BBC Radio 4 …

The time is about thirty years in the future; the place, the UK, where the actress and campaigner Joanna Lumley has just become a ‘benign dictator'. As her first act of office Lumley has instituted something called the ‘Old Lady Job Justification Hearings', a sort of soft Inquisition before which representatives of various occupations are obliged to appear in order to justify their existence – to prove they have ‘a proper job'. The hearings are run by elderly ladies, whose questions, though always sweetly expressed, are as kryptonite to the Man of Steel. (To a cosmetic surgeon: ‘Oh! A doctor, you say? That's lovely dear! So you make sick people feel better do you?') By the end of each session, the interviewee is reduced to a self-loathing mess, while the old ladies, not wanting to compound their distress, are all apologetic consolation – English tea and sympathy: ‘Don't worry, dear. Have another biscuit. Have you ever considered opening a little shop?'

Okay, it lacks the dystopian power of Orwell's post-atomic vision; but it's not without its interest …

Mitchell and Webb get one thing right, I think: the question of what constitutes meaningful work is about to become, if it hasn't already become, an inescapable modern theme. In capitalist democracies in particular high unemployment, wage stagnation and the expansion of the so-called ‘precariat' – the class of workers with low job security, low wages and no access to savings: the working poor, more or less – give an urgent edge to a more general feeling that the world of work is not as it should be, that it exists in spite of our wants and needs and not in order to facilitate them.

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by Mara Naselli

The Soviet writer Isaac Babel is well known for his relentless scrutiny in revision. He and his young wife retreated to the mountains to work on the stories that would become The Red Cavalry, published in 1926. “Achieving the form that he wanted was endless torture,” writes Nathalie Babel. “He would read my mother version after version; thirty years later she still knew the stories by heart.”

The writer Konstantin Paustovsky also recounts when he and Babel sat along the parapet of a cliff discussing the art of writing. Babel flung pebbles into the sea and then quashed his friend’s romantic notions.

“It’s all right for you other writers,” said Babel. “You can wrap things up in the dew of your imagination, as you put it! What an awful expression, by the way! But what would you do if you had no imagination? Like me? . . . I have to know everything, down to the last wrinkle, or I can’t even begin to write. ‘Authenticity,’ that’s the motto, and I’m stuck with it! That’s why I write so little and so slowly. Because it’s terribly hard.”

Babel explained his method: “I take out all the participles and adverbs I can. Participles are heavy, angular, they destroy the rhythm. They grate like tanks going over rubble. Three participles to one sentence, and you kill the language. . . . Adverbs are lighter. They can even lend you wings in a way. But too many of them make the language spineless. . . . A noun needs only one adjective, the choicest. Only a genius can afford two adjectives to one noun.”

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by Mathangi Krishnamurthy

I think I want a Raspberry Pi. Computers are getting smaller and smaller, as is everything else in my life. Tenure, income, hope, knowledge, and certainty. Perhaps a computer the size of a credit card will remedy this bleak picture. Perhaps the ability to wield confidently this sign of the new age will renew mine. Also, it travels rather well, and it might even bypass airport security. For surely, one has to get everywhere fast, and first.

I'm pretty sure I want myself ice cube molds that make round ice. Then I will be the hostess that they all clamor to, in search of the perfect whisky glass with the perfect artisanal globular ice. It's all the rage in Japan, I tell you. I know, because I have been there.

Yesterday, I realized that all that is missing in my life is an Aeropress. Do you not know what the Aeropress is? It's that thingie, the one that extracts coffee with the least amount of loss. The one with the breakthrough method, for coffee under the best conditions, the best temperature, with the best aroma, the best…you get the idea. It even comes with instructions in eight languages, testifying to the universal need for coffee. And most of all, coffee without bitterness. Really. I think of the countless hours spent at nameless American coffee shops, slurping dishwater in the name of caffeine, and I think to myself, that this is the bargain you make with adulthood, where life sucks, and only coffee will make it bearable, but it's alright because one can afford an Aeropress.

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by Paul North

In these monthly posts I will survey the landscape of “fateful thinking,” as we glimpse it on the moons orbiting old Europe today. The premise will be that in politics, culture, academia, medicine, economics, and private life, among other regions of experience, we—those in charge and those charged up and those under the thumb of others in this orbit—tend to express ourselves, on the most important matters, in fateful terms. “It has to be like this or that.” Whether we are correct or not when we say “it is” and mean “it must be,” “it has always been,” we regularly call on such statements to support our most critical decisions. Let us assume provisionally that, despite so much hurried change, with all our freedom of imagination and all our progress, we still tend to base our decisions on what must be the case, what could not be otherwise, what comes out of a finished past or certain future and determines the core of our being. In our times these sound like old-fashioned, even ancient sentiments. For the purposes of this survey, I shall assume that “fateful thinking” is as at home in the new as it was in the old. Fate ideas operate equally in science and religion, although “fate” certainly takes distinct forms in each. What remains then is to describe and analyze those forms, the current genres of fate, in hopes of discovering by chance a way of living in which the idea of life has not already been settled in advance.

Current Genres of Fate 1: Kafka's Innocents

When did the idea of fate arise, the one in which every tiny detail of life, every twist in life's way is a sign that says: “no way out.” Classical labyrinths have exits, though they are hard to find. When did the intuition of a labyrinth whose doors open back into itself take over the imagination? When did we enter into zones of experience in which the exit brings us back to square one? Some think it was the work of the Protestant Reformation. Iris Murdoch attributed it to the rise of science: “The idea of life as self-enclosed and purposeless is of course not simply a product of the despair of our own age. It is the natural product of the advance of science and has developed over a long period.” Whatever its origins, when certainty about the destiny of any single human life is taken away, every tiny event becomes a possible portal to destiny. When fate toppled from its throne at the end of history, fateful thinking seeped back into everyday life, filling its crevices. Institutions like law and bureaucracy grew exponentially alongside the rise of science, and this only intensified the seepage of fate into the crevices of life. Institutional protocols took on the offices of destiny and made destiny into a matter of finding the right office.

Life's suffusion with fate had a peculiar consequence: we became innocent again. It is a new Eden, except that, under this version of fate, whereas in the Garden we could do nothing wrong because there was not yet any wrong in the world, now we can do nothing wrong because our actions are so severely limited by the strictures that surround us. We can do nothing really wrong because we really can do so little. Kafka wrote about this constricting context and its new innocence.

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by Michael Liss

If you love classical music, there is a place in your imagination that takes you back 192 years, to May 7, 1824, and puts you at one of the most extraordinary moments in musical history—the first public performance of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony.

You want to be there. You want to see Beethoven himself raise his hands for the first downbeat, that odd woosh that then unfolds almost like an orchestra tuning up. You want to hear those crisp, slashing sounds as it moves through the second movement, and swirling cloud of notes, floating above you, that is the third. But the payoff comes in the fourth, when Beethoven surpasses himself, first trying, and then rejecting, the themes of the first three to resolve by joining instrumental beauty to vocal, fused in the pure elation of Schiller's “Ode to Joy. “

If you were there, you would do as every other person in attendance did—leap to your feet and roar your approval. And you would be witness to the most dramatic, even shattering moment in music history—when one of soloists, Caroline Unger, gently turns the ailing, unhearing Beethoven to receive their adoration.

As the historian (and musicologist) Edmund Morris recounts in “Beethoven, the Universal Composer,” if there was any silence in the house, it could have only come from the Imperial Box, which was empty. Beethoven, a man underwritten for decades by the aristocratic and wealthy, had begun to edge away from them, and they from him. The Ninth is not only revolutionary in its form, it is perhaps the first large-scale truly democratic work. With one 74-minute effort, Beethoven created an entirely new vocabulary, one that not only spoke of a stateless universal brotherhood, but in form and delivery, frees the individual to participate to the extent of his abilities.

To put Beethoven in better context, it's useful to place him, and two of the great composers before him, Bach and Mozart, in “political-musical” time, or perhaps more accurately, “political-musical-economic” time.

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by Evan Edwards

In September of 1851, a word enters the journal of Henry David Thoreau: perambulation. An inveterate enthusiast of walking, as well as a voracious collector of words, such a sudden introduction of this peculiar peripatetic term, which is an antiquated relative of the more familiar ‘ambulation,' or ‘to amble,' (from the Latin Ambulare, ‘to walk') should stand out to us as readers. He writes that “[o]n Monday, the 15th, I am going to perambulate the bounds of the town,” and later, “Sept. 17. Perambulated the Lincoln Line,” and “Sept. 18. Perambulated Bedford line.” This word begins to cross Thoreau's mind more and more steadily for the better part of a month until, in October, he gives up ‘perambulating,' and instead uses a near synonym, ‘surveying,' (which, like perambulating, has to do, at least on the surface, with the work he was doing at the time) to describe his activities. He then rarely returns to ‘perambulation' for the rest of his life. At least in word.

Instead, in October, he begins to speak exclusively of ‘surveying,' ‘walking,' or elsewhere, ‘skating to,' and then, as he enters the late 1850s, in the last half-decade of his life, he all but ceases to lead journal entries with a description of his own activity at all, perambulation or otherwise, referring instead to the conditions of the environment and then, occasionally, drifting into descriptions of his own mind and body. Although the term does not seem to return, it tells us worlds about Thoreau's philosophical position.

In order to understand the significance of the brief intrusion of this term, we should keep two things in mind: first, the time at which he was writing these entries; and second, the difference between ambulating and perambulating. Attending to these two points should help us not only understand Thoreau, but also something about our own relationship to nature.

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by Dave Maier

Math is pretty easy when you’re just starting out. You’re just adding and subtracting and multiplying and dividing. They might even let you use calculators, but even if they don’t, you’re just dealing with whole numbers, the kind you use when you’re counting on your fingers. (Sometimes they spring some newfangled versions of the multiplication algorithm on you, but it’s still just multiplication.)

Some students first run into trouble when they get to fractions, usually in sixth grade or so. Now we are writing the same number in rather different ways (1/2 = 2/4 = 0.5, and so on), and we can’t really count on our fingers either. All of a sudden there are a whole bunch of numbers between 2 and 3. In fact, as it turns out, there are an infinite number of such numbers. Infinity was okay when it was the biggest number of all, all the way on the end (or ends) of the number line and thus safely out of the way, but now we’re using it to count things, and those things are themselves not only the things we count with, but the numbers between what we seem now to be calling the “counting” numbers. (It even turns out – although they don’t make a big deal of this in sixth grade, thank goodness – that there are more numbers between 2 and 3 than there are “counting” numbers on the whole number line, even though both numbers are infinite. Yikes!)

Again, though, in arithmetic at least we’re just talking about numbers. Every problem has a single right answer, even if we now get to write that answer in different ways. But then, all of a sudden, straight up ahead: algebra.

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by Paul Braterman

Toilet signs on sale at ebay

Toilet etiquette is where prudery meets absurdity. Your chance of being embarrassed, let alone molested, by a transgender person in a US public toilet is probably zero, and certainly less than your chance of being shot dead at home by a toddler playing with a gun; after all, the only public display of genitalia is at the men's urinal, and you can always use a booth if you prefer.

It is said that an undergrad once asked Sir John Pentland Mahaffy, Provost of Trinity College Dublin, where he might find a lavatory. “At the end of the corridor,” Mahaffy grandly gestured, “you will find a door marked GENTLEMEN; but don't let that stop you.” In the UK, of which Dublin was stll part at the time, class trumps gender. Incidentally, Trinity had been admitting female undergraduates since 1903, 74 years before Harvard; I assume that sanitary arrangements were instituted to cope with this.

It is established law in the US that the teaching of creationism serves a religious, rather than scientific or educational, purpose. It follows (Edwards v. Aguillard) that such teaching is unconstitutional in US public schools, since it violates the First Amendment separation of Church and State. There is no prospect of this ruling being overturned, unless we end up with a Supreme Court nominated by President Ted Cruz.

It has also been repeatedly established that display of the Ten Commandments on Government property violates the US Constitution, for much the same reasons.

So why do we have States bringing in transgender bathroom laws, scientifically baseless (as discussed here by my friend Faye Flam), whose only effect would be to inconvenience and offend one particular small minority? Why has this monumental non-issue even spilled over into the moronic drivelfest that is now the Republican Party's nomination debate?

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by Leanne Ogasawara

Madonna del Parto

Last summer, marooned with a large group of astronomers in a remote 11th century abbey in the Tuscan countryside, I found myself growing increasingly antsy. Hatching a plan to break out, I dragged my astronomer off on what should have been one of the great pilgrimages of our lifetime–for as luck would have it, just down the road lay what Aldous Huxley considered to be the greatest picture in the world.

I am referring to one of the paintings on the famous Piero della Francesca trail. To see those masterpieces in situ is astonishing, and I consider the Piero Pilgrimage to be one of the great art historical experiences in the world.

Like all pilgrimages, however, this one was not without its mishaps…. Flushing my phone accidentally down the toilet after seeing the astonishingly beautiful and transportive fresco cycles in Arezzo was bad enough; but then to finally arrive at the climax of the pilgrimage where Aldous' “best picture on earth” stood, only to find it unavailable for viewing (and not just that but veiled in such a way as to tantalize us about what glorious beauty we were missing)– was close to unbearable.

Our biggest blunder, however, came when we willfully decided to skip driving an extra half hour to go see the Madonna del Parto. Yes, I want to kick myself! Located in Monterchi, the Madonna del Parto is an extremely rare (perhaps the only?) treatment in Christian art of the Virgin pregnant. “Del Parto” can mean labor or childbirth–and in the picture, Piero depicts a very pregnant Mary.

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by Matt McKenna

Zootopia’s target audience may be a tad younger than Bernie Sanders’ target audience, but youthful Sanders supporters should nonetheless consider watching the film in order to see a dark vision of their potential future. Like many animated Disney films, Zootopia includes talking animals working together to solve a problem. Also like many animated Disney films, the audience is bludgeoned with allusions comparing the cartoon animals’ society to our own (in Zootopia, institutions are specist like real world institutions are racist). There’s nothing wrong with talking animals or ham-fisted moralizing–after all, the film is for kids. What differentiates this Disney film from previous Disney films is that a young voter–pro-Sanders or not–may well see their dreary, hopeless future in Officer Judy Hopps’ transition from plucky bunny to establishment stooge.

The hero of Zootopia is Judy Hopps who, like young voters in reality, starts out as an ardent advocate for the downtrodden. Though she is but a humble rabbit, a child to carrot farmers, Judy dreams of becoming a police officer in the big city of Zootopia, which is an interesting choice for the name of a city built by animals since (at least for me) the name conjures up images of caged creatures on display for human amusement. Anyway, young and full of hope, Hopps enrolls in the police academy, lands a job as the city’s first rabbit cop, and quickly thereafter becomes disillusioned by her role in the force. You can probably guess the challenges she faces: the chief is a jerk, the sleazy Mayor Lionheart (he’s a lion) cares about his image and not about the city’s crime wave, and the people Officer Hopps attempts to protect eventually take advantage of her naïveté. At the film’s emotional nadir, Hopps falls into a depression and heads home to farm carrots with her parents. It's the classic tale of a kid rebelling at twenty only to go mainstream at thirty. Admittedly, Hopps speeds through this transition much faster than a decade, but that shortened time period may be narratively justified by converting the film’s timeline into rabbit-years or something.

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by Bill Benzon

William P. Gottlieb, Library of Congress, c. 1946.

Duke Ellington was one of the great composers and bandleaders of the last century, and his band was one of the great bands. Touring, however, is unforgiving. Long hours sitting in a bus, meals if and when you can grab them, and gigs every night. And when you’ve played the same tunes with the same cats for decades, well, it can be rough to get up for a gig. Fact is there were times when Ellington’s musicians looked like they were asleep on the stage.

That’s how they appeared the one time I saw Ellington live. It was at one of those sessions held by the Left Bank Jazz Society in Baltimore’s Famous Ballroom on Sunday afternoons. This was probably in 1970, 71, or 72, long after Ellington’s prime years in the second quarter of the century. The Famous Ballroom was on North Charles Street, not too far from the train station, and up three flights of fairly wide stairs. It too was past its prime years, but the patrons of the Left Bank, they were always primed for good music. Some were dressed to the nines in their church Sunday best, the men in sharp suits, the women in elaborate hats; and some were dressed casually in jeans and sneakers.

That’s generally how it was, but I only specifically remember three things from that concert. Ellington dressed well and had a line of patter smooth as silk and brittle as glass. He’d been doing this a long time. That’s one. The guys slumped in their chairs like they’d just gotten off an all-night flight from Timbuktu. Perhaps they had. That’s two.

And three: Paul Gonsalves burned the place down with his tenor sax. I forget what the number was. All I remember is that Gonsalves strode out on stage to play a solo, but he didn’t position himself in front of the microphone. He stood to one side. A helpful member of the audience moved the mike directly in front of him as he started to blow. He stopped playing for a second, grabbed the mike angrily and shoved it aside. Not for him the brittle reverberations of amplified sound. Then he started blowing again. The pure juice of the natural human essence flowed from his sax to embrace us in its majesty and urgency.

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by Daniel Ranard

Nearly anyone who tells you about quantum mechanics is quick to tell you how weird it is. And perhaps any science that ventures outside the realm of the visible or the human is bound to be strange. Our universe is a strange place, filled with exotic objects whose undeniable strangeness is blunted only by familiarity: the double helix, rippling force fields, supernovae. But physicists will tell you that quantum mechanics is even stranger. They explain that distant photons may be intimately entangled, or that an electron may exist in a superposition of two places at once. They describe a world not only strange in its particulars but strange in its way of being. According to quantum theory, particles may lack definite properties until measured, and the outcomes of quantum experiments are fundamentally uncertain.

What should we make of these claims? Perhaps we should be deeply impressed. After all, quantum mechanics is not some niche of modern physics; physicists expect that the rules of quantum theory underlie all physical phenomena. And if taken seriously, these claims about quantum weirdness are claims about the nature of knowledge or existence itself. Philosophers and thinkers should take note.

But even though we might be impressed, we should also be suspicious. No definite properties, fundamental uncertainty… what could it all mean? It's hard to imagine how scientific experiments (or any line of investigation, really) might yield such bold claims. You worry that the physicists have taken their equations and their metaphors too seriously. Here it's helpful to borrow a perspective from operationalism, a school of thought in the philosophy of science. A staunch operationalist might say the real content of a physical theory lies only in the list of experimental predictions it makes: “If you build an experiment in this way, you will see result X; if you build an experiment in that way, you will see that result Y,” and so on. Any talk about invisible particles or fields then serves only to package and describe these predictions. Most philosophers agree this view is too simple, but it contains a point of truth: the language and concepts we use to describe our predictions are often a matter of taste and historical contingency. In fact, we expect that our most fundamental physical theories will be revealed as only useful approximations, undergirded by new theories with new descriptions.

Before we take claims of quantum weirdness seriously, we must ask whether the weirdness is a property of nature itself or only of our current description. This question is rarely broached in popular explanations of physics, or even in most physics classes. But the question stands: how do we know quantum theory will never be rephrased or replaced, that quantum weirdness is not just a figment of our odd descriptions?

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