Patrick Stokes at ABC:

Conspiracy theories weren't invented by the internet. They go back at least as far as the elite reaction to the French Revolution, with a grand Illuminati-Masonic conspiracy theory taking hold on both sides of the Atlantic before the start of the 19th century. Anti-Semitic conspiracy theories had tragic consequences during the last century, while today the Obama administration has had to contend with everything from demands for the president's birth certificate to state governments fuelling rumours of impending martial law. The consequences of conspiracy theories are, as they have always been, concrete and significant.

Most of us use the term 'conspiracy theory' to refer to beliefs we consider outlandish, paranoid, and almost certainly false. Yet strictly speaking this is unfair: on the simplest definition, a conspiracy theory is simply any explanation of observed events that posits two or more actors working in secret. Philosophers who have considered conspiracy theories as a class of explanation insist that there's nothing intrinsically irrational about conspiracy theory so defined. In fact, if we didn't accept the idea of a group of actors plotting in secret, we'd be unable to explain a host of historical events, from the assassination of Julius Caesar to Watergate. Conspiracies happen.

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Huw Price in Aeon:

Three months ago I wrote an essay in Aeon about intriguing developments in low-energy nuclear reactions (LENR), a controversial field that traces its origins to the claims of ‘cold fusion’ by Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons in 1989. Cold fusion itself is widely regarded as discredited, yet there are several recent reports of LENR devices producing commercially useful amounts of heat. As David Bailey and Jonathan Borwein have pointed out in HuffPost Science, it seems increasingly improbable that all these findings are the result of fraud or error, as skeptics assert. But the only remaining alternative – that science simply made the wrong call when it dismissed cold fusion – is still almost invisible in serious scientific conversations and in the mainstream media.

Why is this possibility so broadly ignored? I suggested that it is because LENR is caught in what I called a ‘reputation trap’. Cold fusion has had such a bad name that scientists and journalists put their reputations at risk if they dare to express an interest in LENR. So a fascinating story goes largely unnoticed and unreported.

More importantly, the reputation trap has pushed to the margins an idea that, if it does work, might be just what we need right now: the ‘energy miracle’ that Bill Gates is so desperately seeking.

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John Kaag in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

When the Republican presidential candidate Marco Rubio said that his country needed more welders and fewer philosophers, most listeners took him to be taking an anti-intellectual jab at academe, at the cultural and economic viability of high theory. Many of my philosophy colleagues came to the defense of our discipline, supplying statistics that demonstrated the economic payoff from pursuing the love of wisdom.

That response, however, sidesteps what might be most disturbing about Rubio’s comment: the suggestion that welders cannot be philosophers and philosophers cannot be welders. Theoreticians have always been mocked for being only loosely tethered to the world of human affairs (think of Aristophanes’ characterization, in The Clouds, of Socrates as hopelessly detached, flying solo in his balloon). And many philosophers, like Plato, have returned the favor by dismissing the rest of the world as cave dwellers. The advent of philosophy as an academic discipline in the 20th century has done nothing to ease this tension, and we have returned, once again, to the disturbing point where statesmen call for the end of theorizing.

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William Watkin at 3:AM Magazine:

The rate of executions has been decreasing in America for a couple of years now. Some states have just stopped executing. Others such as Connecticut, Illinois, New Jersey, New Mexico, Maryland and New York have gone even further and taken the death penalty off the statute books. The result is that only a handful of states, die-hard vengeful places like Florida, Texas, Missouri, and Oklahoma, still doggedly pursue death by lethal injection. The reasons for this are not moral, legal or philosophical. Rather, the slow collapse of one of America’s most cherished and reviled institutions, death row, is due to primarily managerial reasons, specifically the meat and potatoes of any failing business model: supply of stock and training of staff.

There are two fundamental problems with the lethal injection in the US today. Either you can’t get the drugs or, if you can, you just can’t get them in the arms of the accused, without yourself being accused of breaking the eighth amendment, forbidding cruel and unusual punishment. How did we get to this pretty pass, committed as we have been to kill criminals whatever the cost?

Considering the promise of efficiency that is part and parcel of the medicalisation of the death penalty with the development of the lethal injection, it is surprising to note that, according to Austin Sarat, 7% of all lethal injections have been ‘botched’ as opposed to 3% of all other methods. One possible problem with the lethal injection is that to kill someone in this way you need expertise, training and of course the will to kill.

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Joseph Luzzi at The American Scholar:

Part of the problem lies in the difficulty that Dante poses for English translation. He wrote in an intensely idiomatic, rhyme-rich Tuscan with a surging terza rima meter that gives the poem its galloping energy—a unique rhythm that’s difficult to reproduce in rhyme-poor English separated from Dante’s local vernacular by centuries. The content of Dante’s writing presents an even bigger problem. Unlike the other author he supposedly shared the world with, Shakespeare, Dante was self-consciously scholarly and intellectual, filling his verses with allusions to ancient, biblical, and contemporary medieval writing, and tackling a range of theological, philosophical, political, and historical issues. And then there are all those characters! From Inferno 1 to Paradiso 33, scores of different literary personae—some real, some invented, some famous, some obscure—take the stage to plead their case or expound on their joy before the autobiographical character Dante as he journeys from hell to heaven. So in order to “get” Dante, a translator has to be both a poet and a scholar, attuned to the poet’s vertiginous literary experimentalism as well as his superhuman grasp of cultural and intellectual history. This is why one of the few truly successful English translations comes from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, a professor of Italian at Harvard and an acclaimed poet. He produced one of the first complete, and in many respects still the best, English translations ofThe Divine Comedy in 1867. It did not hurt that Longfellow had also experienced the kind of traumatic loss—the death of his young wife after her dress caught fire—that brought him closer to the melancholy spirit of Dante’s writing, shaped by the lacerating exile from his beloved Florence in 1302. Longfellow succeeded in capturing the original brilliance of Dante’s lines with a close, sometimes awkwardly literal translation that allows the Tuscan to shine through the English, as though this “foreign” veneer were merely a protective layer added over the still-visible source. The critic Walter Benjamin wrote that a great translation calls our attention to a work’s original language even when we don’t speak that foreign tongue. Such extreme faithfulness can make the language of the translation feel unnatural—as though the source were shaping the translation into its own alien image. Longfellow’s English indeed comes across as Italianate: in surrendering to the letter and spirit of Dante’s Tuscan, he loses the quirks and perks of his mother tongue.

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Cynthia Haven at The Nation:

Death dogged Brodsky—the tricky heart in his chest, the repeated and increasingly complex surgeries to eke out a few more years—until he finally succumbed at age 55. It was another fact that fueled the romantic myth, when the reality was far grimmer and harsher than his public imagined. Brodsky was terrified of death, despite his protestations, despite lighting up another cigarette almost as soon as the open-heart surgery was finished. Teasley writes that he “fought fear of death with poetry, love, sex, coffee and cigarettes—­and tried to deny death’s significance while almost never being able to forget it.”

Michael Gregory Stephens, writing in Ploughshares in 2008, described meeting Brodsky in a seedy old-man’s bar on a Sunday morning, when the poet was already belligerently drunk. I thought Stephens must be mistaken, so I contacted him a few years ago to ask. He told me he’d confirmed with others that it was not an isolated incident. However, it appears to have taken place sometime in the year-and-a-half period when Brodsky lost his father, his mother, and Carl Proffer, the man he once called “an incarnation of all the best things that humanity and being American represent.” Without the context provided by Teasley’s book, the episode would be preposterous and degrading, and difficult to reconcile with the aesthetic poet. Brodsky had achieved everything, succeeding beyond his wildest dreams—but he had lost the world in which he could savor those successes and the people dear to him who would have known what the victories had cost.

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Beso’s Song

Beso was damaged,
thrown away.
I would cover my ears and weep,
bent with grief
if he began to sing
like Orpheus.
Would it still be
a human being,
swollen with hearing,
that survived his song?

by Richard Jarette
from Beso the Donkey
Michigan State University Press
.
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Adam S. Cohen in Harvard Magazine:

In August 1912, Harvard president emeritus Charles William Eliot addressed the Harvard Club of San Francisco on a subject close to his heart: racial purity. It was being threatened, he declared, by immigration. Eliot was not opposed to admitting new Americans, but he saw the mixture of racial groups it could bring about as a grave danger. “Each nation should keep its stock pure,” Eliot told his San Francisco audience. “There should be no blending of races.” Eliot’s warning against mixing races—which for him included Irish Catholics marrying white Anglo-Saxon Protestants, Jews marrying Gentiles, and blacks marrying whites—was a central tenet of eugenics. The eugenics movement, which had begun in England and was rapidly spreading in the United States, insisted that human progress depended on promoting reproduction by the best people in the best combinations, and preventing the unworthy from having children.

…Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.—A.B. 1829, M.D. ’36, LL.D. ’80, dean of Harvard Medical School, acclaimed writer, and father of the future Supreme Court justice—was one of the first American intellectuals to espouse eugenics. Holmes, whose ancestors had been at Harvard since John Oliver entered with the class of 1680, had been writing about human breeding even before Galton. He had coined the phrase “Boston Brahmin” in an 1861 book in which he described his social class as a physical and mental elite, identifiable by its noble “physiognomy” and “aptitude for learning,” which he insisted were “congenital and hereditary.” Holmes believed eugenic principles could be used to address the nation’s social problems. In an 1875 article in The Atlantic Monthly, he gave Galton an early embrace, and argued that his ideas could help to explain the roots of criminal behavior. “If genius and talent are inherited, as Mr. Galton has so conclusively shown,” Holmes wrote, “why should not deep-rooted moral defects…show themselves…in the descendants of moral monsters?” As eugenics grew in popularity, it took hold at the highest levels of Harvard. A. Lawrence Lowell, who served as president from 1909 to 1933, was an active supporter. Lowell, who worked to impose a quota on Jewish students and to keep black students from living in the Yard, was particularly concerned about immigration—and he joined the eugenicists in calling for sharp limits. “The need for homogeneity in a democracy,” he insisted, justified laws “resisting the influx of great numbers of a greatly different race.”

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Laurel Hamers in Science:

It’s one of the big mysteries of cell biology. Why do mitochondria—the oval-shaped structures that power our cells—have their own DNA, and why have they kept it when the cell itself has plenty of its own genetic material? A new study may have found an answer. Scientists think that mitochondria were once independent single-celled organisms until, more than a billion years ago, they were swallowed by larger cells. Instead of being digested, they settled down and developed a mutually beneficial relationship developed with their hosts that eventually enabled the rise of more complex life, like today’s plants and animals. Over the years, the mitochondrial genome has shrunk. The nucleus now harbors the vast majority of the cell’s genetic material—even genes that help the mitochondria function. In humans, for instance, the mitochondrial genome contains just 37 genes, versus the nucleus’s 20,000-plus. Over time, most mitochondrial genes have jumped into the nucleus. But if those genes are mobile, why have mitochondria retained any genes at all, especially considering that mutations in some of those genes can cause rare but crippling diseases that gradually destroy patients’ brains, livers, hearts, and other key organs. Scientists have tossed around some ideas, but there haven't been hard data to pick one over another.

…Mitochondria make energy through a series of chemical reactions that pass electrons along a membrane. Key to this process is a series of protein complexes, large protein globs that embed in the internal membrane of the mitochondria. All of the mitochondria’s remaining genes help produce energy in some way. But the team found that a gene was more likely to stick around if it created a protein that was central to one of these complexes. Genes responsible for more peripheral energy-producing functions, meanwhile, were more likely to be outsourced to the nucleus, the group reports today in Cell Systems. “Keeping those genes locally in the mitochondria gives the cell a way to individually control mitochondria,” Johnston says, because pivotal proteins are created in the mitochondria themselves. That local control means the cell can more quickly and efficiently regulate energy production moment-to-moment in individual mitochondria, instead of having to make sweeping changes to the hundreds or thousands of mitochondria it contains. For instance, out-of-whack mitochondrion can be fixed individually rather than triggering a blanket, cell-wide response that might then throw something else off balance.

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Emily Singer in Quanta:

Peel away the layers of a house — the plastered walls, the slate roof, the hardwood floors — and you’re left with a frame, the skeletal form that makes up the core of any structure. Can we do the same with life? Can scientists pare down the layers of complexity to reveal the essence of life, the foundation on which biology is built?

That’s what Craig Venter and his collaborators have attempted to do in a new study published today in the journal Science. Venter’s team painstakingly whittled down the genome of Mycoplasma mycoides, a bacterium that lives in cattle, to reveal a bare-bones set of genetic instructions capable of making life. The result is a tiny organism named syn3.0 that contains just 473 genes. (By comparison, E. coli has about 4,000 to 5,000 genes, and humans have roughly 20,000.)

Yet within those 473 genes lies a gaping hole. Scientists have little idea what roughly a third of them do. Rather than illuminating the essential components of life, syn3.0 has revealed how much we have left to learn about the very basics of biology.

“To me, the most interesting thing is what it tells us about what we don’t know,” said Jack Szostak, a biochemist at Harvard University who was not involved in the study. “So many genes of unknown function seem to be essential.”

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Elisa Gabbert in Guernica:

There’s an idea in linguistics that until a culture creates a name for a color, they don’t really see it as a distinct category. It builds from the anthropological discovery that languages tend to develop color terms in the same order: first, for black and white (or roughly, light and dark), then for red, then for either green or yellow and then both, then blue (and so on). They don’t invent a word for blue, the thinking goes, much less for mauve or taupe, until they need it. Color terms proliferate in a world of dyes and spectrometry.

This has led some linguists and scholars to suggest that Homer’s “wine-dark sea” was not just a weird poeticism but evidence of the ancient Greeks’ entirely different perception of color: “As late as the fourth century BC, Plato named the four primary colors as white, black, red, and bright” (via Lapham’s Quarterly). It’s possible that our ancestors did not think of the ocean as blue; it certainly doesn’t look as blue from a boat as it does from a plane.

It’s a chicken-or-egg conundrum though: How can the name come after the concept if you need the name to understand the concept? This problem of circularity always made me resistant to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis in its strong version, which states that our thoughts are bound by the restraints of our language. The weak version, that language merely affects our thoughts, seems trivially true. What doesn’t affect our thoughts?

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Dilip D'Souza in LiveMint:

You might pick the book up anticipating an autobiography, but A Numerate Life is not one in the sense you probably understand that word. Not least because Paulos nurses a “scepticism about the biographical enterprise” and that’s partly why this book’s “progression will be episodic and non-linear”. But through it all, he “hopes to show that the points of correspondence between mathematics and biography are … quite profound”.

And it’s in that spirit that Paulos takes us on a vivid, thought-provoking, free-spirited tour of his life, that mathematical lens firmly in place. Over here it’s his love interest, her shattered Coke bottle taking him, yes, two-thirds of the way. There it’s someone he knew who was “completely conventional, totally banal and utterly unimaginative”—except that Paulos finds out that he is given to “gluing five-dollar bills to the sidewalk (and) giggling at people trying to scrape them off”. Paulos uses this intriguing person as a springboard to show—mathematically, of course—how most of us are best characterized as strange, not normal. In doing so, he raises the question of what, indeed, is “normal”.

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Meghan O'Gieblyn at The Point:

Alcoholics Anonymous is notoriously difficult to evaluate scientifically. Several observational studies have been quite favorable to the program—finding, for instance, that the longer people attend twelve-step meetings, the more likely they are to achieve long-term sobriety, or that engagement in meetings, as opposed to mere attendance, can be correlated with sobriety. But for many such studies are innately compromised by the fact that their members self-select. In The Sober Truth, Lance Dodes dismisses the observational studies wholesale. The kinds of people who go to AA—moreover, the ones who stick around—are those who find it useful. What about everyone else? To really understand the effectiveness of AA, Dodes suggests, we must consider everyone who walks into the rooms, including those reluctant attendees who sulk into the back rows of speaker meetings, nod off during the Serenity Prayer and never return. AA’s literature claims that those who fail to fully participate in the twelve steps tend to relapse, but for Dodes such warnings are little more than community propaganda, a way of blaming the participant when the program fails them. “Imagine if similar claims were made in defense of an ineffective antibiotic,” he writes.

As the comparison makes clear, Dodes conceives of AA as a “treatment” for alcoholism, a term that assumes patient passivity and is at odds with how members often describe the program—as a spiritual discipline that requires its participants to engage in a series of actions and rituals. Yet it is the discussion of attendance versus participation that lays the groundwork for Dodes’s conclusion about AA’s inefficacy. Citing data from the NIAAA that claims up to 31 percent of people who go to AA stick around for a year or more, Dodes then modifies those numbers to reflect attendance rather than involvement.

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Adrienne Lafrance at The Atlantic:

The year is 2016. Robots have infiltrated the human world. We built them, one by one, and now they are all around us. Soon there will be many more of them, working alone and in swarms. One is no larger than a single grain of rice, while another is larger than a prairie barn. These machines can be angular, flat, tubby, spindly, bulbous, and gangly. Not all of them have faces. Not all of them have bodies.

And yet they can do things once thought impossible for machine. They vacuum carpets, zip up winter coats, paint cars, organize warehouses, mix drinks, play beer pong, waltz across a school gymnasium, limp like wounded animals, write and publish stories, replicate abstract expressionist art, clean up nuclear waste, even dream.

Except, wait. Are these all really robots? What is a robot, anyway?

This has become an increasingly difficult question to answer. Yet it’s a crucial one. Ubiquitous computing and automation are occurring in tandem. Self-operating machines are permeating every dimension of society, so that humans find themselves interacting more frequently with robots than ever before—often without even realizing it. The human-machine relationship is rapidly evolving as a result. Humanity, and what it means to be a human, will be defined in part by the machines people design.

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David Shulman at the NYRB:

Israeli human rights activists and what is left of the Israeli peace groups, including joint Israeli-Palestinian peace organizations, are under attack. In a sense, this is nothing very new; organizations such as B’Tselem, the most prominent and effective in the area of human rights, and Breaking the Silence, which specializes in soldiers’ firsthand testimony about what they have seen and done in the occupied territories and in Gaza, have always been anathema to the Israeli right, which regards them as treasonous.¹ But open attacks on the Israeli left have now assumed a far more sinister and ruthless character; some of them are being played out in the interrogation rooms of Israeli prisons. Clearly, there is an ongoing coordinated campaign involving the government, members of the Knesset, the police, various semiautonomous right-wing groups, and the public media. Politically driven harassment, including violent and illegal arrest, interrogation, denial of legal support, virulent incitement, smear campaigns, even death threats issued by proxy—all this has become part of the repertoire of the far right, which dominates the present government and sets the tone for its policies.

There is now a palpable sense of danger, and also an accelerating decline into a situation of incipient everyday state terror. Palestinians have lived with the reality of state terror for decades—it is the very stuff of the occupation—but it has now seeped into the texture of life inside the Green Line, as many on the left have warned that it would. Israelis with a memory going back to the 1960s sometimes liken the current campaign to the violent actions of the extreme right in Greece before the colonels took power, as famously depicted in the still-canonical film Z.

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From Nature:

When he labelled outspoken academics as terrorists, Turkey’s increasingly authoritarian President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan was probably not thinking of Voltaire’s eighteenth-century philosophical maxim: “To hold a pen is to be at war”. Erdoğan sent shivers down the spines of those who care about human rights by declaring on 14 March that those who support terrorists are as guilty as those “who pull the trigger”, and that Turkish law should be changed to reflect this. “The fact that an individual is a deputy, an academic, an author, a journalist or the director of an NGO does not change the fact that that person is a terrorist,” he said. One the same day, three academics from universities in Istanbul were hauled into police custody and then refused bail while prosecutors considered charges of making propaganda for a terrorist organization. Their crime? In January, they had signed a petition that called for an end to violence in the southeast of the country, where government forces have been fighting Kurdish separatists. The petition was signed by 1,128 academics, mostly from Turkish universities, when it was publicly launched on 11 January. It immediately sparked Erdoğan’s rage. Many politically appointed university rectors leapt into line, launching disciplinary investigations into members of their staff who had signed — more than 500 so far. Dozens of signatories were brought in for police questioning. The harsh response attracted a shocked solidarity. Another 1,000 people signed the petition, including a large number of Western scientists, before it was closed on 20 January.

An atmosphere of uncertainty and fear prevails. None of the signatories knows whether they, too, will be arrested, and several have had death threats. Some have actively sought sabbaticals abroad; those working outside the country are afraid to return even to visit family. Meanwhile, Turkey is playing a major part on the world political stage, in a role that is overshadowing the fate of the academics. Turkey is a geopolitical fulcrum. On one side it borders war-torn Middle East, on the other, strife-ridden Europe that is struggling to cope with the refugee crisis. When the country reached a historic agreement with the European Union last week to take back migrants who were crossing into Europe illegally, many in the EU complained bitterly about making a deal with Erdoğan because of his worrying human-rights record.

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Gordon Marino in the New York Times Book Review:

There is today a thriving industry of hagiography on Muhammad Ali. It is, however, not easy to explain how the Louis­ville Lip morphed from a blarney-filled boxer into a global symbol of racial pride and self-respect. According to Randy Roberts and Johnny Smith in “Blood Brothers,” the chrysalis was Ali’s intense but tragic friendship with Malcolm X.

As early as his high school years, Cassius Clay had been intrigued by the Nation of Islam. In 1962, the heavyweight contender traveled to Detroit to listen to the Nation’s “Supreme Minister,” Elijah Muhammad, and Malcolm X.

For African-Americans, the Nation represented a militant alternative to picket lines, fire hoses and attack dogs. Elijah Muhammad and Malcolm sneered at Martin Luther King’s strategy of nonviolence, supported segregation and declared that the white man was the Devil. How did this hostile-to-paranoid worldview attract the people-loving boxer who was bankrolled by a lily-white investment group?

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Allison Eck in Nautilus:

Jeremy England is concerned about words—about what they mean, about the universes they contain. He avoids ones like “consciousness” and “information”; too loaded, he says. Too treacherous. When he’s searching for the right thing to say, his voice breaks a little, scattering across an octave or two before resuming a fluid sonority.

His caution is understandable. The 34-year-old assistant professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is the architect of a new theory called “dissipative adaptation,” which has helped to explain how complex, life-like function can self-organize and emerge from simpler things, including inanimate matter. This proposition has earned England a somewhat unwelcome nickname: the next Charles Darwin. But England’s story is just as much about language as it is about biology.

There are some 6,800 unique languages in use today. Not every word translates perfectly, and meaning sometimes falls through the cracks. For instance, there is no English translation for the Japanese wabi-sabi—the idea of finding beauty in imperfection—or for the German waldeinsamkeit, the feeling of being alone in the woods.

Different fields of science, too, are languages unto themselves, and scientific explanations are sometimes just translations. “Red,” for instance, is a translation of the phrase “620-750 nanometer wavelength.” “Temperature” is a translation of “the average speed of a group of particles.” The more complex a translation, the more meaning it imparts. “Gravity” means “the geometry of spacetime.”

What about life?

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