Ed Yong in The Atlantic:

A few Fridays ago, Tracy Van Houten drove to a registrar’s office to pick up the paperwork she would need to run for Congress. Doing so would mean giving up her role as an aerospace engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory—a dream job that she had held for 13 years. Her plan was to pick up the papers, think about them over the weekend, and make a decision afterwards.

Sitting outside the building, she wavered, and decided to call her senators to voice her opposition against Betsy DeVos—the since-confirmed nominee for Secretary of Education. She got a busy tone. She tried again. Another busy tone. “It was at the fifth one that I thought: Okay, I need to get to Washington and get a seat at the table,” she says. “That motivated me to get into the building and get on with it.”

Van Houten is now officially running to represent the 34th Congressional District of California in the U.S. House. The seat’s former occupant, Xavier Becerra, was appointed as attorney general of California last December, and 23 candidates are now vying to replace him in a special election, to be held in April. The roster includes experienced politicians, activists, and lawyers. Van Houten, who is something of a wildcard, is the only rocket scientist.

More here.

Peter Schjeldahl in The New Yorker:

The quality of the art is astonishingly high for someone who—because he “felt antsy” in retirement, he writes, after “I had been an art-agnostic all my life”—took up painting from a standing stop, four years ago, at the age of sixty-six. Bush’s eye and hand have improved drastically since hacked images of a couple of clumsy, apparently nude self-portraits in a bathroom surfaced, in 2013. (He made those, he said, to shock his painting tutor—the first of three plainly crackerjack ones whom he acknowledges in the book.) Bush now commands a style, generic but efficient, of thick, summary brushwork that aims to capture expression as well as physiognomy. There’s a remoteness in the use of photographs. The subjects aren’t present to the artist. They’re elsewhere. But they look honestly observed and persuasively alive.

More here.

Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow in The Nation:

In 1956, Jane Jacobs was 39 years old, working as a staff writer at Architectural Forum. Her boss, unable to attend a conference at Harvard, asked her to go in his stead and give a talk on land banking. Jacobs, skittish about public speaking, reluctantly agreed, on one condition: that she could speak on a subject of her choice. That subject, it turned out, was the utter wrongheadedness of many of the ideas cherished by her audience, the era’s luminaries of urban planning. The prevailing wisdom at the time held that “urban renewal” required clearing “slums” and starting over. The rebuilt cities would tidily disentangle residential and commercial areas and include plenty of open space. These ideas may have looked good in architectural drawings, but in real life, Jacobs had come to believe, they were a formula for lifeless monotony. In East Harlem, she noted, 1,110 stores had been razed to make way for housing projects. Jacobs argued that these little shops couldn’t simply be replaced by supermarkets. “A store is also a storekeeper,” she said. Stores were not just commercial spaces; they were also social centers that “help make an urban neighborhood a community instead of a mere dormitory.” Even empty storefronts had a function, often sprouting into clubs, churches, or hubs for other civic activities. When these spaces were destroyed, the community was gravely wounded.

This speech, a turning point in Jacobs’s career, appears in Vital Little Plans, a new collection of her short works; Robert Kanigel’s new biography of Jacobs, Eyes on the Street, fills in the context. The men in the room—including the mayor of Pittsburgh, the head of the New York City Housing Authority, and The New Yorker’s architecture critic, Lewis Mumford—took the rebuke remarkably well, and Jacobs won some distinguished admirers. The speech was also the germ of what became her masterpiece, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), one of the seminal books of the 20th century.

More here.

Carole Boyce Davies in AAIHS:

My sense is that we are on the threshold of a new “conjuncture” in which 42% of millennials in the U.S. say they would vote for a socialist government and the white working class seems bereft of any union or left organizing and have therefore been allowed to remain totally illiterate about their social conditions though with an innate sense of being left behind. Trumpism enters that space of misinformation, illiteracy, inadequacy and absence. And what of Black left thought today? We are still clearly in the looking back mode—a “fifty years after” framings of major events—without theoretical guidance for the future. A Black Lives Matter movement exists but its actions remain sporadic and more responsive than proactive. Elaine Brown former chairwoman of the Black Panther Party is quoted in Spiked as critiquing their tendency to be more pacifist than assertive, still requesting rights instead of assuming them.

A number of questions remain to be engaged. For me, the primary one is this: what kind of theoretical/practical ideas can be generated–given the still tenuous lived reality of black peoples worldwide–that can admit the limitations of past movements (intellectual and/or political) but still move forward with new agendas that refine past agendas and re-define new projects?

More here.

Emily Wolahan at The Quarterly Conversation:

In, Alice Iris Red Horse, a range of poetry from throughout Yoshimasu’s career has been gathered and translated by a group of very talented translators (nine in total, though most not working collaboratively). A few interviews are also included, as well as a translator’s note attached to every poem. While some might resistance the idea of using text to scaffold text, an artist like Yoshimasu invites such ways of reading. Just as a good essay about Brice Marden’s marble paintings can contextualize and articulate the emotions they convey, the translator’s notes and handful of interviews in Alice Iris Red Horse shed light on how these poems function beyond the page. As many of these poems are intended to be accompanied in performance by noise and vocalizations, the scaffolding that these “extra” texts provide go some way to help contextualize Yoshimasu’s vision.

Sawako Nakayasu’s translation notes, for example, don’t merely scaffold or provide context for Yoshimasu, but engage in a conversation with him, perhaps revealing the core work in any translation. Discussing “…Stones Single, or in Handfuls,” she explains the first lines of the poem, which refer to a “narrow road.” To my ear this recalls Basho’s book (sometimes translated as) Narrow Road to the Interior, But Nakayasu reveals that Yoshimasu refers not to Basho but to a children’s song “Toryanse”: “This narrow road, where does it go? / This narrow road is the Road of the God Tenjin.” This nursery rhyme has a tune and “many pedestrian crossings in Japan have adopted the melody of ‘Torynase.’”

more here.

George Saunders at The Guardian:

What does an artist do, mostly? She tweaks that which she’s already done. There are those moments when we sit before a blank page, but mostly we’re adjusting that which is already there. The writer revises, the painter touches up, the director edits, the musician overdubs. I write, “Jane came into the room and sat down on the blue couch,” read that, wince, cross out “came into the room” and “down” and “blue” (Why does she have to come into the room? Can someone sit UP on a couch? Why do we care if it’s blue?) and the sentence becomes “Jane sat on the couch – ” and suddenly, it’s better (Hemingwayesque, even!), although … why is it meaningful for Jane to sit on a couch? Do we really need that? And soon we have arrived, simply, at “Jane”, which at least doesn’t suck, and has the virtue of brevity.

But why did I make those changes? On what basis?

On the basis that, if it’s better this new way for me, over here, now, it will be better for you, later, over there, when you read it. When I pull on this rope here, you lurch forward over there.

more here.

Jack Miles in the New York Times:

In the Myth of Er, told or retold by Socrates at the end of Plato’s “Republic,” we learn that after death souls are reincarnated only after crossing Lethe, the River of Oblivion. In his 2013 novel “The Childhood of Jesus” and now in its sequel, “The Schooldays of Jesus,” J.M. Coetzee has written a pair of stylistically realistic novels with, however, a Lethe premise more at home in myth. Everyone in the Spanish-speaking country where these novels are set has arrived by ship, and the voyage has washed every immigrant’s memory clean of all recollection of a previous life. Page by page, the larger portion of both novels is taken up by quasi-Platonic dialogues that struggle back toward a-Lethe-ia — Greek for “truth,” a truth left behind on the far side of Lethe. But, by a brilliant turn, the central symposiasts are Simón, a man in his 40s, and Davíd, a boy who is 5 as “Childhood” opens and 7 as “Schooldays” ends.

The brilliance of this turn is that it allows Coetzee to create a kind of fusion genre blending the energy of philosophical dialogue, the warmth and unprogrammed humor of father-son repartee, the emotional potency of a family romance and finally the uncanny suggestion of allegory (womb as ship, birth as disembarkation). The result is rich, dense, often amusing and, above all, full of inner tension and suspense.

More here.

Ed Yong in The Atlantic:

In 1895, the Lumiere Brothers—among the first filmmakers in history released a movie called The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station. Just 50 seconds long, it consists of a silent, unbroken, monochrome shot of a train pulling into a platform full of people. It was a vivid example of the power of “animated photographs”, as one viewer described them. Now, 122 years later, The Arrival of a Train is breaking new ground again. It has just become one of the first movies to be stored in DNA.

In the famous double-helices of life’s fundamental molecule, Yaniv Erlich and Dina Zielinski from the New York Genome Center and Columbia University encoded the movie, along with a computer operating system, a photo, a scientific paper, a computer virus, and an Amazon gift card.

They used a new strategy, based on the codes that allow movies to stream reliably across the Internet. In this way, they managed to pack the digital files into record-breakingly small amounts of DNA. A one terabyte hard drive currently weighs around 150 grams. Using their methods, Erlich and Zielinski can fit 215,000 times as much data in a single gram of DNA. You could fit all the data in the world in the back of a car.

More here.

Debarati S. Seni in the Times of India:

Thirty-three years ago, on a cold winter night in Delhi, when everyone was swathed up in their blankets, braving the chill, 18-year-old William Dalrymple, landed in India. He wasn't interested in this country back then, but over the years that changed and how — thanks to his many books about the rich Indian history. If you are someone who finds history boring, then you are among those who haven't read Dalrymple. The prominent historian, author, broadcaster and critic, has many awards to his credit, has an innate knack with words, as he showcases bygone, ancient tales to you in a fascinating way.In an exclusive chat with Bombay Times, William tells us about how enthralling history really is with sagas of loot, murder, torture, violence, deceit and colonial greed and more…

Do you think non-fiction has finally found its feet in India?

India has seen an enormous growth in non-fiction. They are actually selling more than fiction now, which was impossible to imagine a decade ago. There are amazing non-fiction writers in India — Suketu Mehta, his book on Mumbai, I think is a masterpiece of my generation of writers. At a recent literature festival, I must have had around 250 writers and at least 50 Indian non-fiction writers.
I agree that narrative history is only beginning to find its feet now with works of people like Ram Guha and Sunil Khilnani. And up to now, since the 50s, the history of India has been preserved in academic writings in prose, more about social economic history, peasant history and worker history, than readable tales of romping Mughals.

More here.

Erica Brenner in The Guardian:

If you’re a political outsider who wants to move fast to the top job in a democracy, how to do it? You could start by dipping into a book written 500 years ago by an out-of-pocket Italian civil servant. The quickest way, it says, is to have fortune on your side from the outset, with plenty of inherited money and a leg up through family connections. If lying and breaking your oaths help you crush the opposition, so be it. Make the people your best friend. Promise to protect their interests against predatory elites and foreigners. Fan partisan hatreds so that you alone seem to rise above them, saviour of the fatherland.

The book is The Prince, its author Niccolò Machiavelli. Minus television and Twitter, it seems the techniques of ambitious “new princes”, as he calls them, haven’t changed a bit. But why did Machiavelli write a whole book about them, peppering it with men who soared to power by greasing palms and exploiting weaknesses: Julius Caesar, Pope Alexander VI, Cesare Borgia? Most people today assume that Machiavelli didn’t just describe their methods, he recommended them – that he himself is the original Machiavellian, the first honest teacher of dishonest politics. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the adjective has come to mean “cunning, scheming, and unscrupulous, especially in politics”. Along with our daily news, popular culture has brought legions of Machiavellian figures into our homes and made them both human and entertaining: Tony Soprano, Frank and Claire Underwood in House of Cards, Lord Petyr Baelish from Game of Thrones. These Machiavellians are scoundrels, but subtle ones. In watching their manoeuvres on screen we, like their victims, can’t help being a little seduced by their warped ingenuity. So it no longer shocks us to think that a highly intelligent man who lived five centuries ago, in times we imagine were far crueller than ours, spent night after night at his desk in the Tuscan countryside, his wife and children sleeping nearby, drafting the rulebook for today’s cynical populists and authoritarians.

Picture: Machiavellian scoundrel … James Gandolfini as Tony Soprano in the HBO TV series The Sopranos.

More here.

Robert Service in Science:

Humanity has a data storage problem: More data were created in the past 2 years than in all of preceding history. And that torrent of information may soon outstrip the ability of hard drives to capture it. Now, researchers report that they’ve come up with a new way to encode digital data in DNA to create the highest-density large-scale data storage scheme ever invented. Capable of storing 215 petabytes (215 million gigabytes) in a single gram of DNA, the system could, in principle, store every bit of datum ever recorded by humans in a container about the size and weight of a couple of pickup trucks. But whether the technology takes off may depend on its cost. DNA has many advantages for storing digital data. It’s ultracompact, and it can last hundreds of thousands of years if kept in a cool, dry place. And as long as human societies are reading and writing DNA, they will be able to decode it. “DNA won’t degrade over time like cassette tapes and CDs, and it won’t become obsolete,” says Yaniv Erlich, a computer scientist at Columbia University. And unlike other high-density approaches, such as manipulating individual atoms on a surface, new technologies can write and read large amounts of DNA at a time, allowing it to be scaled up.

Scientists have been storing digital data in DNA since 2012. That was when Harvard University geneticists George Church, Sri Kosuri, and colleagues encoded a 52,000-word book in thousands of snippets of DNA, using strands of DNA’s four-letter alphabet of A, G, T, and C to encode the 0s and 1s of the digitized file. Their particular encoding scheme was relatively inefficient, however, and could store only 1.28 petabytes per gram of DNA. Other approaches have done better. But none has been able to store more than half of what researchers think DNA can actually handle, about 1.8 bits of data per nucleotide of DNA.

More here.

Berk Ozler over at the World Bank's Development Impact:

New York Times published an article last week, titled “The Future of Not Working.” In it, Annie Lowrie discusses the universal basic income experiments in Kenya by GiveDirectly: no surprise there: you can look forward to more pieces in other popular outlets very soon, as soon as they return from the same villages visited by the Times. One paragraph of the article drew my attention in particular: “One estimate, generated by Laurence Chandy and Brina Seidel of the Brookings Institution, recently calculated that the global poverty gap — meaning how much it would take to get everyone above the poverty line — was just $66 billion. That is roughly what Americans spend on lottery tickets every year, and it is about half of what the world spends on foreign aid.”

Well, I don’t know about you, but that paragraph makes me think that if we just were able to divert 50% of the current foreign aid budget towards cash transfers, we would eliminate extreme poverty. But, is that really true? The answer is: “not even close.”

See, that calculation assumes that we know exactly who is poor, how far below the poverty line each person exactly is, give them that precise amount, etc. (Actually, Zhang, Chandy, and Noe outline their simplifying assumptions in footnote 2 of this post.) How close are we to that in reality? Again, far away – at least in developing countries.

More here.

Craig Silverman in Buzzfeed:

The websites Liberal Society and Conservative 101 appear to be total opposites. The former publishes headlines such as “WOW, Sanders Just Brutally EVISCERATED Trump On Live TV. Trump Is Fuming.” Its conservative counterpart has stories like “Nancy Pelosi Just Had Mental Breakdown On Stage And Made Craziest Statement Of Her Career.”

So it was a surprise last Wednesday when they published stories that were almost exactly the same, save for a few notable word changes.

After CNN reported White House counselor Kellyanne Conway was “sidelined from television appearances,” both sites whipped up a post — and outrage — for their respective audiences. The resulting stories read like bizarro-world versions of each other — two articles with nearly identical words and tweets optimized for opposing filter bubbles. The similarity of the articles also provided a key clue BuzzFeed News followed to reveal a more striking truth: These for-the-cause sites that appeal to hardcore partisans are in fact owned by the same Florida company.

Liberal Society and Conservative 101 are among the growing number of so-called hyperpartisan websites and associated Facebook pages that have sprung up in recent years, and that attracted significant traffic during the US election. A previous BuzzFeed News analysis of content published by conservative and liberal hyperpartisan sites found they reap massive engagement on Facebook with aggressively partisan stories and memes that frequently demonize the other side’s point of view, often at the expense of facts.

Jonathan Albright, a professor at Elon University, published a detailed analysis of the hyperpartisan and fake news ecosystem. Given the money at stake, he told BuzzFeed News he’s not surprised some of the same people operate both liberal and conservative sites as a way to “run up their metrics or advertising revenue.”

More here.

From January, Adam Tooze reviews Wolfgang Streeck's How Will Capitalism End? in the LRB (with a response from Streeck):

In early 2014, as the likes of Habermas and the late Ulrich Beck called on their fellow Germans to make the elections to the Strasbourg Parliament the constitutive moment of a European demos, Streeck’s mind was on darker themes. In January 2014 at the British Academy, he gave the lecture ‘How Will Capitalism End?’, which lends its dramatic title to this collection. If, as events in Europe and the US seemed to demonstrate, capitalism had broken free from its constraints, then visions of an ‘ever closer union’, at least in the form of the EU, were out of touch with reality. We should be bracing ourselves for a prolonged and agonising decomposition of the entire social fabric. It has been said that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism: Streeck believes we may one day witness the proof of that. Capitalism will end not because it faces serious opposition but because over the course of the coming decades and centuries it can be relied on to consume and destroy its own foundations. We should expect ever intensifying stagnation, inequality, the plundering of the public domain, corruption and the escalating risk of major war, all of this accompanied by a pervasive erosion of social order, generalised social entropy. Indeed, according to Streeck we have at least since the 1970s been living in what he refers to as a ‘post-social society … a society lite’. We cope individually with conditions of increasing uncertainty, while at the macro level both society and economy become increasingly ungovernable. ‘Life in a society of this kind,’ he writes, ‘demands constant improvisation, forcing individuals to substitute strategy for structure, and offers rich opportunities to oligarchs and warlords while imposing uncertainty and insecurity on all others, in some ways like the long interregnum that began in the fifth century CE and is now called the Dark Age.’

Streeck isn’t merely making a diagnosis, but a call to arms. He encourages his fellow sociologists to break through the ‘disciplinary truce’ that in the 1950s divided the economy from the rest of the social world and hived it off as the exclusive domain of economics. But his hopes extend beyond the academic: ‘Sociologists and political scientists, in alliance with heterodox economists of different stripes, have begun working on a new sort of political economy, a socio-economics that would again make the economic subservient to the social rather than vice versa, first as a theoretical and then, hopefully, as a political project’. Streeck draws urgent practical conclusions: ‘Bringing capitalism back into the ambit of democratic government, and thereby saving the latter from extinction, means de-globalising capitalism.’ Capitalism must be cut back to the scale of the nation-state, because it is at the level of the nation-state that Europeans have over the last two centuries been able to establish ‘social cohesion and solidarity and governability’.

More here.

David Shariatmadari in The Guardian:

Tariq Ramadan knows all about travel bans. After all, he was never meant to end up here, in a pebbledash semi in north-west London. In 2004, he was on his way to the US, having been offered the role of professor of Islamic studies at the University of Notre Dame, in Indiana. Suddenly, nine days before his flight, a house already rented, kids enrolled in school, his visa was revoked.

The reasons given were vague at first, but eventually came down to the fact he supported a charity the Bush administration labelled a fundraiser for Hamas. They argued Ramadan should have known about the links. How could he, he said, when the donations were made before the blacklisting – in other words, before the US government itself knew? He believes, instead, that he was singled out for his opposition to the war in Iraq.

In 2010, Hillary Clinton, as secretary of state, revoked the revocation, but by that time, Ramadan had been embraced by St Antony’s College, Oxford. Ramadan has no regrets. “I’m very happy that they prevented me from going. I’m much better off here,” he says, in gently accented English (he grew up in Geneva, speaking French and Arabic). Commuting to Oxford, he has made Metroland his home. In the States, he says, “I don’t think it’s a political atmosphere where you are free to speak. People are scared.”

It’s probably just as well he feels that way: the Trump administration won’t be rolling out the welcome mat. As well as its plans for a new executive order designed to prevent millions of Muslims from entering the country, it’s considering designating the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organisation. That poses a problem for Ramadan, as it was his grandfather, Hassan al-Banna, who founded the movement.

More here.