by Michael Liss

I have a problem. Each December I write a political New Year’s ditty to send to friends and family. I’ve had a good time with them, even when the news (at least from my perspective) is less than cheery. I get to crib shamelessly from great authors of the past, ruin perfectly good metre with my tuneless ear, and throw in some real groaners. My “Mitchie at the Bat” is considered a classic of the genre, and even last year’s dirge-y “Wreck of the Hillary C” induced a small avalanche of comments from the similarly agonized.

But I’m blocked. Eleven months of government by cattle-prod has depleted my mirth supply, so, in a last-minute Hail Mary, I am going to recharge by pivoting to a dispassionate discourse about something we are all passionate about—money. Not Bitcoin, or something esoteric that’s way above my humble understanding, but plain old cash—the real stuff, actual specie, as in old coins.

I happen to have a few. Not many, and they don’t have much in the way of numismatic value, but they are a treasure trove of history, and history cheers me up. About a dozen assorted coins dating from the late 18th Century to 1892, all from a worn-out purse my grandmother found in her basement catacombs. Among them were some two-cent pieces from the 1860s, a half-dime, an 1803 large penny, a commemorative coin from the Columbian Exposition, and an absolutely exquisite 1826 Capped Bust half-dollar.

To a junkie like me (for history, not necessarily for coins) they are all wonderful. Collectively, they tell a story that starts with 16 states and ends with 44, of powdered wigs and multi-hour speechifying, several wars, horses and stagecoaches, cotton pickers and cotton merchants, the creation of whole new cities out of swamp, and the building of an empire (by whatever means necessary) that stretched across the continent.

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by Leanne Ogasawara

Einstein was adamant. He did not want a large public funeral.

He wanted to be immediately cremated with his ashes scattered before anyone had time to make a fuss.

Fair enough, right?

Einstein biographer Walter Isaacson reminds us of the 1727 funeral of Sir Isaac Newton. Like Einstein, Newton was a superstar of his day. And so not surprisingly, Newton was buried with the highest honors at Westminster Abbey in London. Pallbearers included not only the lord high chancellor, but two dukes and three earls. Most of the fellows of the Royal Society were there as well to honor one of the greatest scientists the world had ever known. Einstein, says Isaacson, could have easily commanded such a large-scale state funeral. For Einstein was held in similarly high esteem by the people of his time. President Eisenhower famously declared that no other man has contributed more to the expansion of knowledge in the 20th century than Einstein. Many felt he was the greatest man of the twentieth century and a state funeral would have been not only appropriate –but expected.

Einstein, however, had other ideas. And immediately after his death on April 18, 1955, he was quietly cremated in Trenton, New Jersey. This took place on the afternoon he died before most people had even heard the news. The cremation was attended by all of twelve people; after which his ashes were scattered in the nearby Delaware River, as his great friend and Princeton colleague Otto Nathan read a few lines from Goethe's poetry.

This quiet funeral, for me, perfectly captures the man that was Einstein. He had wanted to be quickly cremated with no fanfare because, he said, he did not want his final resting place to become an object of morbid fascination.

But, alas, this was not to be. In what is an absolutely outrageous story, Einstein's brain was stolen. It then took on a life of its own as kind traveling relic around the country.

How is this possible?

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by Akim "Hot Cha Cha" Reinhardt

*Omg, so excited about Prince Harry announcing he's getting hitched to the absolutely fabulous Meghan Markle. Way to go, royal family!

*The Trump presidency continues shifting Foucualtian microtechnologies power, including the reinforcement select biopower apparatuses around immigration and race but, despite this, has thoroughly betrayed earlier promises to disrupt capitalism!

*Yes, it is a major bummer that the Magnificent Markle won't be going by the title "Princess Meghan," thereby ruining the theme of many a birthday party, but at least the Windsor Castle clan can finally begin weeding out the hemophilia and polydactylism.

*The funny man from frigid Minnesota is in some serious hot water. And we're not talking about Lou Grant! Serial molester/groper/tongue-down-your-mouther/sleep-therapist-from-Hell Al Franken resigned from the Senate last week after a cohort of his peers pressured him to step down. Sadly, frothing, myopic Dems who value scoring political points and cocktail party Suart Smalley impersonations more than challenging America's ingrained misogyny could not be consoled by the great equalizer: Minnesota's Democratic governor is filling Franken's seat, which won't even be contested for nearly a year, so there's plenty of time to install and establish a new incumbent. No matter . . . the party's Kardashian wing values appearances over everything else, and is working fervently to remind each and every last American that so long as Franken didn't rape and murder toddler cancer patients, he's way, way better than Roy Moore!

*Hot Hollywood Rumor: Quentin Tarrantino is pitching an R-rated Start Trek film to franchise impresario J.J. Abrams, who's excited about the idea, according to early reports. And fans think the long running series of futuristic, interstellar morality plays is the prefect setting for Tarrantino to update his white boy gender and racial revenge fantasies while having actors casually toss around the word "nigger." Early casting possibilities include Samuel L. Jackson as a potty mouthed, hyper emotional Mr. Spock and Uma Thurman as a sword-wielding, heroin snorting, track suit bedecked Klingon warlord. Hell yeah!

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by Bill Benzon

Franco Moretti and his colleagues at the Stanford Literary Lab have collected a number of their pamphlets into a book:

Canon/Archive: Studies in Quantitative Formalism by Franco Moretti (Author, Editor), Mark Algee-Hewitt, Sarah Allison, Marissa Gemma, Ryan Heuser, Matthew Jockers, Holst Katsma, Long Le-Khac, Dominique Pestre, Erik Steiner, Amir Tevel, Hannah Walser, Michael Witmore, Irena Yamboliev, published by n+1.

That book is the occasion of this essay, which thus resembles a review in some, but only some, respects.

If it’s only a review that interests you, then perhaps I can save you the trouble of a rather long read.

Canon/Archive is an important book of literary criticism, likely as important as any published this year. It is also rather technical in places. But you can skate over those spots if you’re determined to read the whole book. Look at the charts and diagrams, they’re the heart of the book.

That in itself is important to note; the book is full of charts and diagrams. That is unheard of in standard literary criticism. It’s a sign of the fact that Canon/Archive embodies a new mode of thought, perhaps the first since the advent of the so-called New Criticism before World War II (though mostly after the war).

A new mode of thought! Heavens to Betsy!

As Moretti notes in his preface, “Images come first … because – by visualizing empirical findings – they constitute the specific object of study of computational criticism” (xi). Think of it, visually, of course. You run the programs, visualize the results, and then write the text to support, explicate, and reflect on the implications of those visualizations.

Toto, I've a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore.

For those who decide to brave the whole essay, here's a piece of advice: If you find something boring or a bit picky, do what I always do, skip over it. You can always come back.

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by Evert Cilliers aka Adam Ash

When President Trump took the office of President in the year 2017, few Americans could have predicted the huge changes to come under the rulers that would follow him — changes inspired by his unprecedented example.

And few could have predicted that this man, who started with an approval rating lower than any president before him, down in the toilet, would end up with an approval rating so high up to heaven's ceiling, it even satisfied him, a man who loved to be adored. His ego feasted on his people's approval like bees feast on nectar, like kids feast on Big Macs with fries on the side, like flies feast on feces.

In fact, nothing much might have happened in the Trump years were it not for three events that came to pass late during his tenure, events that came to be known as the Unholy Trifecta.

The first event was the drowning of Miami in a hurricane much worse than any preceding one, which hit that city with spectacular results, undoubtedly occasioned by accelerated climate change.

President Trump called in the Army to install order when roaming bands of brigands began to rob and kill to survive in the chaos (or so the official line from the White House averred) which set the template for other take-overs by the Army of other cities in various states of trouble, mostly financial, brought about by Republican Governors who had slashed taxes to such a degree that there was no money left for schools, which led to massive protests, which led to the President sending in the Army to install order, and which normalized the military occupation of more and more cities.

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by Dave Maier

It’s that time of year again already – time to remind everyone that it’s that time of year again! I must admit I didn’t listen to a whole lot of new music this year, but I have definitely rounded up a good selection for you, even if there’s probably a whole lot out there that we won’t find out about until later. Such is life in the abundant times in which we live. The names here will be mostly familiar to regular listeners, but I’ve included a couple of oddities as well. Here’s to a happy and healthy 2018 for all!

[direct link if widget fails]

Yagya – The Great Attractor [Stars and Dust]

Yagya is Aðalsteinn Guðmundsson from Iceland. His latest release is very much in the vein of his earlier ones, e.g. 2009’s Rigning, which is probably my favorite. Ambient listeners might have to get used to the dance-floor pulse of Yagya’s music, as inherited from his major influence, Wolfgang Voigt (a.k.a. Gas), but that’s easily done, given his exquisite spacial and melodic sensibilities.

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by Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse

Although the word "democracy" is commonly used to denote all that is good in politics, democracy is a dubious proposal. It is the thesis that you may be required to live according to rules that you reject, simply because those rules are favored by others. What's more, democracy is the proposal that you may be rightfully forced to live according to rules that are supported only by others who are ignorant, misinformed, deluded, corrupt, irrational, or worse. Further still, under democracy, you may be rightfully forced to live according to the rules favored by a majority of your fellow citizens even though you are able to demonstrate their ignorance and irrationality, and despite the fact that you can debunk the rationales they offer in support the rules that you oppose. Democracy apportions political power to citizens as such rather than according to their ability to wield it responsibly.

The aspiration of democracy is that with its freedoms, we allow reasons to be exchanged so that the best will come to be recognized. Note that this is true of democracy at its best. And we know that real-world democracy is far from the ideal. We are in fact forced to live according to rules that are favored by ignorant, misinformed, and irrational citizens; and many of the rules we are forced to live by are defensible only by way of the flawed rationales embraced by the ignorant. In real-world democracy, we are indeed at the mercy of our irrational and ignorant fellow citizens. Knowing this, politicians and officials cater to majority irrationality, and, once in power, they govern for the sake of gaining reelection.

It's difficult to see what could justify democracy. Maybe this is as it should be? Even under ideal conditions, political orders are always coercive, and so the task of justifying any mode of politics should be onerous. And the difficulty of justifying democracy should increase under non-ideal conditions such as those we currently face. Part of the task of democracy, even in its most ideal versions, is to critically assess the prevailing democratic order. And one way to assess a democracy is to envision alternative arrangements that might be superior.

In a recent book, provocatively titled Against Democracy, Jason Brennan takes up the chore of assessing existing democracy. His central contention is appropriately modest. He claims that if there is a workable nondemocratic political arrangement that can reasonably be expected to more reliably produce morally better policy decisions than existing democratic arrangements, we ought to try that alternative arrangement. Ultimately, he identifies a range of alternatives that he alleges will outperform democracy, all of which instantiate a political form he calls (borrowing a term coined by David Estlund) epistocracy, the rule of the knowers.

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by Misha Lepetic

As for you, my galvanized friend, you want a heart.
~ The Wizard of Oz

There is an old joke that deserves to be made popular again. A CEO is touring the company's newest factory. The manager, with a great deal of pride, points out how everything is automated. As the tour reaches the final room, the CEO notices a man sitting sullenly in the corner, with a leashed dog sitting next to him. Somewhat surprised, the CEO asks why the man is there, to which the manager responds, "It's his job to feed the dog." Stumped, the CEO asks why the factory would need a dog. The manager responds, quite matter-of-factly, "Why, to keep the man from touching the equipment."

At least one telling of the joke can be attributed to Warren G. Bennis, a scholar of organizational psychology and more-or-less originator of the field of leadership studies. But what is more interesting to me is the fact that Bennis's version of the joke goes back to 1991—an indication that we have been thinking about technological unemployment for a long time. When I originally heard the joke, probably sometime in the mid-90s, I savored it for its absurdist connotations: man and dog, locked in an eternal, Monty Python-esque loop of feeding and guarding, so as to guarantee no interference in the well-tempered functioning of the machine that has almost entirely replaced them both.

But these days what resonates for me more profoundly is the notion that these two still have jobs, regardless of how marginal such jobs may be; someone still has to feed the dog, and someone still has to keep the man from messing up the machinery that does the actual work. The real subtlety in the joke is that any presence should be needed at all, and yet it is somehow still required. The jobs—for both man and dog—are a fig leaf, but ostensibly the owners of the factory have decided that such a fig leaf is necessary, or at least desirable. Why is this?

I was reminded of this joke when recently contemplating the ubiquitous headlines that sensationalize the wholesale replacement of human labor by non-human capital. Unsurprisingly, the mainstream media prefers the drama of entire sectors of labor being sidelined. For example, an evergreen topic is the imminent wipe-out of heavy truck driving, which accounts for 1.8 million jobs in the United States, or nearly doubling to 3.5 million jobs, if you include taxis, delivery vans and the like. But paradigms are rarely overturned quite so rapidly, and the story that is already unfolding before us is much trickier to unravel, and more interesting.

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by Jonathan Kujawa

At the University of Oklahoma last week.

While considering topics for this month's 3QD essay, the US Senate voted to approve a tax bill which not only dramatically reshapes US tax law, but says a great deal about our society's values. We're in an era where research and education are dramatically underfunded and underappreciated, to be knowledgeable about a subject is an automatic disqualification, and where what things which should be a question of fact and evidence are being dragged down into the political muck. I thought about writing about the Dark Ages and how the advancement of knowledge is not guaranteed. About the danger of eating our seed corn. About how it feels like we are truly living in the darkest timeline [1]. But here at 3QD this is preaching to the choir. I'd rather light a candle which can be shared with others. I'd rather talk about Exploding Dots.

In math even the most innocuous ideas can lead to undiscovered worlds. All we need is equal doses of creativity and bravery. The creativity to ask crazy questions and the bravery to try crazy things. As I tell my students, bravery in math should be easy to come by. There is no harm in trying. After all, this isn't brain surgery or nuclear engineering — nobody will die if we screw up! — just erase and try again.

The really scarce commodity is creativity. After 18+ years of schools drilling the creativity right out of your skull, it's awfully hard to let your mathematical freak flag fly. As David Hilbert said when he heard one of his students had dropped out to study poetry, "Good, he did not have enough imagination to become a mathematician". But, with some practice, we can undo the damage of our early years and start to see the wonders of the mathematical universe. Sometimes all it takes is a new perspective.

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by Jalees Rehman

Can neuroscience help identify individuals who are most prone to engage in violent criminal behavior? Will it help the legal system make decisions about sentencing, probation, parole or even court-mandated treatments? A panel of researchers lead by Dr. Russell Poldrack from Stanford University recently reviewed the current state of research and outlined the challenges that need to be addressed for "neuroprediction" to gain traction. The use of scientific knowledge to predict violent behavior is not new. Social factors such as poverty and unemployment increase the risk for engaging in violent behavior. Twin and family studies suggest that genetic factors also significantly contribute to antisocial and violent behavior but the precise genetic mechanisms remain unclear. A substantial amount of research has focused on genetic variants of the MAOA gene (monoamine oxidase A, an enzyme involved in the metabolism of neurotransmitters). Variants of MAOA have been linked to increased violent behavior but these variants are quite common – up to 40% of the US population may express this variant! As pointed out by John Horgan in Scientific American, it is impossible to derive meaningful predictions of individual behavior based on the presence of such common gene variants.

One fundamental problem of using social and genetic predictors of criminal violent behavior in the legal setting is the group-to-individual problem. Carrying a gene or having been exposed to poverty as a child may increase the group risk for future criminal behavior but it tells us little about an individual who is part of the group. Most people who grow up in poverty or carry the above-mentioned MAOA gene variant do not engage in criminal violent behavior. Since the legal system is concerned with an individual's guilt and his/her likelihood to commit future violent crimes, group characteristics are of little help. This is where brain imaging may represent an advancement because it can assess individual brains. Imaging individual brains might provide much better insights into a person's brain function and potential for violent crimes than more generic assessments of behavior or genetic risk factors.

Poldrack and colleagues cite a landmark study published in 2013 by Eyal Aharoni and colleagues in which 96 adult offenders underwent brain imaging with a mobile MRI scanner before being released from one of two New Mexico state correctional facilities. The prisoners were followed for up to four years after their release and the rate of being arrested again was monitored.

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by Dwight Furrow

Contemporary discussions of wine quality tend to oscillate unhelpfully between subjectivism and objectivism. One side argues that wine quality is thoroughly subjective because individual differences among tasters preclude agreement on the nature or quality of what is being tasted. The other side points to objective, scientific analyses of chemical components detected through taste and smell, but such analyses cannot explain what makes a wine distinctive or aesthetically valuable. Thus, neither side can explain our tasting practices and the attention we pay to wine quality. If you're a subjectivist there is no such thing as wine quality. But within objective, scientific analysis, aesthetic quality never shows up. To extricate ourselves from this interminable dialectic we need a clearer understanding of what wine is–an ontology of wine if you will. This might seem like a strange question. Don't we know what wine is? Wine is a thing, a liquid containing alcohol that we drink for pleasure or consume with food. But herein lies the problem. We tend to think of objects in the world, including wine grapes and bottles of wine, as inert substances just sitting there until we decide to do something with them. If the grapes or the wine are of interest, it's because we confer value on them. This is a mistake because it reinforces the unhelpful subject/object dualism just mentioned. But what's the alternative?

I want to sketch the alternative by invoking some recent work in ontology articulated by the political philosopher Jane Bennett in her book Vibrant Matter. Bennett does not discuss wine but her way of linking the ontology of things to an aesthetic appreciation of them can help make sense of our love of wine and expose the limits of these notions of subjectivity and objectivity that persist in our discourse.

Bennett argues that all matter including the inorganic is pulsing with life. Obviously the word ‘life' has a special meaning for Bennett since we don't normally think of inorganic objects as alive. Essentially, by "life", she means the ability to act and be acted upon. When thinking of objects as stable, largely passive objects until acted upon by something else, the most important actors are human beings, fulsome subjects actively manipulating the world to serve human ends. With regard to wine such a picture seems on the surface quite defensible. After all, we make the wine and enjoy the wine, and wine is as deeply a part of human culture as blue jeans and automobiles. But Bennett argues this picture of the relationship between human beings and things is misleading and incomplete. She shows how worms, a dead rat, or gun powder residue have the capacity to act, influencing their environment in ways not intended and often not comprehended by human beings. Worms, it turns out, make vegetable mold and thus seedlings possible and protect buried artifacts from decay, thus helping both to enable and preserve human culture. A bit of detritus, gunpowder residue, can catalyze a jury to judgment. A dead rat surprisingly sparks an aesthetic response.

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by Brooks Riley

For most of us, the act of looking at a painting is, and should be, subjective. The baggage we bring to the confrontation–how we see, what we notice, what we know, how we feel, what we like or don’t like—is as individual as a finger print, and often highly idiosyncratic. Like the proverbial horse, we can be led to a painting, but we cannot be made to like it—if we’re honest. We may well like it, or appreciate it (divorcing ‘like’ from ‘value’), even if we’ve been led to it. But we can also be cajoled, or conned, into liking it or appreciating it because we’ve been told it’s a masterpiece.

Sometimes I feel I’m being stalked by Leonardo da Vinci. He tiptoes in and out of my life at irregular intervals, calling attention to himself and exhorting me to believe in his painterly genius. It’s aesthetic harassment, and he’s had plenty of enablers over the centuries, telling me I should give in to him.

The first time I saw the Mona Lisa, at 14, the first thing I noticed were her eyebrows, or rather the lack of them. Like a homing pigeon, my attention swiftly bypassed the painting as gestalt and zoomed directly into a detail that delivered a personal shock of recognition. I didn’t see the smile, I didn’t try to read her expression, I didn’t try to see where she was looking, I didn’t notice the landscape outside the window behind her. I was fixated on that delicate bone along which her eyebrows might have stretched like a delicate punctuation mark on an expression.

In spite of my dark brown hair, I was born with almost no eyebrows, only a few beige weeds scattered helter-skelter in a landscape of pale skin, invisible even from a short distance. At 14, when all my friends had lovely, well-defined brows, my lack of them was a source of adolescent insecurity that eventually faded when the teasing stopped.

By the time I saw the Mona Lisa for the second time, at 22, I’d found out that Lisa shaved off her eyebrows according to Renaissance fashion–I was born too late. This may be what led bandleader Mitch Miller to tell me, when we met, that I looked like a few Madonnas he’d seen at the Frick. It had to be the eyebrows, or the lack of them.

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by Ashutosh Jogalekar

Primitive science began when mankind looked upward at the sky and downward at the earth and asked why. Modern science began when Galileo and Kepler and Newton answered these questions using the language of mathematics and started codifying them into general scientific laws. Since then scientific discovery has been constantly driven by curiosity, and many of the most important answers have come from questions of the kind asked by a child: Why is the sky blue? Why is grass green? Why do monkeys look similar to us? How does a hummingbird flap its wings? With the powerful tool of curiosity came the even more powerful fulcrum of creativity around which all of science hinged. Einstein’s imagining himself on a light beam was a thoroughly creative act; so were Ada Lovelace’s thoughts about a calculating machine as doing something beyond mere calculation, James Watson and Francis Crick’s DNA model-building exercise, Enrico Fermi’s sudden decision to put a block of paraffin wax in the path of neutrons.

What is common to all these flights of fancy is that they were spontaneous, often spur-of-the-moment, informed at best by meager data and mostly by intuition. If Einstein, Lovelace and Fermi had paused to reconsider their thoughts because of the absence of hard evidence or statistical data, they might at the very least been discouraged from exploring these creative ideas further. And yet that is what I think the future Einsteins and Lovelaces of our day are in danger of doing. They are in danger of doing this because they are increasingly living in a world where statistics and data-driven decisions are becoming the beginning and end of everything, where young minds are constantly cautioned to not speculate before they have enough data.

We live in an age where Big Data, More Data and Still More Data seem to be all consuming, looming over decisions both big and mundane; from driving to ordering pet food to getting a mammogram. We are being told that we should not make any decision pending its substantiation through statistics and large-scale data analysis. Now, I will be the first one to advocate making decisions based on data and statistics, especially in an era where sloppy thinking and speculation based on incomplete or non-existent data seems to have turned into the very air which the media and large segments of the population breathe. Statistics has especially been found to be both paramount and sorely lacking in making decisions, and books like Daniel Kahneman’s “Thinking Fast and Slow” and Nate Silver’s “The Signal and the Noise” have stressed how humans are intrinsically bad at probabilistic and statistical thinking and how this disadvantage leads to them consistently making wrong decisions. It seems that a restructuring of our collective thinking process that is grounded in data would be a good thing for everyone.

But there are inherent problems with implementing this principle, quite apart from the severe limitations on creative speculation that an excess of data-based thinking imposes.

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by Paul Braterman

EVOLUTION: What the Fossils Say and why it Matters, Donald R. Prothero (2^nd edition)

If you are interested in evolution, get this book. And make sure that your library gets it. And your children's high school library. Incidentally, it's incredible value; list price $35.00/£27.95 from Columbia University Press, with over 400 lavishly illustrated pages.

The book is a comprehensive survey of the fossil record, supplemented at times with other evidence, and framed as one long argument against creationism. It opens with a general discussion of the ideas behind current evolutionary thinking, moves on to a survey of specific topics in (mainly animal) evolution, from the origins of life to the emergence of humanity, and concludes with a brief discussion of the threat that creationism poses to rational thinking. The argument is laid out clearly in the seemingly artless prose of an accomplished writer in love with his subject matter, with plain language explanations that presume no prior knowledge, while the detailed discussions of specific topics give enough detail to be of value, I would imagine, even to a professional in the field. The author is an experienced educator and researcher, with thirty books ranging from the highly technical to the popular, some 300 research papers, and numerous public appearances to his credit, and the work is copiously illustrated with photos, diagrams, and drawings by the author's colleague, Carl Buell. These illustrations are an integral part of the work, graphically displaying the richness of the data at the heart of the argument.

The first edition of this book appeared in 2007, when it was the year's American Association of Publishers outstanding book in earth science, and while progress in the past decade has been less dramatic than in the two decades preceding, nonetheless this update is most timely.

The author's Prologue lays out the agenda: "Instead of the embarrassingly poor [fossil] record that Darwin faced in 1859, we now have an embarrassment of riches." To which one might now also add the records in molecular biology, embryology, and historical biogeography. The final paragraphs of the book summarise the motivation: "Evolution matters because science matters. Science matters because it is the pre-eminent story of our age, an epic saga about who we are, where we come from, and where we are going."

As an integral part of the author's strategy, we have quotations from creationist writers that show their arguments to be at best uninformed, at worst consciously dishonest. To a UK audience, this may seem excessive. In a US context, I fear it is not. In any case, the creationists' errors serve to clarify the logic of the genuine science. There is an extensive bibliography at the end, and additional reading suggestions at the end of each chapter, although I would have welcomed some way of relating these to specifics in the text.

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by Claire Chambers

In her 1989 memoir Meatless Days, Sara Suleri famously writes that 'leaving Pakistan was, of course, tantamount to giving up the company of women'. She goes on to explain that in Pakistan womanhood did not truly exist as a concept: 'we were too busy for that, just living, and conducting precise negotiations with what it meant to be a sister or a child or a wife or a mother or a servant'.

Having left Pakistan recently after a whirlwind week giving and attending talks, I've had the opportunity to reflect on the acuity of Suleri's words. For me, women's company is always a large part of what it means to visit the Islamic Republic. This was all the more true on the recent trip, since a hotel mix-up led to my sharing a room in Mandi Bahauddin for one night with a young female lecturer from Lahore. As the two of us got on with 'just living', we stayed up late talking about love, academia, and religion. Amidst much laughter, we showed each other Bollywood Thumkas and energetic Zumba.

Earlier, in Islamabad, I had spent time with an old friend who had studied for her PhD in England and now teaches at International Islamic University. Aroosa was a shining example of South Asia's famed hospitality, taking me up the winding mountainous roads for a walk at the foot of the Margalla Hills. I hadn't seen this verdant view — its serenity only broken by insouciant monkeys — since the 1990s, except in films such as Hammad Khan's Slackistan. At Margalla Hills too, I saw a sign emblazoned with the words 'Long Live Pak-China Friendship'. This was a salutary reminder that while the West tends to focus on longstanding Indo-Pak hostilities and the post-9/11 coinage of Af-Pak, Pakistan has lower-key but important relationships with its two other neighbours: Iran and China. The China-Pakistan Economic Corridor or CPEC includes an ambitious and controversial road being built to connect the northern border with China at the Khunjerab Pass, through Gilgit-Baltistan and Rawalpindi down to the deep sea port of Gwadar in Balochistan. The 'all-weather' Sino-Pakistani relationship is viewed askance by many Indians. For example, the scholars Parvaiz Ahmad and Bawa Singh describe the ramping up of the friendship as a new Great Game for the region. Scarcely contemplating this geo-political maneovring, Aroosa and I sampled the most eye-wateringly delicious paan I had ever tasted (admittedly I had little experience to draw on!) and squinted at as much of the view of Pakistan's capital as was afforded through the smog.

Smog! I had never seen anything like it, but was reminded of reading about the 'pea-soupers' of Dickens' London. Friends told me that when this miasma first descended about a decade ago, they were initially charmed by the thought of mists and mellow fruitfulness. However, amidst much choking, the smarting of eyes, and poor visibility, Pakistanis were quickly disabused of this romantic notion.

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by Max Sirak

(Click here or scroll down for audio version.)

"As above, so below" is possibly the best known Hermetic aphorism. The phrase itself comes from The Emerald Tablet of Hermes Trismegistus. An actual tablet that was translated into Latin during the 12th Century and quickly became a favorite of medieval alchemists, and then a bit later someone whom you may have heard of.

His name was Isaac Newton. You know, the guy with the apple who "discovered" gravity. Well, turns out Ol' Zac was quite the mystic. In fact, some believe "As above, so below" is the seed which sparked Newton to begin searching for the similarities between ourselves and the stars.

This principle is said to be represented symbolically in a couple places. One is the six-pointed Star of David, with its two equilateral triangles overlapping and pointing in opposite directions. Another is in the Tarot. The Magician card raises one arm above his head to the sky and drops the other below his waist to the ground.

While I can't necessarily speak, authoritatively, to the origins of symbols that pre-date me, one by many thousands of years, or what precisely motivated a luminary of science to put forth ideas forever changing they way we look at our world, I do think the phrase "As above, so below" could use an addendum:

"As it begins, so too it ends."

In the last couple of years I've noticed six similarities between the beginnings of our lives and their ends. It's almost as though life is like one of those nifty pieces of art where a centerline divides two identical-though-reversed images creating a spectacular and intricate pattern when viewed together.

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by Christopher Bacas

The month ended anticlimactically. We’d done shitty business for the hotel and, due to some nastiness caused by remnants of our ship crew, hadn’t endeared ourselves to staff. Heading inland, the rhythm section came unmoored. Bass and drums baited each other; refusing to listen and digging in hard. Their beat was a floor covered in marbles: balance gone, you ducked low and grabbed the sides to stay upright. On a tiny stage in Salt Lake City, we closed with A’s original theme; a bizarre dirge with tribal drums, cantorial clarinet and peppery brass commentary. When we cutoff the last note, the curtain was closed. I heard angry words behind, then turned to see T down his bass and walk straight into the trap set, fists raised. Jack hastily de-throned himself and threw his arms forward. Cymbals and drums toppled. Manager waded in and got between them.

T’s lip quivered as he paced the stage between rounds. Jack motor-mouthed himself to the dressing room, leaving his gear in a heap. This wasn’t going to be resolved anytime soon. A divine intervention followed. T caught a bad cold; pneumonia, really. He couldn’t sleep at night and the bus became a torture chamber. He writhed, shivering and hacking, voice a sandpaper squawk, refusing any help. Soloist suggested T check-in to a hospital for a few days. Guitar could play T’s instrument. In Boston, Guitar often gigged on bass. He sounded great and it was a simple way to make money. Those gigs destroyed his hands, so Guitar didn’t relish playing bass in a big band, but he’d do it to help out. Sitting behind the driver, unshaven, eyes cratered, T hated the idea.

“FUCK YOU!”

He croaked from his diesel deathbed.

“You’re not gonna take my gig!”

“I don’t WANT your gig. I don’t like playing bass. Take a couple days off, man”

Soloist added,

“Chrissakes, T, let him play!”

“No fuckin’ way. He wants to steal my gig!”

In a reversal, Guitar was frustrated by someone else’s paranoia.

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by G. M. Trujillo, Jr.

Among the gray crags and russet stalagmites of Hades, Sisyphus heaves a boulder. Zeus, the king god, banished him there after he tricked Thanatos and Persephone, thus making a fool of death and rebirth. He thwarted the gods, so they thwart him. He must endlessly haul the rock up a mountain, but before it reaches the crest, the enchanted boulder crashes back to the base. Sisyphus must retreat, heave again. Toil upward, slump downward. Already in the underworld, not even death may liberate him. So there he trembles and labors. His sinews creak; his lungs gasp. The gods tremble and gasp as well. With laughter.

Homer and Ovid immortalized these poetic images, but why has Sisyphus inspired so much philosophical reflection? Traditionally, philosophers analyze the myth to understand the meaning of life. We see ourselves in Sisyphus and muse about the implications. Here, I continue that tradition by asking: how can Sisyphus endure his struggle yet judge his life worthwhile? I argue that Sisyphus’s life is meaningful because of the relationships he has with others. The myth of Sisyphus affirms that social activity consecrates our lives with significance.

Many interpretations consider Sisyphus only as an individual and thus neglect the fact that he lived with others, just as we do. Theories about meaning in life should reflect the profound and intricate nature of the social interactions we cherish. By exploring the social aspects of life, we stumble upon an insight: a person’s life may be made meaningful when others view it as such, when we enjoy rich relationships with others. Maybe Sisyphus could find his life meaningful through an act of reflective defiance, constructing meaning for and through himself. Maybe his participation in rituals of the Greek afterlife contributes meaning to his existence. However, even when subjective interpretation or objective activities fail, our friends, family, and lovers anoint our lives with meaning.

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by Thomas R. Wells

Let us assume that the automation of our job tasks by algorithms and our physical displacement by robots proceeds at a rapid pace. What is the future of work? Will it be awful or will it be nice?

Some people focus on the jobs that robots can’t do now, or not very well, such as cleaning toilets or programming other robots. But there aren’t enough of those jobs to be interesting. Others focus on who owns the robots, and what kind of jobs they might like the rest of us to do, such as Downton Abbey type flunkies. But this seems too determinedly dystopian.

It makes more sense to treat the future of work as the economic question it appears to be – at least at first. Especially since we have two hundred years of historical experience with technological revolutions. When technology displaces human employment, what generally happens to the humans? In every case, humans move down the value chain, moving into work of less economic value than before.

For example, in 1800 the overwhelming majority of people still worked on the land, even in Adam Smith’s Britain. They had to. Producing food required enormous amounts of human labour. Most people spent most of their income on bread, which is not surprising since that was the main product of the economy. As the agricultural revolution spread new technologies and methods, productivity per worker soared. Millions of workers were no longer required. Those workers moved to the cities and the new economic opportunities in factories. They went from growing food (essential to human survival) to making things that were merely nice to have (helpful to human living). A similar thing happened when factories became so efficient at making things that we could afford to transfer most of the human labour force to services (around 75% of most developed economies).

In other words, automation increases productivity, the amount of economic value a society can produce with the same inputs of labour and materials. That means we can have all the things we used to have, plus we now also have some spare labour that we can use to produce things lower down on our collective list of priorities, such as mass higher education and healthcare and telemarketing. The reason we didn’t make those things already is that they were not valuable enough to be worth the cost of giving up anything higher on the list. Technology driven economic change increases general prosperity by expanding the frontier of what an economy can produce, and therefore what the people in it can consume. (How those consumption possibilities are distributed is a different, political rather than economic question.)

Applying this logic to our current revolution in automation, it seems reasonable to conclude that the future of human work will be producing things even further down our list of priorities than what most of us do now. What might that look like?

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by Samir Chopra

One winter vacation some years ago, as my wife and I waited for a ferry from Fajardo in Puerto Rico to the island of Culebra, I noticed on the walls of our waiting room a poster for the Cayo Luis Pena in the Culebra National Wildlife Refuge. As I gazed at dazzling blue waters and painfully white glistening sands, bewitched by the promise of the colorful aquatic creatures that frolicked below the waters of an oceanic snorkeling and scuba-diving paradise, I felt myself succumb, yet again, to the tyranny of the guidebook. I felt the terror of that most fearful of things: the inadequate, not properly-realized, not fully-treasured, missed-opportunity vacation; the tourism poster I was gazing at provided an artful reminder of all I stood to lose if I did not ‘get it right’ and see the sights it showcased. There is a mode of oppression the travel guidebook and poster have the market cornered on: making us feel like failures even when we manage to put down the laptop, take our fingers off the keyboard, dock the smartphone, and head out, bravely putting away our calendars, for the wilderness.

The artfully put-together tourism poster—like illustrations of improbably delicious-looking concoctions in cookbooks—promises us a glimpse of the impossible, the inaccessible, and the too-beautiful. Its photographs of attractions are invariably of ‘postcard’ or ‘coffee-table book’ quality, fit to be mailed to friends; they suggest the ‘attraction’ is not possible to actually visit: surely the photographer was granted ‘special’ access to the Shangri-La that beams at us from the poster? But the poster and the guidebook assure us with a devastating twin salvo that this place has been visited, and more damagingly, that if we do not visit it, we have somehow failed to meet some unknown evaluative standards for vacations. The guidebook does this acutely with listings of the “essential,” the “must-see,” the “ten things any visitor to X must do.” These are resisted by pronouncements like “That’s only what the editors of that guidebook think; what do they know?” But such rhetorical bluster is just that; under the weight of the prescription, our resolve crumbles. We become acutely conscious of the need to play by the guidebook and the poster’s playbook: Visit this place! Have these experiences! Or else!

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