Shahzia Sikander: The World Is Yours, the World Is Mine

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“The World Is Yours, the World Is Mine,” by Shahzia Sikander

Shahzia Sikander in the New York Times:

History is often held hostage by the highest bidder — whoever gets to tell the story ends up defining what happened. What happened in 2014? What mattered in 2014? It depends whom you ask. Historical narratives recount political, economic or social events, but rarely tell stories of the everyday. The mundane nuances of life are often ignored
precisely because they are so personal. But private stories are usually the ones that we connect with most; they capture our 02bwshazia-master315attention and remain in our memory. Modes of storytelling like painting and rap allow us to engage with those personal stories, becoming the vehicles through which history passes.

A major story of 2014 has been the Ebola outbreak, which has spread from West Africa to Europe and the United States. The Ebola narrative has also become the story of how we don’t want to be connected in what is supposedly a hyperconnected and globalized world. We have tried to screen for symptoms and enforce quarantines. However, the interface between human and microbe is complex. Our bodies cannot thrive without some microbes — they are an essential part of our personal ecosystems. They are always present, often lying dormant, just as narratives lie dormant until someone culls them from history’s rubble. I have chosen to respond to these events from 2014 in my work, “The World Is Yours, the World Is Mine,” (2014).

More here.

Real Talk, Or How There is No Language Instinct

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Vyvyan Evans makes the case in Aeon (Illustration by Matt Murphy):

How much sense does it make to call whatever inborn basis for language we might have an ‘instinct’? On reflection, not much. An instinct is an inborn disposition towards certain kinds of adaptive behaviour. Crucially, that behaviour has to emerge without training. A fledging spider doesn’t need to see a master at work in order to ‘get’ web-spinning: spiders just do spin webs when they are ready, no instruction required.

Language is different. Popular culture might celebrate characters such as Tarzan and Mowgli, humans who grow up among animals and then come to master human speech in adulthood. But we now have several well-documented cases of so-called ‘feral’ children – children who are not exposed to language, either by accident or design, as in the appalling story of Genie, a girl in the US whose father kept her in a locked room until she was discovered in 1970, at the age of 13. The general lesson from these unfortunate individuals is that, without exposure to a normal human milieu, a child just won’t pick up a language at all. Spiders don’t need exposure to webs in order to spin them, but human infants need to hear a lot of language before they can speak. However you cut it, language is not an instinct in the way that spiderweb-spinning most definitely is.

But that’s by the by. A more important problem is this: If our knowledge of the rudiments of all the world’s 7,000 or so languages is innate, then at some level they must all be the same. There should be a set of absolute grammatical ‘universals’ common to every one of them. This is not what we have discovered. Here’s a flavour of the diversity we have found instead.

Spoken languages vary hugely in terms of the number of distinct sounds they use, ranging from 11 to an impressive 144 in some Khoisan languages (the African languages that employ ‘click’ consonants). They also differ over the word order used for subject, verb and object, with all possibilities being attested. English uses a fairly common pattern – subject (S) verb (V) object (O): The dog (S) bit (V) the postman (O). But other languages do things very differently. In Jiwarli, an indigenous Australian language, the components of the English sentence ‘This woman kissed that bald window cleaner’ would be rendered in the following order: That this bald kissed woman window cleaner.

Many languages use word order to signal who is doing what to whom. Others don’t use it at all: instead, they build ‘sentences’ by creating giant words from smaller word-parts. Linguists call these word-partsmorphemes. You can often combine morphemes to form words, such as the English word ‘un-help-ful-ly’. The word tawakiqutiqarpiit from the Inuktitut language, spoken in eastern Canada, is roughly equivalent to: Do you have any tobacco for sale? Word order matters less when each word is an entire sentence.

The basic ingredients of language, at least from our English-speaking perspective, are the parts of speech: nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs and so on. But many languages lack adverbs, and some, such as Lao (spoken in Laos and parts of Thailand), lack adjectives.

More here.

The obsessions of Werner Herzog

2f47950e-7ae4-11e4_1113513kIain Sinclair at the Times Literary Supplement:

The voice. That voice. The forest as an oozing, fecund sump of original darkness and interspecies fornication. Birds screaming in pain. Monkeys howling like the legions of the damned. And deluded humans, those naked forked beings, babbling their eco-political plea bargains to an indifferent destiny, as they are broken on the wheel of fate. Until there is just one heretic left, with cones of light beaming, burning from his unblinking eyes. The sweeping gestures. The leaps from rock to rock. And, always, that voice. The seductive drone of reason from an undeceived witness to horror. He sounds amused, engaged: implicated. The voice of a village Bavarian from the mountains. A long-striding walker. A world-weary autodidact devouring the classics: Virgil, Homer, and the never-ending voyage that refuses to bring him home to the black hole of unresolved history that is never going away. He is a self-proclaimed searcher for the “ecstatic truth” of Euripides.

Here is the captured voice of Werner Herzog: the maverick, the sanest madman still in the game; performing, researching, scribbling in microscopic calligraphy, hard-tramping margins of ice and sand, working the burden of life to the final groan. And now, with a mime of easily overcome reluctance, directing this comprehensive fiction of an autobiography, by way of recorded conversations with the film scholar Paul Cronin. A Guide for the Perplexed is a blockbuster performance of telling and hiding: remembering, denying, cursing, reliving traumas and triumphs; picking over all the projects, triumphant and forgotten.

more here.

Who Really Burns: Quitting a Dean’s Job in the Age of Mike Brown

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Eve Dunbar in Jezebel:

As with most predominantly white institutions, black teenagers are, sadly, a rarity on our campuses. And many students within these sorts of elite spaces have been sheltered from racial violence due to their whiteness and/or socio-economic status. The students who haven't been sheltered often escape into these “liberal,” liberal arts colleges expecting a respite from the violent face of anti-blackness that plagues our nation.

Yet racial profiling often intensifies rather than relents in elite, predominantly white institutions located in cities and towns that are predominantly black, brown, and poor.

In the face of this incident, as the singular, young, black female high-ranking administrator, I found myself a part of a crisis that had been brewing decades. For years before my six-month time as Acting Dean, black faculty and students had raised racial profiling as an issue. Little had been done over the decades to address their concerns. There wasn't even a formal mechanism in place to acknowledge these incidents.

After talking with impacted students, I worked to put into place a system for documenting racial profiling incidents on our campus. Unlike the classroom, which can breed critical self-reflexivity, there was no space within the administrators' managerial function to reckon with a history of racial profiling writ large on our campus community, city, or nation. All of my work around racial profiling was a loose-fitting Band-Aid that came too late and too little.

More here.

Wheat People vs. Rice People: Why Are Some Cultures More Individualistic Than Others?

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T. M. Luhrmann in the NYT (illustration by Bratislav Milenkovic):

There’s some truth to the modernization hypothesis — that as social worlds become wealthier, they also become more individualistic — but it does not explain the persistent interdependent style of Japan, South Korea and Hong Kong.

In May, the journal Science published a study, led by a young University of Virginia psychologist, Thomas Talhelm, that ascribed these different orientations to the social worlds created by wheat farming and rice farming. Rice is a finicky crop. Because rice paddies need standing water, they require complex irrigation systems that have to be built and drained each year. One farmer’s water use affects his neighbor’s yield. A community of rice farmers needs to work together in tightly integrated ways.

Not wheat farmers. Wheat needs only rainfall, not irrigation. To plant and harvest it takes half as much work as rice does, and substantially less coordination and cooperation. And historically, Europeans have been wheat farmers and Asians have grown rice.

The authors of the study in Science argue that over thousands of years, rice- and wheat-growing societies developed distinctive cultures: “You do not need to farm rice yourself to inherit rice culture.”

Their test case was China, where the Yangtze River divides northern wheat growers from southern rice growers. The researchers gave Han Chinese from these different regions a series of tasks. They asked, for example, which two of these three belonged together: a bus, a train and train tracks? More analytical, context-insensitive thinkers (the wheat growers) paired the bus and train, because they belong to the same abstract category. More holistic, context-sensitive thinkers (the rice growers) paired the train and train tracks, because they work together.

Asked to draw their social networks, wheat-region subjects drew themselves larger than they drew their friends; subjects from rice-growing regions drew their friends larger than themselves.

More here. Here is an earlier paper on evidence “that traditional agricultural practices influenced the historical gender division of labor and the evolution and persistence of gender norms. We find that, consistent with existing hypotheses, the descendants of societies that traditionally practiced plough agriculture, today have lower rates of female participation in the workplace, in politics, and in entrepreneurial activities, as well as a greater prevalence of attitudes favoring gender inequality. We identify the causal impact of traditional plough use by exploiting variation in the historical geo-climatic suitability of the environment for growing crops that differentially benefited from the adoption of the plough.”

Moby-Dick; Or, The Marathon

Brendan O'Connor in The Oyster Review:

Moby dickIt can be hard to talk about reading a book like Moby-Dick without sounding like, well, kind of a dick. The book has taken on a cultural significance that outweighs its admittedly hefty pages; it is a status symbol, and having read it a signifier of a particular status. You read Moby-Dick and you have evidence that you are a person of taste and some intellectual fortitude. Of course, the trouble with having read a book—rather than being in the midst of reading it—is that you needn't carry it around anymore, and if you're not carrying it around anymore, how is anyone to know that you've read it? Troubling thoughts, these.

I've only read Moby-Dick once, the summer between my sophomore and junior years of college. Most of it I read on a vacation that took places almost entirely on the water, in warm places. I thought there was something clever about this. (Like I said, it was the summer between my sophomore and junior years of college.) I finished the book some weeks later, sitting in a diner in Southborough, MA on a day off from the summer camp I was working at, far from open water and anyone with whom I might have felt comfortable sharing my excitement about the book. I do not believe there to have been anything disingenuous about the excitement I felt as I finished the book, muttering over and over again to myself, “Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God.” But how to share that feeling with someone else? “I just finished Moby-Dick,” is never not going to sound like bragging, even if the idea is just to try to bring someone else aboard. The canon is like that, I think. There are books—and films and works of visual art and pieces of music and whatever, really—that come to be ruined by their own context.

Read the rest here.

James Watson Throws a Fit

Laura Helmuth in Slate:

WatsonJim Watson is one of the most important scientists of the 20th century. He is also a peevish bigot. History will remember him for his co-discovery of the structure of DNA, in 1953. This week, Watson is insuring that history, or at least the introduction to every obituary, will also remember him for being a jerk. In a fit of pique and self-pity, Watson is selling his Nobel Prize medallion. He will become the first Nobel laureate in history to do so. He gave the Financial Timesseveral reasons why, this Thursday, he will auction off the gold disk, symbol of the highest honor in science (expected price: up to $3.5 million). He claims that, even though he ran major research institutions and served on corporate boards until the age of 79, he needs the money. He might donate it to universities, he said, or buy a David Hockney painting. Oh, and he also mentioned to the FT that he’s selling the medal because he has become an “unperson,” and “no one really wants to admit I exist.” This is not about the Hockney. Selling the medal is Watson’s way of sticking his tongue out at the scientific establishment, which has largely shunned him since 2007. Watson had been making racist and sexist remarks throughout his career, but he really outdid himself seven years ago when he told the Sunday Timesthat he was “inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa” because “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours—whereas all the testing says not really.” He further said that while we may wish intelligence to be equal across races, “people who have to deal with black employees find this not true.

Watson was also famously insulting and arrogant as a professor at Harvard, even for a professor at Harvard. Fellow faculty member E.O. Wilson described Watson in the 1950s and ’60s as the “Caligula of biology” for his contempt of scientists who studied anything other than molecules. Wilson wrote that, unfortunately, due to Watson’s stroke of genius at age 25, “He was given license to say anything that came to his mind and expect to be taken seriously.” In 2000, Watson told an audience at Berkeley that there was a link between sunlight exposure and libido, and therefore “That’s why you have Latin lovers.” In the same speech, reported by the San Francisco Chronicle, he said that thin people are ambitious. “Whenever you interview fat people,” Watson said, “you feel bad, because you know you’re not going to hire them.” He just wouldn’t stop dismissing whole groups of people, even after his disgrace in 2007. At a science conference in 2012, for instance, he said of women in science, “I think having all these women around makes it more fun for the men but they’re probably less effective.”

More here.

A simple trick to improve your memory

Tom Stafford in BBC:

BrainIf I asked you to sit down and remember a list of phone numbers or a series of facts, how would you go about it? There’s a fair chance that you’d be doing it wrong. One of the interesting things about the mind is that even though we all have one, we don't have perfect insight into how to get the best from it. This is in part because of flaws in our ability to think about our own thinking, which is called metacognition. Studying this self-reflective thought process reveals that the human species has mental blind spots. One area where these blind spots are particularly large is learning. We're actually surprisingly bad at having insight into how we learn best. Researchers Jeffrey Karpicke and Henry Roediger III set out to look at one aspect: how testing can consolidate our memory of facts. In their experiment they asked college students to learn pairs of Swahili and English words. So, for example, they had to learn that if they were given the Swahili word 'mashua' the correct response was 'boat'. They could have used the sort of facts you might get on a high-school quiz (e.g. “Who wrote the first computer programs?”/”Ada Lovelace”), but the use of Swahili meant that there was little chance their participants could use any background knowledge to help them learn. After the pairs had all been learnt, there would be a final test a week later.

Now if many of us were revising this list we might study the list, test ourselves and then repeat this cycle, dropping items we got right. This makes studying (and testing) quicker and allows us to focus our effort on the things we haven't yet learnt. It’s a plan that seems to make perfect sense, but it’s a plan that is disastrous if we really want to learn properly. Karpicke and Roediger asked students to prepare for a test in various ways, and compared their success – for example, one group kept testing themselves on all items without dropping what they were getting right, while another group stopped testing themselves on their correct answers. On the final exam differences between the groups were dramatic. While dropping items from study didn’t have much of an effect, the people who dropped items from testing performed relatively poorly: they could only remember about 35% of the word pairs, compared to 80% for people who kept testing items after they had learnt them. It seems the effective way to learn is to practice retrieving items from memory, not trying to cement them in there by further study.

More here.

Thursday Poem

Fathom

…the furthest distances I’ve travelled
have been those between people
………………………..– Leontia Flynn

1. Father
(at the Forty-foot Gentlemen’s Bathing Place)

Seven thirty a.m.
and I love that men
are different
when wet.

We’re sea-changed,
leagues of seals,
rasping, clapping,
rapturing the air.

I’m glad the water’s cold.
And though my father
taught me everything

I know about salt water,
for fifty weeks per annum
he remained arms’ length inland.

2. Farther

Not necessarily needing to know
I launch into these buoyant
introductions: ‘Hey Dad, it’s Paula,
your favourite daughter your

beautiful blow-in from Belfast,’
my mother priming him well
in advance, so that I’m a little
deflated but hardly surprised

when he risks ‘Are you married
to one of my sons?’ ‘Father’
I breeze ‘Bishop Hegarty’d

never agree.’ And his smile as he
fathoms the quip soon sinks, repeating
how terribly terribly sorry he is.

Read more »

My Vassar College Faculty ID Makes Everything OK

Kiese Laymon in Gawker:

ScreenHunter_886 Dec. 04 12.39The fourth time a Poughkeepsie police officer told me that my Vassar College Faculty ID could make everything OK was three years ago. I was driving down Hooker Avenue. When the white police officer, whose head was way too small for his neck, asked if my truck was stolen, I laughed, said no, and shamefully showed him my license and my ID, just like Lanre Akinsiku. The ID, which ensures that I can spend the rest of my life in a lush state park with fat fearless squirrels, surrounded by enlightened white folks who love talking about Jon Stewart, Obama, and civility, has been washed so many times it doesn't lie flat.

After taking my license and ID back to his car, the police officer came to me with a ticket and two lessons. “Looks like you got a good thing going on over there at Vassar College,” he said. “You don't wanna it ruin it by rolling through stop signs, do you?”

I sucked my teeth, shook my head, kept my right hand visibly on my right thigh, rolled my window up, and headed back to campus.

One more ticket.

Two more condescending lessons from a lame armed with white racial supremacy, anti-blackness, a gun, and a badge. But at least I didn't get arrested.

Or shot six times.

My Vassar College Faculty ID made everything okay. A little over two hours later, I sat in a closed room on Vassar's campus in a place called Main Building.

More here.

Many of the artists in the groundbreaking 1913 Armory Show went on to revolutionize art. William Glackens, on the other hand… he just kept painting

Morgan Meis in The Smart Set:

IC_MEIS_GLACK_AP_001In the early days of the 20th century, Picasso met some rich and careless Americans. “These folks,” Dave Hickey wrote in his book The Invisible Dragon: Essays on Beauty, “are no longer building gazebos and placing symboliste Madonnas in fern-choked grottos. They are running with the bulls — something Pablo can understand. They are measuring their power and security by their ability to tolerate high-velocity temporal change, high levels of symbolic distortion, and maximum psychic discontinuity.”

In Hickey’s version of the story of Modernism, it is these rich and careless Americans who finally shook the Europeans out of the torpor of late 19th century art making. The Americans were ready to face high-velocity temporal change and all the psychic discontinuity that goes with it. They were ready to face the Machine age, the Information age, the age of all things melting into air. Picasso’s portrait of prostitutes in a proto-Cubist tableau (les demoiselles d’Avignon) was, thus, made primarily for the rough and ready Americans who were prepared to understand such a picture.

There is truth to Hickey’s story. Gertrude Stein and her brother Leo were hosting their salon in Paris during the days when Picasso was looking for a new way to paint. The American expat community was restless, detached, and given to aesthetic excitability. The rich Americans dropping in from across the pond added fuel to the fire. They stirred money into a pot already filled with ambition and artistic discontent. A bomb was going to go off, and finally it did. The Steins provided the gunpowder. Picasso lit the fuse. Marcel Duchamp threw the bomb onto center stage.

The funny thing about this story is that the Americans who — in Hickey’s version — pushed Modernism along its course, seemed ill-prepared for the results that finally landed back upon their own shores. The landing came in 1913, at the famous Armory Show in New York City. At that show, Americans confronted European works of art that seemed to have metastasized dangerously from Picasso’s proto-Cubist ladies from Avignon just a few years earlier. Here were wild attacks of color from the Fauvists, machine-obsessed explosive paintings from the Futurists, extreme acts of spatial deconstruction from a now fully developed Cubism. And, of course, Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase.

More here.

the life of Mayakovsky

Womack_12_14James Womack at Literary Review:

There are Mayakovsky Streets in forty-five Russian cities and fourteen Ukrainian cities. There are three Mayakovsky Streets in St Petersburg, more than there are in the whole of Kazakhstan, which boasts only a couple, one in Almaty and one in Ust-Kamenogorsk. Triumph Square in Moscow was called Mayakovsky Square from 1935 to 1992; the metro station that serves it is still called Mayakovsky. Omsk seems particularly fond of the poet: as well as a street, it has a cinema and a nightclub (or rather a 'youth relaxation complex', which I hope is a nightclub) blessed with the great man's name.

All this toponymy goes to suggest something of what Pasternak called Vladimir Mayakovsky's 'second death' in 1935, five years after his suicide. In response to a plea from Mayakovsky's lover Lili Brik, Stalin famously declared that 'Mayakovsky was and remains the best, most gifted poet of our Soviet epoch. Indifference to his works and memory is a crime.' After that, the commemoration machine cranked into action, Mayakovsky was elevated to the position of premier Soviet poet and his work started to be forcibly distributed, like 'potatoes in the time of Catherine the Great' (Pasternak again).

more here.

I Was With Fidel Castro When JFK Was Assassinated

053castrojfk_468x336Jean Daniel at The New Republic:

It was around 1:30 in the afternoon, Cuban time. We were having lunch in the living room of the modest summer residence which Fidel Castro owns on magnificent Varadero Beach, 120 kilometers from Havana. For at least the tenth time, I was questioning the Cuban leader on details of the negotiations with Russia before the missile installations last year. The telephone rang, a secretary in guerrilla garb announced that Mr. Dorticós, President of the Cuban Republic, had an urgent communication for the Prime Minister. Fidel picked up the phone and I heard him say: “Como? Un atentado?” (“What’s that? An attempted assassination?”) He then turned to us to say that Kennedy had just been struck down in Dallas. Then he went back to the telephone and exclaimed in a loud voice “Herido? Muy gravemente?” (“Wounded? Very seriously?”)

He came back, sat down, and repeated three times the words: “Es una mala noticia.” (“This is bad news.”) He remained silent for a moment, awaiting another call with further news. He remarked while we waited that there was an alarmingly sizable lunatic fringe in American society and that this deed could equally well have been the work of a madman or of a terrorist.

more here.

the return of wu-tang

141208_r25848-320Sasha Frere-Jones at The New Yorker:

The most surprising thing about “A Better Tomorrow,” the latest album from New York’s Wu-Tang Clan, is not that it is generally strong but that the fractious nine-person group ended up making any kind of recording together at all. For its previous studio album, “8 Diagrams” (2007), Wu-Tang Clan ended up touring without its founder, the RZA, who had produced most of the album. RZA, meanwhile, conducted a solo tour of his own, at the same time. By doing more visible work, including writing soundtracks for Quentin Tarantino, RZA had alienated his own group. As he told me, referring to Raekwon, a core member of the clan, “He said I was a hip-hop hippie with a guitar.” Hippie tag aside, this isn’t unfair. RZA said that he wrote many of the tracks for “A Better Tomorrow” on guitar, first, later voicing the compositions with samples or other instruments. But the Wu still mostly sounds like the Wu, and a newcomer who has never encountered the most famous band from Staten Island would do fine to start here.

The Wu-Tang Clan’s long career mirrors the comic books and kung-fu flicks that its members grew up loving: colorful and intense, and longer on respect than on widespread mainstream acceptance. Like cheap Canal Street mixtapes and kung-fu DVDs, Wu-Tang has never had enormous commercial success, even at the height of the CD era. In twenty years and five albums, the group has sold only a little more than six million records, according to Nielsen SoundScan.

more here.

Cyrus Vance Jr.’s ‘Moneyball’ Approach to Crime

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Chip Brown in the NYT's Magazine (photo CreditLee Friedlander for The New York Times):

In 2010, at the start of his first term, Vance drew up a list of 20 things to do; four years later he had checked them all off, except for learning Spanish. He helped create a new court that offered alternatives to prison for mentally ill defendants whose crimes might have stemmed from treatable conditions. He set up a “conviction integrity program,” which reviewed innocence claims in more than 160 cases and vacated four convictions. He pushed to raise the age of criminal responsibility to 18 — New York and North Carolina are the only states that treat 16-year-olds as adults. He lobbied for the New York’s All Crimes DNA law, which doubled the kinds of crimes for which DNA evidence could be collected. He focused on crimes where the numbers in New York were going the wrong way: computer fraud, identity theft, abuse of the elderly and domestic violence. He reorganized office units and bureaus and shaved nine hours off the time between arrest and arraignment, freeing up cops who used to have to wait so long to give statements that they would sometimes bring lawn chairs to the intake area in order to have a place to sit. Drunken-driving dismissals, according to the D.A.'s office, were down 81 percent; cases tossed because prosecutors violated speedy-trial rules were down 91 percent. Felony conviction rates, which were lower in Manhattan in 2009 than in the other four boroughs, now trailed only the conviction rate in Queens.

But Vance’s most significant initiative, one that has been emulated in jurisdictions from Brooklyn to San Francisco, has been to transform, through the use of data, the way district attorneys fight crime. “The question I had when I came in was, Do we sit on our hands waiting for crime to tick up, or can we do something to drive crime lower?” Vance told me one afternoon in his eighth-floor office at the Criminal Courts Building in Lower Manhattan. “I wanted to develop what I call intelligence-driven prosecution.”

Preparing to run in 2009, Vance studied “community-based prosecution” programs in Washington and consulted with experts in Milwaukee and San Francisco. The concept of expanding prosecution strategies to address neighborhood concerns emerged in the early 1990s as prosecutors and police departments grappled with an epidemic of violence, drug abuse and “quality of life” issues.

More here.

Berlin Notebook

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Ryan Ruby in n+1 (image by Ramón Goeden via flickr):

I had been away from Berlin for the better part of a month, and in my absence exhibits, memorials, and events devoted to the fall of the Wall had sprung up all over town.

4 NOVEMBER: POTSDAMER PLATZ ARKADEN

On my way to the Staatsbibliothek to return an overdue book, I pause in front of the sliding doors of the Potsdamer Platz Arkaden to examine two segments of the Berlin Wall that mark the entrance to an exhibit commemorating the twenty-fifth anniversary of November 9, 1989.

There is nothing particularly special about these Wall segments, which were recently repainted with the same cartoon faces that French street artist Thierry Noir originally sprayed on the Wall, nor about the exhibit itself. Down the long central nave of the Arkaden are border signs in four languages, a reconstructed guard tower, video clips, photographs, maps, uniformed mannequins, a large DDR insignia, the clothes Udo Lindenberg wore to his concert at the Palast der Republik, a Trabant automobile. In short, a collection of the same things that are usually spread out over the twenty sites in Berlin dedicated to the history of the Wall.

What was interesting about the exhibit was its location. The Potsdamer Platz Arkaden is a mall. It is tempting to focus on the crassness of placing what ought to be a solemn memorial to the horrors of a police state in a shopping center, but the choice is telling, and represents a not-uncommon interpretation of the political significance of what is known here as the Mauerfall. To many in the West, the fall of the Wall is a spectacular symbol for the victory of the free market. The whole Potsdamer Platz complex—with its corporate office towers, its multiplex cinemas, its luxury condominiums and five-star hotels and shopping malls—is not just a pleasure dome for the rich, it’s why the West fought the cold war. The Arkaden is Francis Fukuyama’s End of History thesis written in steel and glass. Capitalism was born in a building just like this one, as Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project documents. It is fitting that this is where it should decide to celebrate its ultimate victory.

More here.

Economists Aren’t ‘Superior’ Just Because

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Henry Farrell discusses a new paper by Marion Fourcade, Etienne Ollion, and Yann Algan “The Superiority of Economists” over at Crooked Timber:

Marion Fourcade, Etienne Ollion and Yann Algan’s forthcoming piece on the ‘superiority of economists’ is a lovely, albeit quietly snarky, take on the hidden structures of the economics profession. It provides good evidence that e.g. economics hiring practices, rather than being market driven are more like an intensely hierarchical kinship structure, that the profession is ridden with irrational rituals, and that key economic journals are apparently rather clubbier than one might have expected in a free and competitive market (the University of Chicago’s Quarterly Journal of Economics gives nearly 10% of its pages to University of Chicago affiliated scholars; perhaps its editors believe that this situation of apparent collusion will be naturally corrected by market forces over time). What appears to economists as an intense meritocracy (as Paul Krugman acknowledges in a nice self-reflective piece) is plausibly also, or alternately, a social construct built on self-perpetuating power relations.

Unsurprisingly, a lot of economists are reading the piece (we’re all monkeys, fascinated with our reflections in the mirror). Equally unsurprisingly, many of them (including some very smart ones) don’t really get Fourcade et al’s argument, which is a Bourdieuian one about how a field, and relations of authority and power within and around that field get constructed. As Fourcade has noted in previous work, economists’ dominance has led other fields either to construct themselves in opposition to economics (economic sociology) or in supplication to it (some versions of rational choice political science). Economists have been able to ignore these rivals or to assimilate their tributes, as seems most convenient. As the new paper notes, the story of economists’ domination is told by citation patterns (the satisfaction that other social scientists can take from economists having done unto them as they have done unto others, is unfortunately of limited consolation). Yet if you’re an economist, this is invisible. Your dominance appears to be the product of natural superiority.

More here. Krugman's take here, and Marion Fourcade, Etienne Ollion, and Yann Algan's study can be found here.

How 4 Mexican Immigrant Kids and Their Cheap Robot Beat MIT

Ten years ago, WIRED contributing editor Joshua Davis wrote a story about four high school students in Phoenix, Arizona—three of them undocumented immigrants from Mexico—beating MIT in an underwater robot competition. That story, La Vida Robot, has a new chapter: Spare Parts, starring George Lopez and Carlos PenaVega, opens in January, and Davis is publishing abook by the same title updating the kids’ story. To mark that occasion, WIRED is republishing his original story.

Joshua Davis in Wired:

Team-660x505Oscar began by explaining that his high school team was taking on college students from around the US. He introduced his teammates: Cristian, the brainiac; Lorenzo, the vato loco who had a surprising aptitude for mechanics; and 18-year-old Luis Aranda, the fourth member of the crew. At 5’10” and 250 pounds, Luis looked like Chief from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. He was the tether man, responsible for the pickup and release of what would be a 100-pound robot.

Szwankowski was impressed by Oscar. He launched into an in-depth explanation of the technology, offering details as if he were letting them in on a little secret. “What you really want,” he confided, “is a thermocouple with a cold junction compensator.” He went over the specifications of the device and then paused. “You know,” he said, “I think you can beat those guys from MIT. Because none of them know what I know about thermometers.”

“You hear that?” Oscar said triumphantly when they hung up. He looked at each team member pointedly. “We got people believing in us, so now we got to believe in ourselves.”

Read the full story here.

Menifesto: Laura Kipnis’s study of the un-fair sex

Kerry Howley in Book Forum:

ManThe twenty-first-century critic asked to opine on masculinity finds available to her a limited number of explanatory templates, socially acceptable ways of speaking that dominate our collective thinking about the male psyche. Most clearly, there is that of disapproval, talk of privilege and patriarchy and, of late, the much-deployed “rape culture.” There is also the moralizing template, preferred by presidential candidates and megachurch pastors, which merely ascribes desirable qualities to the state of being a man, generally preceded by the descriptor “real”: Real men raise their children, real men don’t cheat, real men, I don’t know, exercise portion control. For those with a lighter touch, there is the template of amused condescension: One might, for instance, elucidate the various phenomena of American male sentimentality—depressive alcoholism, distant fathers, baseball.

Locating a tone that neither scolds nor belittles the subject is only part of the challenge, because, having found an approach, one comes up immediately against a conceptual and moral problem: how to write about masculinity in a way that is neither essentializing nor prescriptive. If we assume that the differences between individual men are far greater than anything that might bind them together, and that a better world would consist of a wider rather than narrower definition of what it properly means to be a man, it becomes rather difficult to say anything at all.

More here.