The Joy of Fair Division

by Jonathan Kujawa

If you have a sibling you are familiar with the problem of dividing up something desirable between selfish people. For some things, like ice cream or money, your only preference is to get as much as you can. If you divide it equally, then at least nobody will be envious of anyone else. My parents used the trick of letting one of us make the divisions, but in the knowledge that the other kids would get first pick. NASA can only dream of the atomic scale cuts made by me and my siblings [1]!

But what happens if the item in question isn't all the same? If it's a cake, a corner piece with roses made of frosting might be more desirable than a piece from the center. In an inheritance, a taxidermy collection and jewelry are hardly the same. Worse, each person might have very different preferences! My brother has a huge sweet tooth. He loves frosting while I'd definitely steer clear of corner pieces. One person's mounted deer head is another person's diamond earrings.

Sweets_pastries_pastry_shop_cake_cakes_bakery_eating_food-1109237

Delicious Baked Alaska

You might guess math has useful things to say about dividing things. But we'll soon see that there are more than a few surprises, too. The first question you might ask is if it is even possible to always divide something into two equal pieces with a single straight cut. It's not too hard to see if you have a single uniform object (say a plain cake), then no matter its shape, a single, well-chosen slice with a Samurai sword will split it into two equal sized pieces.

But what if your cake is a Baked Alaska? Surely you can't make a single cut which equally splits the cake and the ice cream and the chocolate drizzled on top? The Ham Sandwich Theorem is a remarkable result which says that no matter how elaborately intertwined three objects are, it is always possible to make a single cut which separates each of the three into two equal sized pieces!

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Impossible Things

by Tamuira Reid

Mike and Ingrid, New York City

I sleep with her. I sleep next to a box with my wife in it. And I probably always will. I know it sounds crazy and people would shake their heads and give a whole lot of poor Mikes’sif they found out about it but I don’t give a fuck. I can’t let go. I can’t. Like, I literally can’t. I wake up in the middle of the night and I’m wrapped-up around the box like it’s her.

The super came over to fix the radiator and saw the box in the bed. He didn’t say anything, finished his work and left. But he knew what was in that box. His wife Cheryl died of cancer and he has a box, too. It’s on an altar next to his TV.

Right before she died, Ingrid told me don’t you dare put me in the ground, Mike. Anywhere but the ground. We had never talked about cremation and burial or really death much before. She was thirty-two when she died. It just never came up.

Vera and Lynn, Ohio

We met when we were in our twenties and came out to our families together. It was hard back then, telling people you were gay. I’m an 81 year-old woman and it’s still hard. People can be pretty ignorant. But none of that bothered Vera much. She never really did care too much what people thought of her, or us. Let them talk, she’d always tell me. Makes us look much more interesting than we really are. It’s been almost thirty years since she died and I can still hear her voice in my head. I know people worry about this, forgetting what their loved ones sound like. Never been my problem. Maybe I’m lucky or cursed, who knows?

Car accident. Drunk driver. I don’t like to talk about the accident. What’s to say about it? Some jerk wiped her off the face of the earth that night. He’ll be in jail for a long time and she’s gone and life is just really, really unfair, isn’t it? I had her cremated and spread her ashes in our garden out back. Still think it’s the best garden in the neighborhood, hands down. And I have to say the roses have never looked better. Maybe that is a little grotesque to think, but Vera always did lean towards the dark side of things. She’d appreciate me using her as fertilizer.

I’m moving to Cleveland next week, to my son’s home. My granddaughter, Nina, brilliant young thing, is heading off to Smith and I’m taking her room. It’s large enough but I don’t want to leave my house. Maybe I’ll hide in the garden.

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perceptions

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William Klein, Gerard Ifert, Wojciech Zamecznik. 1950s-1960s

"… In the post-war years, these three photographers managed to revolutionize photography, despite its young history in the arts. Through photomontages, formal abstractions, they became predecessors and influences of the Bauhaus, a school that promotes the alliance between the fine arts and the applied arts. The artist takes center stage and is in charge. The photographer becomes a painter, the camera, his pencil. To draw with light, as most would define photography."

"Photographisme" at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, through January 29, 2018.

More here and here.

Arjun Appadurai: My Imaginary Invitation to the Jaipur Literature Festival

by Arjun Appadurai

62648094Dear Professor Appadurai,

We are writing with great trepidation to invite you to the Jaipur Literary Festival this year. You have never been invited to this Festival over its many years of star-studded glory, unbridled creativity and collaborative celebrity, because we have hesitated to include someone with your fame, stature and credentials to our humble (yet magnificent) event. It is also the case that we do not generally support serious books with too many footnotes. Unless they are published by one of our already established cognoscenti, who sometimes dabble in scholarship of various kinds.

But we digress. We want you to give a plenary talk, during which all other panels, promotional events, political processions, private parties or sexual interactions will be strictly prohibited. This can be at a location and time of your choosing. We suggest the Taj Rambagh Palace lawns at sunset, with a special rendition of Raag Yaman will be performed by a global orchestra conducted by A.K. Rahman.

We are aware, of course, that Rajasthan is a slightly controversial setting, where bride-burnings, film censorship, mob lynching, beef bans, cow protection militias and murders of Dalits, sometimes upset the royal serenity of our palaces, forts, villages and luxury hotels. But we assure you that we guarantee your security, comfort and peace of mind, unless you say something that could hurt the feelings of the sponsors, the Rajasthan government or the Karni Sena, though these are all composed of individuals who are usually entirely free of feelings.

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Two Poems About Mirrors

by Amanda Beth Peery

I once had a handheld plastic mirror
that reflected one feature at a time:
the wrist, the blushing shell of an ear or
lips pulled into a grimace or smile.

For a while I gazed into water and ice
to see my vision in ripples and whiteness
from every lake-rimmed forest shore,
I got older, and I wanted more:

a long, thin mirror on the back of my door
mirror-chips glued to the walls and glinting
a clean bathroom mirror divided in four
foldable parts—no, I wanted even more:

mirrors on ceilings and closet doors
and a looking glass showing that other thing
my double with its dark core, rising
and taking its form, in light, of wings.

. . .

"Poetry is also the precise language of getting lost."

―Abdelmajid Benjelloun

. . .

At first everything lived
in the Mirror Kingdom
under the lake: the trees
with wavering trunks stood
sideways, the sides of faces
were permanently switched.

Everything was soft and
magnified. The spaces
between things were known to shift,
and things would shrink and grow:
a root's thin tendril wound in soil
would become in a blink

a dark river of smooth bark.
The animals had ink-
black coats and dreamed loudly
through the night, calling to
the whirling stars crossing close
over ground—in the Mirror

Kingdom, there was no gap
between soil and sky. You could
catch stars in a net like
silver fish, or catch them
in spread fingers and wear them.
They were gloriously bright rings.

Until one day an earthquake
loosened the creatures from
the Kingdom, sucked them out
of the lake. Now they live
tall and solid as statues
prancing oddly on dry land.

The Controversy Over Natural Wines: Moral Purity or Moral Preening?

by Dwight Furrow

Natural wine squeezing grapesIf you are one of the billions of people on this planet who avoid the wine press you might never have heard of "natural wines". Yet, they are the source of great controversy in the wine world, dividing brother from brother and tearing at the delicate fabric of overwrought sensibilities. It's not quite civil war but it's serious enough to generate plenty of creative insults. To select one example, a Newsweek article was entitled "Why Natural Wine Tastes Worse than Putrid Cider" which, as you might imagine, caused natural wine proponents to launch diatribes against smug, snobbish, closed-minded apologists for "frankenwines". That's the tenor of the debate.

What is this debate about?

Natural wines are wines made without cultured yeast, minimal (or no) use of the preservative sulfur dioxide, no modern winemaking technology such as reverse osmosis or micro-oxygenation, no additives such as mega purple, enzymes, or additional acid, no filtration, and using only grapes grown organically and/or sustainably. Natural wine producers often advertise an aspiration to make wine the way it was made 120 years ago.

So what is wrong with modern winemaking technology? Well, environmental issues such as soil depletion and potentially harmful chemicals to start with, but natural wine enthusiasts also claim modern industrial winemaking destroys flavor, creates generic wines that lack freshness and complexity, and that no longer reflect the unique characteristics of the grapes' origins.

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Friendship in the Digital Age

by Jalees Rehman

6a017c344e8898970b01b7c94a29ba970b-500wiWhy is the number of friendships that we can actively maintain limited to 150? The evolutionary psychologist and anthropologist Robin Dunbar at the University of Oxford is a pioneer in the study of friendship. Over several decades, he and his colleagues have investigated the nature of friendship and social relationships in non-human primates and humans. His research papers and monographs on social networks, grooming, gossip and friendship have accumulated tens of thousands of academic citations but he may be best known in popular culture for "Dunbar's number", the limit to the number of people with whom an individual can maintain stable social relationships. For humans, this number is approximately 150 although there are of course variations between individuals and also across one's lifetime. The expression "stable social relationships" is what we would call friends and family members with whom we regularly interact. Most of us may know far more people but they likely fall into a category of "acquaintances" instead of "friends". Acquaintances, for example, are fellow students and colleagues who we occasionally meet at work, but we do not regularly invite them over to share meals or swap anecdotes as we would do with our friends.

Dunbar recently reviewed more than two decades of research on humans and non-human primates in the article "The Anatomy of Friendship" and outlines two fundamental constraints: Time and our brain. In order to maintain friendships, we have to invest time. As most of us intuitively know, friendship is subject to hierarchies. Dunbar and other researchers have been able to study these hierarchies scientifically and found remarkable consistency in the structure of the friendship hierarchy across networks and cultures. This hierarchy can be best visualized as concentric circles of friendship. The innermost core circle consists of 1-2 friends, often the romantic partner and/or the closest family member. The next circle contains approximately 5 very close friends, then progressively wider circles until we reach the maximum of about 150. The wider the circle becomes, the less time we invest in "grooming" or communicating with our friends. The social time we invest also mirrors the emotional closeness we feel. It appears that up to 40% of our social time is invested in the inner circle of our 5 closest friends, 20% to our circle of 15 friends, and progressively less. Our overall social time available to "invest' in friendships on any given day is limited by our need to sleep and work which then limits the number of friends in each circle as well as the total number of friendships.

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In Youth Is Suffering: Denton Welch and the Literature of Convalescence

Daniel Felsenthal in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

PhpThumb_generated_thumbnailIn 1935, the writer and artist Denton Welch, then a 20-year-old student at Goldsmiths’ College in London, was struck by a car while biking to his aunt’s house in Surrey. It was the beginning of a bank-holiday weekend, and if his autobiographical fiction can be taken as fact, Welch was unused to the amount of traffic on the road. The vehicle crushed his legs, leaving him catheterized and sporadically impotent, with ultimately fatal injuries to his spine and kidneys. Before he died at the age of 33, Welch drafted three novels, Maiden Voyage (1943), In Youth Is Pleasure(1944), and the posthumously published A Voice Through a Cloud (1950), along with numerous stories and poems. He also produced oil paintings, watercolors, and a refurbished dollhouse now in the permanent collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum of Childhood. His biography places him in a lineage of doomed literary geniuses, one that includes Flannery O’Connor and Carson McCullers, whose premature awareness of their own mortality gave their artistic visions an askew acuteness.

While England’s young males were at war, Welch lived an invalid’s life in the countryside, developing an idiosyncratic voice that addressed highly personal passions: material culture, food, manmade grottos, architectural restoration, homosexuality. In real life, Welch haunted antique stores and junk sales; his narrators pride themselves on finding beautiful objects among other people’s garbage. He exerted enough control over his books’ design that they beg consideration as physical objects.

More here.

A ‘Rebel’ Without a PhD: A conversation with the mathematical physicist Freeman Dyson on quantum electrodynamics, climate change and his latest pet project

Thomas Lin in Quanta:

ScreenHunter_2948 Jan. 28 22.33Freeman Dyson — the world-renowned mathematical physicist who helped found quantum electrodynamics with the bongo-playing, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman and others, devised numerous mathematical techniques, led the team that designed a low-power nuclear reactor that produces medical isotopes for research hospitals, dreamed of exploring the solar system in spaceships propelled by nuclear bombs, wrote technical and popular science books, penned dozens of reviews for The New York Review of Books, and turned 90 in December — is pondering a new math problem.

“There’s a class of problem that Freeman just lights up on,” said the physicist and computational biologist William Press, a longtime colleague and friend. “It has to be unsolved and well-posed and have something in it that admits to his particular kind of genius.” That genius, he said, represents a kind of “ingenuity and a spark” that most physicists lack: “The ability to see further in the mathematical world of concepts and instantly grasp a path to the distant horizon that’s the solution.”

Press said he’s posed a number of problems to Dyson that didn’t “measure up.” Months and years went by, with no response. But when Press asked a question about the “iterated prisoner’s dilemma,” a variation of the classic game theory scenario pitting cooperation against betrayal, Dyson replied the next day. “It probably only took him a minute to grasp the solution,” Press said, “and half an hour to write it out.”

Together, they published a much-cited 2012 paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

More here.

The problem with self-help

Julian Baggini in Microphilosophy:

Isbn9781786482440-detailLast week I was set to appear on Radio Four’s Today programme to discuss self-help books with the concert pianist James Rhodes. Rhodes has suffered depression and attempted suicide, which makes his new “anti-self help” book Fire on All Sides a more interesting attack on the genre than most.

In the end I didn’t appear because one of the editors had noticed I’d been on the programme before Christmas and there’s only so much Baggini the broadcaster can inflict on the British people.

Rhodes made an eloquent and persuasive case in the discussion. His main complaint is that the self-help culture encourages us to think we are more perfectible than we are. The “good-enough human being” should indeed be good enough. “The human condition is one of fragility,” he said. “Just because we are not happy it doesn’t mean that we are unhappy. There is a huge amount of space between happiness and unhappiness and someone in between is OK.” Well said.

Rhodes acknowledged that many self-help books do contain nuggets of truth but insisted most of these are just common sense. That’s true, but as his interlocutor Dr Adrian James pointed out, often “common sense” is just what we lack and is only obvious when pointed out.

More here.

Can Planet Earth Feed 10 Billion People? Humanity has 30 years to find out

Charles C. Mann in The Atlantic:

41e2cb789In 1970, when I was in high school, about one out of every four people was hungry—“undernourished,” to use the term preferred today by the United Nations. Today the proportion has fallen to roughly one out of 10. In those four-plus decades, the global average life span has, astoundingly, risen by more than 11 years; most of the increase occurred in poor places. Hundreds of millions of people in Asia, Latin America, and Africa have lifted themselves from destitution into something like the middle class. This enrichment has not occurred evenly or equitably: Millions upon millions are not prosperous. Still, nothing like this surge of well-being has ever happened before. No one knows whether the rise can continue, or whether our current affluence can be sustained.

Today the world has about 7.6 billion inhabitants. Most demographers believe that by about 2050, that number will reach 10 billion or a bit less. Around this time, our population will probably begin to level off. As a species, we will be at about “replacement level”: On average, each couple will have just enough children to replace themselves. All the while, economists say, the world’s development should continue, however unevenly. The implication is that when my daughter is my age, a sizable percentage of the world’s 10 billion people will be middle-class.

More here.

The Ghost of Zora Neale Hurston

Chantel Tattoli in The Paris Review:

Zora“Zora!” Alice Walker howled in the cemetery. “I hope you don’t think I’m going to stand out here all day, with these snakes watching me and these ants having a field day.” It was August 1973. Zora Neale Hurston, who was then thirteen years dead, was a mudslinging protofeminist novelist-folklorist-playwright-ethnographer, not to be crossed, and she had climbed to minor literary stardom in the thirties with her accounts of the Southern African American experience, specifically black Southern womanhood. She was, in the words of her friend Langston Hughes, “the most amusing” among New York’s “Niggerati.” She hailed herself as their queen. But Hurston was complicated. “Someone is always at my elbow reminding me that I am the granddaughter of slaves,” she once wrote. “It fails to register depression with me. Slavery is sixty years in the past. The operation was successful and the patient is doing well, thank you.” She declined to recall a single memory of racial prejudice in her autobiography. Her sycophantic attitude toward her white patrons, Red-baiting, and eventual criticism of Brown v. Board of Education had rotted her name. “She was quite capable of saying, writing, or doing things different from what one might have wished,” Walker admitted. But she forgave Hurston. As Hurston herself declared, “How can any deny themselves the pleasure of my company?”

And so: nearly a decade before Walker published The Color Purple, a sister masterpiece to Their Eyes Were Watching God, the contributing editor at Ms. magazine stood in weeds up to her waist in Florida while sand and bugs poured into her shoes, looking for Hurston. Walker had flown from Jackson, Mississippi, to Orlando and driven to nearby Eatonville, the prideful all-black town where Hurston was raised, but not, as Walker learned from an octogenarian former classmate—Mathilda Moseley, teller of “woman-is-smarter-than-man” tales in Hurston’s Mules and Men—where she was put under.

Walker’s quest took her to Fort Pierce, on the Atlantic Coast, to the dead end of Seventeenth Street, to the Garden of Heavenly Rest. "In fact, I’m going to call you just one or two more times,” Walker swore. Hurston was somewhere in the crummy segregated burial ground; trouble was, her grave was unmarked. “Zo-ra!” Walker roared. And, as if Hurston had shoved her, Walker stumbled into a sunken rectangle in the heart of the yard: presumably Zora.

More here.

The art of gentling

Haley Cohen in The Economist:

ArtAs the Arizonan sun begins to rise, Brian Tierce guides a bay gelding into a round pen and closes the steel gate behind them. Tierce, thick-necked with grey-blue eyes, leads his charge to the centre of the pen and picks up a Styrofoam saddle pad he had left in the dirt earlier. He holds the pad forward and the gelding, named Obi Wan after the Jedi Master in “Star Wars”, sniffs it suspiciously. Suddenly frightened, the horse snorts and strains his neck away. Tierce lowers the pad to his side and says soothingly: “It’s okay, boy. You’re okay.” He waits for a full minute, watching to see if Obi’s head sinks into a more relaxed position. When it does, Tierce tries again, gently sliding the pad down the horse’s muzzle and across his cheeks. He explains: “He’s never had this on him, ever. I could probably get this on him today – the saddle. But I’m not trying to put the saddle on the horse; I’m trying to get the horse to accept the saddle.”

Patience and tenderness are new traits for Tierce, who is 50 years old and serving the final months of a seven-year sentence at Arizona’s state prison complex in Florence for assaulting his ex-girlfriend while high on methamphetamine. “I’ve been in the system my whole life, you know. I was probably given up for incorrigible when I was about five.” At that age Tierce would sneak out of the window of his home in Phoenix to roam the streets with older friends, returning late at night. His father had walked out when he was young; his mom had polio and two other kids. “She was scared to death. She had to do something – she couldn’t control me,” he says flatly. He was placed in a group home for troubled youngsters, where he suffered physical and sexual abuse throughout his childhood. At 18, finally independent, he found meth, and spent 21 of the next 32 years in a jail cell, mostly on drug-related charges.

Tierce’s current sentence – his fifth – has been the most agreeable. In many states, including Arizona, all prisoners who are physically able to must work by law. While other inmates at the Florence complex toil in the prison slop hall, harvest tilapia on the prison fish farm or tinker with broken prison vehicles, Tierce is one of about 20 who spend their weekdays outside, training mustangs as part of the prison’s Wild Horse Inmate Programme (WHIP).

More here.

Facebook Begins Its Downward Spiral

Nick Bilton in Vanity Fair:

ScreenHunter_2947 Jan. 27 18.00Years ago, long before Mark Zuckerberg became Mark Zuckerberg, the young founder reached out to a friend of mine who had also started a company, albeit a considerably smaller one, in the social-media space, and suggested they get together. As Facebook has grown into a global colossus that connects about a third of the globe, Zuckerberg has subsequently assumed a reputation as an aloof megalomaniac deeply out of touch with the people who use his product. But back then, when he only had 100 million users on his platform, he wasn’t perceived that way. When he reached out to my friend, Zuckerberg was solicitous. He made overtures that suggested a possible acquisition—and once rebuffed, returned with the notion that perhaps Facebook could at least partner with my friend’s company. The chief of the little start-up was excited by the seemingly harmless, even humble, proposition from the growing hegemon. Zuckerberg suggested that the two guys take a walk.

Taking a walk, it should be noted, was Zuckerberg’s thing. He regularly took potential recruits and acquisition targets on long walks in the nearby woods to try to convince them to join his company. After the walk with my friend, Zuckerberg appeared to take the relationship to the next level. He initiated a series of conference calls with his underlings in Facebook’s product group. My friend’s small start-up shared their product road map with Facebook’s business-development team. It all seemed very collegial, and really exciting. And then, after some weeks passed, the C.E.O. of the little start-up saw the news break that Facebook had just launched a new product that competed with his own.

Stories about Facebook’s ruthlessness are legend in Silicon Valley, New York, and Hollywood. The company has behaved as bullies often do when they are vying for global dominance—slurping the lifeblood out of its competitors (as it did most recently with Snap, after C.E.O. Evan Spiegel also rebuffed Zuckerberg’s acquisition attempt), blatantly copying key features (as it did with Snapchat’s Stories), taking ideas (remember those Winklevoss twins?), and poaching senior executives (Facebook is crawling with former Twitter, Google, and Apple personnel). Zuckerberg may look aloof, but there are stories of him giving rousing Braveheart-esque speeches to employees, sometimes in Latin.

More here. [Thanks to Ali Minai.]

Directorate S: The US v al-Qaida and the Taliban

Rafia Zakaria in The Guardian:

2048No man who has read a page of Indian history will ever prophesy about the Frontier. We shall doubtless have trouble there again.” So wrote Lord Curzon, then viceroy, in 1904. The British were by then a little weary of the burdens of empire; they were having trouble with the tribespeople of the Frontier, who seemed uninterested in the sort of governance the colonialists wished for them. The smugly racist Curzon blamed it on the “fanaticism and turbulence” that “ferment in the blood” of the Pashtun. The neocolonialists of today cannot explain things away so easily. As Steve Coll documents in Directorate S, the current war has for ever altered the fates of all three countries involved – the US, Afghanistan and Pakistan – and, after 15 years, there is no end to the “trouble” in sight.

Directorate S, from which the book gets its title, lies buried deep in the bureaucracy of the ISI (Inter-Services Intelligence), Pakistan’s spy agency. Ensconced thus, the directorate works to “enlarge Pakistan’s sphere of influence in Afghanistan”. It goes about this task, Coll explains, by supplying, arming, training and generally seeking to legitimise the Taliban, the AK-47 toting terrorists who took over Afghanistan in 1992, stringing up decapitated corpses in town squares and shoving women into the confines of their homes. Nobody paid much attention then, and perhaps never would have, had the Taliban not become host to Osama bin Laden.

Bin Laden, the architect and financier of the 9/11 attacks, was the US’s most obvious target, and in order to get him, sights had to be set on Afghanistan. The scene Coll paints is riveting.

More here.

20 Years Later, The Vagina Monologues Are as Important as Ever

Lorraine Berry in Signature:

9780399180095It is difficult to comprehend that The Vagina Monologues, Eve Ensler’s performance piece about women, their bodies and sexuality, is only celebrating its 20th anniversary. Difficult because its impact – over $100 million raised for programs aimed at stopping violence against women – has been global, and each February, productions are ubiquitous. Performances have taken place in disparate locations, ranging from the bright lights of Broadway to underground performances mounted in secret in cities such as Islamabad, Pakistan.

Each year at around Valentine’s Day, hundreds of college campuses across the United States and the world present The Vagina Monologues as fundraisers for various local women’s agencies in each production’s area. In addition, other moneys can be donated to “VDay,” the foundation bringing attention to women all over the world that have been affected by violence. These college productions feature students, staff members, and faculty in the speaking roles and as part of the production staff. Some of the monologues require a chorus of voices, while others require the single voice of individual women – many of whom have no prior acting experience – but who are animated in their desires to articulate each story, written by Ensler after she had interviewed over 200 women and got them to talk about their vaginas.

The stories have moments of side-splitting humor, and other moments that make audience members weep. But a common reaction to being in the audience is the desire to get organized to resist the forces that keep women vulnerable to violence. And the play has new elements each year, as Ensler writes a new monologue for that year’s performances in response to current issues. The 20th anniversary edition of The Vagina Monologuescontains a number of these new monologues, in addition to a history of the play’s production and reception.

More here.