Amy Krouse Rosenthal in the New York Times:

I have been trying to write this for a while, but the morphine and lack of juicy cheeseburgers (what has it been now, five weeks without real food?) have drained my energy and interfered with whatever prose prowess remains. Additionally, the intermittent micronaps that keep whisking me away midsentence are clearly not propelling my work forward as quickly as I would like. But they are, admittedly, a bit of trippy fun.

Still, I have to stick with it, because I’m facing a deadline, in this case, a pressing one. I need to say this (and say it right) while I have a) your attention, and b) a pulse.

I have been married to the most extraordinary man for 26 years. I was planning on at least another 26 together.

Want to hear a sick joke? A husband and wife walk into the emergency room in the late evening on Sept. 5, 2015. A few hours and tests later, the doctor clarifies that the unusual pain the wife is feeling on her right side isn’t the no-biggie appendicitis they suspected but rather ovarian cancer.

As the couple head home in the early morning of Sept. 6, somehow through the foggy shock of it all, they make the connection that today, the day they learned what had been festering, is also the day they would have officially kicked off their empty-nestering. The youngest of their three children had just left for college.

More here.

Ajay Agrawal, Joshua Gans, and Avi Goldfarb in the Harvard Business Review:

The year 1995 was heralded as the beginning of the “New Economy.” Digital communication was set to upend markets and change everything. But economists by and large didn’t buy into the hype. It wasn’t that we didn’t recognize that something changed. It was that we recognized that the old economics lens remained useful for looking at the changes taking place. The economics of the “New Economy” could be described at a high level: Digital technology would cause a reduction in the cost of search and communication. This would lead to more search, more communication, and more activities that go together with search and communication. That’s essentially what happened.

Today we are seeing similar hype about machine intelligence. But once again, as economists, we believe some simple rules apply. Technological revolutions tend to involve some important activity becoming cheap, like the cost of communication or finding information. Machine intelligence is, in its essence, a prediction technology, so the economic shift will center around a drop in the cost of prediction.

The first effect of machine intelligence will be to lower the cost of goods and services that rely on prediction. This matters because prediction is an input to a host of activities including transportation, agriculture, healthcare, energy manufacturing, and retail.

When the cost of any input falls so precipitously, there are two other well-established economic implications. First, we will start using prediction to perform tasks where we previously didn’t. Second, the value of other things that complement prediction will rise.

More here.

Razib Khan in Gene Expression:

In 2011 I had dinner with a friend of mine from college. He's a smart guy. Ph.D. in chemistry form M.I.T and all that. I mentioned offhand how it was rather proven to good degree of certainty there was Neanderthal gene flow into modern humans (our lineage)[1]​. He was somewhat surprised by this information, and I was aghast that he didn't know. 1It was one of the biggest science stories of the year. Right?

What that brought home to me is that something that seems revolutionary near to your heart or field of occupational interest may not be so visible to those who are not similarly situated. My friend is a well educated person with a science Ph.D., but it was just not on his radar. Similarly, I had very smart friends in college who were evangelical Christians who were surprised by the high degree of identity between the chimpanzee and human in regards to our DNA sequence (they were Creationists, and skeptical of any close kinship).

Here's a final example that might interest readers. I had a long conversation with a relatively prominent journalist a month or so ago. Someone who writes in biology, and in particular genetics (who is not Carl Zimmer). I mentioned offhand to them that the work of various labs utilizing ancient DNA is showing rather conclusively that the vast majority of human populations are relatively recent admixtures between highly diverged lineages. To put it in plainer language: we are all mestizos! This journalist was totally surprised by this fact.

This indicates to me again that facts which are "known" in the "in-group" may be surprising to those who are not as hooked in. It isn't a matter of being educated, smart, or interested. It's a matter of narrowly constrained social channels.

Here are 10 facts that we've recently discovered about human evolution, with a focus on genetics since that's what I know best, which you should probably know.

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Gary Shteyngart in the New York Times:

A broken man walks on stage and makes jokes for 194 pages. That’s the shortest summary I can think of for David Grossman’s magnificently comic and sucker-punch-tragic excursion into brilliance, his new novel, “A Horse Walks Into a Bar.” Jewish humor is celebrated, and, these days, more necessary than ever. It is humor from the edge of the grave. Humor with a gun stuck in your ribs. Humor that requires nothing more than a match and a can of gasoline. And, of course, the willingness to set yourself on fire. Grossman’s protagonist, the self-styled Dovaleh G, is ready for the flames. He addresses an audience hungry for jokes — though not of the political variety, they’ve had enough of that in Israel — in the basement club of the town of Netanya, which lies between Tel Aviv and Haifa. The first photo of Netanya on Wikipedia shows the intersection of two highways with some Minsk-looking apartment towers attached. As Dovaleh likes to say: “Nice city, Netanya.”

The audience for Dovaleh’s act of self-immolation is a cross-section of Israeli society: soldiers, bikers, gruff Likudniks, sensitive young women and two special guest stars from his childhood, a former judge with anger management issues and a dwarf village medium with a speech impediment.

More here.

Emma Brockes in The Guardian:

The success of We Should All Be Feminists has made Adichie as prominent for her feminism as for her novels, to the extent that “now I get invited to every damned feminist thing in the whole world”. She has always been an agony aunt of sorts, “the unpaid therapist for my family and friends”, but having the feminist label attached has changed things, and not just among her intimates. “I was opened to a certain level of hostility that I hadn’t experienced before as a writer and public figure.”

…In response to her new book, a reporter emailed her the question: “Why not humanism?” (instead of feminism). To which, she says, “I thought, what part of the fucking book did this person not read?”

It’s like the people who go around saying All Lives Matter, I say, in response to the Black Lives Matter movement. “Right, which I find deeply offensive and very dishonest. Because we have to name something in order to fix it, which is why I insist on the word feminist or feminism.” This, she says, in spite of the fact that many of her friends, particularly black women, “resist that word, because the history of feminism has been very white and has assumed ‘women’ meant ‘white women’. Political discussion in this country still does that. They’ll say, ‘Women voted for…’ and then, ‘Black people voted for…’ And I think: I’m black and a woman, so where do I fit in here?” As a result, “Many of my friends who are not white will say, ‘I’m an intersectional feminist’, or ‘I’m a womanist’. And I have trouble with that word, because it has undertones of femininity as this mystical goddess-mother thing, which makes me uncomfortable. So we need a word. And my hope is we use ‘feminism’ often enough that it starts to lose all the stigma and becomes this inclusive, diverse thing.”

More here.

Ibram X. Kendi in Black Perspectives:

Giving voice to the voiceless, the Chicago Defender condemned Jim Crow, catalyzed the Great Migration, and focused the electoral power of black America. Robert S. Abbott founded The Defender in 1905, smuggled hundreds of thousands of copies into the most isolated communities in the segregated South, and was dubbed a “Modern Moses,” becoming one of the first black millionaires in the process. His successor wielded the newspaper’s clout to elect mayors and presidents, including Harry S. Truman and John F. Kennedy, who would have lost in 1960 if not for The Defender’s support. Along the way, its pages were filled with columns by legends like Ida B. Wells, Langston Hughes, and Martin Luther King. Drawing on dozens of interviews and extensive archival research, Ethan Michaeli constructs a revelatory narrative of race in America and brings to life the reporters who braved lynch mobs and policemen’s clubs to do their jobs, from the age of Teddy Roosevelt to the age of Barack Obama.

Ibram X. Kendi: Please share with us the creation story of your book—those experiences, those factors, those revelations that caused you to research this specific area and produce The Defender.

Ethan Michaeli: I decided to write the first comprehensive history of The Chicago Defender because I worked there from 1991 to 1996, and knew this was a story that needed to be told. I am white and Jewish, raised in a suburb of Rochester, New York, and arrived at The Defender as a fresh graduate of the University of Chicago with a bachelor’s degree in English literature. I had no particular interest in civil rights or racism or African American history, which is not to say that I was dismissive, but just to underscore how much I thought race was an issue which had been dealt with in the ‘60s. So that when a friend–another white, Jewish, University of Chicago graduate–offered to recommend me for a job he was leaving at an “African-American-owned newspaper,” I didn’t appreciate the significance. I reasoned that in this putatively post-racial era, some newspapers would have white owners while others would have black owners, and what was the big deal? In those years at The Defender, then still holding its own as one of the city’s three daily newspapers, I received a crash course in African-American history as well as the mechanics of journalism.

More here.

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Christopher Lydon in Literary Hub:

Cornel West: You said, Why Baldwin?

Christopher Lydon: Baldwin today.

CW: Baldwin today. Well one is that we live in an age in which there is such a paucity of eloquence. Baldwin exemplifies eloquence at its highest level. Now, when Cicero and Quintillian define eloquence as “wisdom speaking,” I think we’d have to add it’s “wisdom speaking” that’s rooted in a courage that refuses to sell out. We live in an age in which everybody’s for sale, everything is for sale. Baldwin would never have sold out. He was true to himself. He was true to his soul. This is in many ways the Baldwin moment, and it’s primarily because we know here’s somebody who’s committed to intellectual integrity, committed to a moral honesty.

Remember what he says at the end of Notes of a Native Son in the introduction: “All I want to be is an honest man and who, like Hemingway, endures in my work.” Now you see, in an age of mendacity and criminality, which is our own, just telling the truth and having integrity is revolutionary. It’s subversive. It’s countercultural. So, Baldwin comes back bringing this rich tradition of eloquent, truth-telling, witness-bearing, soul-stirring writing, and he’s got the black church as a backdrop. He’s listening to Bessie Smith. He’s listening to Mahalia Jackson when he’s writing, so you could feel the vibrations and the vibes on the page that are connected to the sonic expressions of geniuses like Bessie Smith and like a Ray Charles, of course, was probably his favorite. They were together at Carnegie Hall. That was a very historical moment at Carnegie Hall with the two of them.

All that to say is what? In this Trump moment, Baldwin comes back with tremendous power, potency, vitality and vibrancy, in part, because he’s willing to speak the truth not just about the country in the abstract but the truth about legacies of white supremacy, the truth about indifference, the truth about callousness, the truth about the spiritual blackout, which is the relative eclipse of integrity, honesty and decency in public life in the country. That’s true for Democrats, true for Republicans, true for right-wing, true for left-wing.

More here.