He Conceived the Mathematics of Roughness

Benoit Mandelbrot, the brilliant Polish-French-American mathematician who died in 2010, had a poet’s taste for complexity and strangeness. His genius for noticing deep links among far-flung phenomena led him to create a new branch of geometry, one that has deepened our understanding of both natural forms and patterns of human behavior. The key to it is a simple yet elusive idea, that of self-similarity.

To see what self-similarity means, consider a homely example: the cauliflower. Take a head of this vegetable and observe its form—the way it is composed of florets. Pull off one of those florets. What does it look like? It looks like a little head of cauliflower, with its own subflorets. Now pull off one of those subflorets. What does that look like? A still tinier cauliflower. If you continue this process—and you may soon need a magnifying glass—you’ll find that the smaller and smaller pieces all resemble the head you started with. The cauliflower is thus said to be self-similar. Each of its parts echoes the whole.

Other self-similar phenomena, each with its distinctive form, include clouds, coastlines, bolts of lightning, clusters of galaxies, the network of blood vessels in our bodies, and, quite possibly, the pattern of ups and downs in financial markets. The closer you look at a coastline, the more you find it is jagged, not smooth, and each jagged segment contains smaller, similarly jagged segments that can be described by Mandelbrot’s methods. Because of the essential roughness of self-similar forms, classical mathematics is ill-equipped to deal with them. Its methods, from the Greeks on down to the last century, have been better suited to smooth forms, like circles. (Note that a circle is not self-similar: if you cut it up into smaller and smaller segments, those segments become nearly straight.)

Only in the last few decades has a mathematics of roughness emerged, one that can get a grip on self-similarity and kindred matters like turbulence, noise, clustering, and chaos. And Mandelbrot was the prime mover behind it. He had a peripatetic career, but he spent much of it as a researcher for IBM in upstate New York. In the late 1970s he became famous for popularizing the idea of self-similarity, and for coining the word “fractal” (from the Latin fractus, meaning broken) to designate self-similar forms. In 1980 he discovered the “Mandelbrot set,” whose shape—it looks a bit like a warty snowman or beetle—came to represent the newly fashionable science of chaos. What is perhaps less well known about Mandelbrot is the subversive work he did in economics. The financial models he created, based on his fractal ideas, implied that stock and currency markets were far riskier than the reigning consensus in business schools and investment banks supposed, and that wild gyrations—like the 777-point plunge in the Dow on September 29, 2008—were inevitable. (...)

It was in casting about for a thesis topic that he had his first Keplerian glimmer. One day Uncle Szolem—who by now had written off Mandelbrot as a loss to mathematics—disdainfully pulled from a wastebasket and handed to him a reprint about something called Zipf’s law. The brainchild of an eccentric Harvard linguist named George Kingsley Zipf, this law concerns the frequency with which different words occur in written texts—newspaper articles, books, and so on. The most frequently occurring word in written English is “the,” followed by “of” and then “and.” Zipf ranked all the words in this way, and then plotted their frequency of usage. The resulting curve had an odd shape. Instead of falling gradually from the most common word to the least common, as one might expect, it plunged sharply at first and then leveled off into a long and gently sloping tail—rather like the path of a ski jumper. This shape indicates extreme inequality: a few hundred top-ranked words do almost all the work, while the large majority languish in desuetude. (If anything, Zipf underestimated this linguistic inequality: he was using James Joyce’s Ulysses, rich in esoteric words, as one of his main data sources.) The “law” Zipf came up with was a simple yet precise numerical relation between a word’s rank and its frequency of usage.

Zipf’s law, which has been shown to hold for all languages, may seem a trifle. But the same basic principle turns out to be valid for a great variety of phenomena, including the size of islands, the populations of cities, the amount of time a book spends on the best-seller list, the number of links to a given website, and—as the Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto had discovered in the 1890s—a country’s distribution of income and wealth. All of these are examples of “power law” distributions.* Power laws apply, in nature or society, where there is extreme inequality or unevenness: where a high peak (corresponding to a handful of huge cities, or frequently used words, or very rich people) is followed by a low “long tail” (corresponding to a multitude of small towns, or rare words, or wage slaves). In such cases, the notion of “average” is meaningless.

by Jim Holt, NY Review of Books |  Read more:

Image: Hank Morgan/Time Life Pictures/Getty Images

Raccoon on spring flowering tree, by Coy.
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Live in Infamy

To some, the Facebook timeline reads as an explicit chronology of illicit behavior. For most, these personality museums are masterfully curated, conveying an exuberance tamed by professionalism, edginess blunted by responsibility. While we are generally aware of the risks involved in divulging personal information, the popular conception is that our norms of exposure will change. Through mass-unveiling, salacious behavior will become bland.

Our society will learn to forgive youth-frozen-in-documentation. We will be more affirming of eccentric conduct and peculiar passions. Whereas candidate Clinton said that he didn’t inhale and he didn’t like it, Obama could say he inhaled often because that was the point. As our social mores relax to accommodate the radical honesty of blogs and the overshare impulse of Instagram, our aspiring candidates will be resilient to ad feminam attacks. This would be so precisely because we’d all be vulnerable to them, or at least familiar with them. (Few background checks are as rigorous as those for public servants, but the population at large will grow accustomed to informal and undisclosed reputation screenings in their personal and professional life.) (...)

Individuals whose life stories buck standard social scripts—immigrants, LGBT youth and ethnic minorities—are more aware of this than most. Members of these groups often navigate several social realms, swapping different speech patterns and modes of behavior depending on the context. As the much-missed Dave Chappelle once said, all black Americans are bilingual, equipped with one language for the street and another for the job interview. This ability to develop and express one’s dynamism, and to control one’s appearance based on a particular audience, is stifled by pervasive exposure.

In 2010, 28-year-old Krystal Ball ran for a seat in Congress to represent Virginia’s conservative 1st district. Pictures surfaced in early October of a younger Ball at a costume party with her then-husband. She was dressed in a Santa hat. Her ex’s makeshift costume consisted of fuzzy reindeer antlers and a red dildo for a nose (think: naughty Santa and Rudolph). Even though observers of Virginia politics identify Ball’s political inexperience as the campaign’s burden, as well as her running as a Democrat in a heavily Republican district, the photographs dominated the news. Ball responded swiftly:

The tactic of painting female politicians as whores and as sluts is nothing new, and painting successful women in general in this way in order to delegitimize them and to denigrate them is nothing new. It’s a new twist on it though because obviously now as I’m one of the first of my generation in the Facebook age to step up and run for office I’m sort of the first one to have this particular thing happen to me but I certainly don’t think I’ll be the last.

Where many of us can see ourselves in those pictures of playful twentysomethings posing at a costume party, Ball’s political enemies attempted to rip her likeness from its context. They wanted Virginians in the 1st district to see her as an immoral and unserious ditz.

That many of this country’s lingering stereotypes play out on the political stage was not lost on Ball. In her responses during and since the campaign, she urges young women not to let this incident dissuade them from public service. But for every girl inspired by Ball’s pleas, how many more were discouraged by the whole episode? To argue that normalized exposure will endow our politics with greater forgiveness is to overlook how the identities of our society’s most vulnerable are mischaracterized, simplified and denied richness.

Witnessed in the abundance of cruel and negative advertisement during campaigns, and recounted to us in obnoxious detail in tell-alls like Confessions of a Political Hitman, opposition researchers and political adversaries will use any information they can find to convince voters to shun candidates. As Ball found out, the prevalence of social networks just means there is a larger ammunition cache.

Consider also this bizarre declaration from Facebook boy-king Mark Zuckerberg: “The days of you having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end…Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity.” Or ponder this nugget from Google Executive Chairman and former CEO Eric Schmidt, “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.”

In Schmidt and Zuckerberg’s vision, it would be inappropriate to account for Ball’s setting and circumstance. Last year, when two Texas undergraduates were outed to their unsympathetic parents through a Facebook privacy loophole, was that merely stark justice for their lack of integrity? The damage exacted by unwilling exposure will be unfair and uneven.

For young people interested in public service, it could be seen as best practice to simply stay off social networks. Keeping a low profile might shield their reputations from disrepute, against criticisms of the maximalist “let-it-all-hang-out” stance. But this too misses the point.

Not only does this mindset fail to acknowledge the entanglement of networked social platforms with face-to-face communication—as well as the ways ubiquitous surveillance captures information without one’s knowledge or consent—it also represents a perverse kind of incentivizing. Blogs, like older forms of publishing, encourage ideological experimentation. Subject-oriented networks, in the spirit of Twitter, traffic in the magnetism of shared interest. To discourage the use of these technologies could foster a political class that is calculating in character and predictable in policy. Hiding healthy duplicities or repressing radical dissent may encourage politically minded young people to be more like politicians.

by Hamza Shaban, TNI |  Read more:

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Kyoto's Restaurant by Giora on Flickr.
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The Slopes of Davos

During the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, in a school auditorium outside the ski resort’s secure perimeter, there’s a smaller Open Forum – no invitation required for anyone who can make it up to the Swiss Alps. It’s TEDx to Davos’s TED, a neat package of webstream-ready inspiration. One of this year’s presentations was Life Lessons from Jazz: Improvisation as a Way of Life, in which Columbia ethnomusicology professor Chris Washburne and his band taught the audience how to survive neoliberal uncertainty with the “spontaneous creativity that we have inherited from the African-American culture.”

Quoting the early soloist Sidney Bechet, Washburne calls jazz the sound of freedom. “It’s the sounds that emulate [sic] from the emancipated slaves. The newfound freedom that they found in the South of the United States, and they had to make sense of that freedom. They had to turn ugliness into beauty, and to rebuild their lives.” So, too, do we have to grasp the new freedoms of the neoliberal world to improvise a way of life that celebrates uncertainty and precarity.

A favored metaphor in Davos, jazz offers these life lessons to the precariat and the elites alike, while negating the responsibility of the latter to do anything about the vulnerabilities of the former. We’re all in the music together, and risk sets the rhythm. Jazz musicians “have one of the riskiest jobs in the world, because failure is just around the corner at every single turn,” Washburne assures us between sets of Azure and Caravan. “As a matter of fact, you can think about jazz as just a series of failures.”

The World Economic Forum belongs to those who drape themselves in risk and find opportunity in each reversal of fortune. They are used to improv – only improv promises mostly to enrich them, rather than allowing them to scrape by. In a way, the economic elite see this meeting as their own Montreux Jazz, a place for free-market thought leaders to fearlessly riff on the future as it comes.

Their setlist comes in an annual Global Risks report prepared at the start of the year. This document, with its clean graphics in five colors – Google plus purple – lays bare the terrors of the moment and sorely tests the macho boardroom definition of risk. In the corporate world, risk always carries a harmonic of opportunity; always exists to be snatched up by someone with big enough balls and a good enough hedge. It is a kind of commodity. Any disaster just needs to be quantified in two variables – likelihood of occurring, and potential impact – and it’s ready for the market.

The first Global Risk reports emerged seven years ago from a network of experts and roundtable consultations bringing together risk advisors, academics and executives. Insurance corporations – Swiss Re, Zurich Insurance, Marsh & McLennan – played, and continue to play, a nonspecific role as “collaborators,” providing guidance in the selection of risks. In 2011, the process switched to a larger email survey of leaders and thinkers from business, government, international organizations and the academies. Respondents were asked to rate a list of risks by likelihood of occurrence in the next ten years, by potential cost in billions of dollars, and by connection with other risks.

In 2012 the survey pool grew to include NGOs, and the unit of potential impact changed from billions of dollars to a value-neutral five point scale. Like the Open Forum, this was Davos in its inclusive, multi-stakeholder guise. The sample nevertheless remains heavily skewed toward the business world, which accounts for over 42 percent of respondents this year; all other groups are dwarfed, with governments coming in at 8.1 percent.

The list of risks also reached its current size and shape in 2012, and the authors decided to fix it in place for the sake of year-to-year analysis. These fifty possible disasters would thenceforth serve as the basic scale on which to jam – the definitive threats to business and, by extension, humanity. Until the next overhaul, we’re stuck with the sound of 2012 – but if it’s catastrophic imagination that we need, 2012 was a creative year.

Global Risks 2013 explores catastrophes that are too big and unknown to hedge, even if many of them are already coming to pass. Its portfolio is fifty risk factors thick, with water shortages, liquidity crises and orbital debris, each precisely weighted by likelihood and potential impact and charted like commodities. Backlash against globalization is up. Extreme weather is up. Nothing is down. It’s never been clear exactly whose nightmares these risks are, and the lack of attribution is part of the point. They are supposed to rise up out of the data, objective and urgent, the voice of the planet demanding to be heard.

by T. Paul Cox, TNI |  Read more:

Image: Imp Kerr

The Kentucky Derby...On Acid

This is my good friend Caitlin (whose name isn’t really Caitlin). That is a hit of acid on her tongue. She did acid once, four years ago, and she’s doing it again now, just before we head out to the Kentucky Derby, because the only way to attend the most famous horse race in the world—an event that features thousands of drunken gamblers, straight-up drunks, and a roiling, seersuckered mess of Southern gentry—is to trip your head off for the whole thing.

by Amira Asad, Vice |  Read more:

Photo: uncredited

Six Flags in New Orleans (Abandoned - post Katrina)
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A Dream of Glowing Trees

Hoping to give new meaning to the term “natural light,” a small group of biotechnology hobbyists and entrepreneurs has started a project to develop plants that glow, potentially leading the way for trees that can replace electric streetlamps and potted flowers luminous enough to read by.

The project, which will use a sophisticated form of genetic engineering called synthetic biology, is attracting attention not only for its audacious goal, but for how it is being carried out.

Rather than being the work of a corporation or an academic laboratory, it will be done by a small group of hobbyist scientists in one of the growing number of communal laboratories springing up around the nation as biotechnology becomes cheap enough to give rise to a do-it-yourself movement.

The project is also being financed in a D.I.Y. sort of way: It has attracted more than $250,000 in pledges from about 4,500 donors in about two weeks on the Web site Kickstarter.

The effort is not the first of its kind. A university group created a glowing tobacco plant a few years ago by implanting genes from a marine bacterium that emits light. But the light was so dim that it could be perceived only if one observed the plant for at least five minutes in a dark room.

The new project’s goals, at least initially, are similarly modest. “We hope to have a plant which you can visibly see in the dark (like glow-in-the-dark paint), but don’t expect to replace your light bulbs with version 1.0,” the project’s Kickstarter page says.

But part of the goal is more controversial: to publicize do-it-yourself synthetic biology and to “inspire others to create new living things.” As promising as that might seem to some, critics are alarmed at the idea of tinkerers creating living things in their garages. They fear that malicious organisms may be created, either intentionally or by accident.

Two environmental organizations, Friends of the Earth and the ETC Group, have written to Kickstarter and to the Agriculture Department, which regulates genetically modified crops, in an effort to shut down the glowing plant effort.

The project “will likely result in widespread, random and uncontrolled release of bioengineered seeds and plants produced through the controversial and risky techniques of synthetic biology,” the two groups said in their letter demanding that Kickstarter remove the project from its Web site.

They note that the project has pledged to deliver seeds to many of its 4,000 contributors, making it perhaps the “first-ever intentional environmental release of an avowedly ‘synthetic biology’ organism anywhere in the world.” Kickstarter told the critics to take up their concerns with the project’s organizers. The Agriculture Department has not yet replied.  (...)

Synthetic biology is a nebulous term and it is difficult to say how, if at all, it differs from genetic engineering.

In its simplest form, genetic engineering involves snipping a gene out of one organism and pasting it into the DNA of another. Synthetic biology typically involves synthesizing the DNA to be inserted, providing the flexibility to go beyond the genes found in nature.

by Andrew Pollack, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Peter DaSilva for The New York Times

Who Would Kill a Monk Seal?

The Hawaiian monk seal has wiry whiskers and the deep, round eyes of an apologetic child. The animals will eat a variety of fish and shellfish, or turn over rocks for eel and octopus, then haul out on the beach and lie there most of the day, digesting. On the south side of Kauai one afternoon, I saw one sneeze in its sleep: its convex body shuddered, then spilled again over the sand the way a raw, boneless chicken breast will settle on a cutting board. The seals can grow to seven feet long and weigh 450 pounds. They are adorable, but also a little gross: the Zach Galifianakises of marine mammals.

Monk seals are easy targets. After the Polynesians landed in Hawaii, about 1,500 years ago, the animals mostly vanished, slaughtered for meat or oil or scared off by the settlers’ dogs. But the species quietly survived in the Leeward Islands, northwest of the main Hawaiian chain — a remote archipelago, including Laysan Island, Midway and French Frigate Shoals, which, for the most part, only Victorian guano barons and the military have seen fit to settle. There are now about 900 monk seals in the Leewards, and the population has been shrinking for 25 years, making the seal among the world’s most imperiled marine mammals. The monk seal was designated an endangered species in 1976. Around that time, however, a few monk seals began trekking back into the main Hawaiian Islands — “the mains” — and started having pups. These pioneers came on their own, oblivious to the sprawling federal project just getting under way to help them. Even now, recovering the species is projected to cost $378 million and take 54 years.

As monk seals spread through the mains and flourished there, they became tourist attractions and entourage-encircled celebrities. Now when a seal appears on a busy beach, volunteers with the federal government’s “Monk Seal Response Network” hustle out with stakes and fluorescent tape to erect an exclusionary “S.P.Z.” around the snoozing animal — a “seal protection zone.” Then they stand watch in the heat for hours to keep it from being disrupted while beachgoers gush and point.

But the seals’ appearance has not been universally appreciated. The animals have been met by many islanders with a convoluted mix of resentment and spite. This fury has led to what the government is calling a string of “suspicious deaths.” But spend a little time in Hawaii, and you come to recognize these deaths for what they are — something loaded and forbidding. A word that came to my mind was “assassination.”

by Jon Mooalem, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Peter Bohler for The New York Times

Ryan Adams

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A plain silk miyamairi kimono used for christening a baby boy at a Shinto ceremony, featuring cranes and a pine forest. Embroidery highlights. Taisho period (1912-1927). The Kimono Gallery
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What Do You Desire?

[ed. Wow. This is some really amazing writing. But if kinky (truly kinky) sex bothers you DO NOT read this. It's pretty startling sometimes to realize how weird the world can be, just around the corner.]

On a Monday last April, I stood in line at JFK Airport to board a plane to San Francisco. Before me stood a silver-headed West Coast businessman. His skin had the exfoliated, burnished sheen of the extremely healthy; his glasses were of an advanced polymer; he had dark jeans. He wore the recycled ethylene-vinyl acetate shoes that are said never to smell. His fleece coat was of an extraordinary thickness and quality, with a lissome external layer that would not pill. He seemed like the sort of man who would pronounce himself a minimalist and say that everything he bought was selected for its extraordinary craftsmanship and beautiful design. But the silver fox’s computer bag was a cheap thing with netting and buckles that said GOOGLE on it. The person in front of him in line wore a Google doodle T-shirt with Bert and Ernie where the Os would be. In front of him was a Google backpack.

Until I left San Francisco it never went away. It was embroidered on breast pockets, illustrated with themes of America’s cities, emblazoned on stainless-steel water bottles, on fleece jackets, on baseball caps, but not on the private coach buses that transported workers to their campus in Mountain View, where they ate raw goji-berry discs from their snack room and walked about swathed, priestlike, in Google mantles, with Google wimples and Google mitres, seeking orientation on Google Maps, Googling strangers and Google chatting with friends, as I did with mine, dozens of times a day, which made the recurrence of the logo feel like a supremacist taunt.

My first day in the city I sat in a sunlit café in the Mission District, drank a cappuccino, and read a paper copy of the San Francisco Chronicle that lay anachronistically on the counter. I overheard someone talking about his lunch at the Googleplex. “Quinoa cranberry pilaf,” I wrote down. And then, “coregasm.” Because that was the subsequent topic of discussion: women who have spontaneous orgasms during yoga. The barista was saying how wonderful it was that the issue was receiving attention, coregasms being something a lot of women experienced and were frightened to talk about. Those days were over.

The people of San Francisco were once famous for their refusal of deodorant and unnecessary shearing. Sometimes, walking down the street, past gay construction workers and vibrator stores, I was reminded that this was the place where Harvey Milk was elected (and assassinated), where the bathhouses had flourished (and closed). But most of the time I noticed only that the people of San Francisco appeared to have been suffused with unguents and botanical salves, polished with salts, and scented with the aromatherapeutics sold in the shops that lined Valencia Street. The air smelled of beeswax, lavender, and verbena, and the sidewalks in the Mission glittered on sunny days. The food was exquisite. There was a place in Hayes Valley that made liquid-nitrogen ice cream to order. I watched my ice cream magically pressured into existence with a burst of vapor and a pneumatic hiss. This miracle, as the world around me continued apace, just moms with Google travel coffee mugs talking about lactation consultants. Online, people had diverted the fear of sin away from coregasms and toward their battles against sugar and flour. “Raw, organic honey, local ghee, and millet chia bread taming my gluten lust,” was a typical dispatch. “Thank goodness for ancient grains.”

At night I was alone, and I would walk down the street listening to sermons in Spanish from the storefront churches and the electronic hum of the BART train below. The city was a dream world of glowing screens and analog fetishism, of Google, orgasms, stone fruits, and sparkles. A Greek chorus of the homeless and mentally ill connected these fragments into deeper conspiracies, until I began to see conspiracies myself. I would walk down the sidewalks of the Mission and note their glittery resemblance to my powdered blush in its makeup compact. “This sidewalk looks like Super Orgasm,” I would think, Super Orgasm being the name of the particular shade of blush I own. My makeup reveled in contemporary sexual politics: FOR HIM & HER read the sticker on the back of my paraben-free foundation. I contemplated a possible economic index comparing the cost of a pint of honey-lavender ice cream to the federal minimum hourly wage. I ran to Golden Gate Park, where giant birds of prey gazed hungrily upon glossy dachshunds. The cyclists passed in shoals, dressed in Google bicycle jerseys.

I had never had a coregasm and my sexual expectations conformed to widely held, government-sanctioned ideals. I was single, and now in my thirties, but I still envisioned my sexual experience eventually reaching a terminus, like a monorail gliding to a stop at Epcot Center. I would disembark, find myself face-to-face with another human being, and there we would remain in our permanent station in life: the future.

In San Francisco, people thought differently. They sought to unlink the family from a sexual foundation of two people. They believed in intentional communities that could successfully disrupt the monogamous heterosexual norm. They gave their choices names and they conceived of their actions as social movements. I had come to San Francisco to observe this sexual vanguard, but I did not think their lessons applied to me. “But what is your personal journey?” they would ask, and I would joke about this later with my friends.

by Emily Witt, N+1 |  Read more:

Photo by Sam Breach, September 26, 2010

Bruno Barbey, Photo Poche, Nathan, 1999. Introduction de Annick Cojean.
Obidos, Portugal, 1983.
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Julian Barnes and the Work of Grief

How do you turn catastrophe into art?” This bold question, posed by Julian Barnes in a fabulist exegesis of Géricault’s great painting “The Raft of the Medusa”, in A History of the World in 10½ Chapters (1989), might be said to be answered by his new book, Levels of Life, a memoir of his wife of thirty years, Pat Kavanagh, who died of a brain tumour in 2008. With few of the playful stratagems and indirections of style typical of his fiction, but with something of the baffled elegiac tone of his Booker Prize-winning short novel The Sense of an Ending (2011), Levels of Life conveys an air of stunned candour: “I was thirty-two when we met, sixty-two when she died. The heart of my life; the life of my heart”. The end came swiftly and terribly: “Thirty-seven days from diagnosis to death”. The resulting memoir, a precisely composed, often deeply moving hybrid of non-fiction, “fabulation”, and straightforward reminiscence and contemplation, is a gifted writer’s response to the incomprehensible in a secular culture in which “we are bad at dealing with death, that banal, unique thing; we can no longer make it part of a wider pattern”.

Levels of Life is a not quite adequate title for this highly personal and at times richly detailed book, implying an air of lofty contemplation from which the vividness of actual life has departed. Barnes quotes E. M. Forster: “One death may explain itself, but it throws no light upon another” – yet Levels of Life suggests that a single death, if examined from a singular perspective, may throw a good deal of light on the universal experiences of loss, grief, mourning, and what Barnes calls “the question of loneliness”. “I already know that only the old words would do: death, grief, sorrow, sadness, heartbreak. Nothing modernly evasive or medicalising. Grief is a human, not a medical, condition.” The epiphany – or rather one of the epiphanies, for Levels of Life contains many striking, insightful aphorisms – towards which the memoir moves is the remark of a bereaved friend: “Nature is so exact, it hurts exactly as much as it is worth, so in a way one relishes the pain . . . . If it didn’t matter, it wouldn’t matter”. In the more intimate passages here, Barnes would seem to be making the tacit point that the creation of art is inadequate to compensate for such loss.

“You put together two people who have not been put together before . . . . Then, at some point, sooner or later, for this reason or that, one of them is taken away. And what is taken away is greater than the sum of what was there. This may not be mathematically possible; but it is emotionally possible.” (...)

Barnes has little faith in the power of one’s will to guide, if not control, the waywardness of emotion. In less secular, more traditional cultures, the grieving after death is ritualized; no individual has to invent for himself a way of mourning, at least externally. Death is an occasion – frequent, if still shocking – in the social fabric, not an aberration in private life. As he lives in a secular, urban, intellectual milieu, Julian Barnes presents himself as essentially adrift and unmoored, and stoically so; his grieving is passionate but narrow. (...)

Levels of Life ends on a tentatively hopeful note – not optimistic, but rueful. “There is a German word, Sehnsucht, which has no English equivalent; it means ‘the longing for something.’” This is the obverse of the widower’s more particularized loneliness, which is the “absence of a very specific someone”. The final, perfectly honed lines of the memoir suggest the balloonist’s quasi-mystic, Romantic expectation: “All that has happened is that from somewhere – or nowhere – an unexpected breeze has sprung up, and we are in movement again. But where are we being taken?”.

by Joyce Carol Oates, TLS |  Read more:
Image: © Writer Pictures

Terror and Twitter

To say that I’ve been following the Boston bombings case throughout the past week would be a considerable understatement. I’ve read every major and tangential article about it, often multiple times. I’ve rotated a slew of hashtags (#Watertown, #Bostonbombings, #Tsarnaev) through the search bar on Twitter several times a day, and a few nights when I’ve woken up at 4am. I’ve seen each of the fifteen or so pictures that are making the rounds, from the photos of the bombing itself, to the surveillance photos of the brothers, to the brothers’ five or six photos culled from their social media sites, to the play-by-play over the 20ish hours of the manhunt: snack-run gas station photo, swat guys on someone’s shed photo, bullet holes through the wall and chair photo, Dzhokhar’s hangdog boat-staddling photo and his shirt-pulled-up, skinny-ribbed photo, and his blurry, bloody-faced ambulance photo. (I would link to these but you’ve probably seen some if not all of them already.) I even managed to accidentally see the grotesque Tamerlan’s-dead-body photo. I’ve been, ashamedly and in a word, obsessed.

While the story itself is fixating in the way an airport adventure novel is fixating (bombs? A police chase? Calling in the FBI? A shootout? A manhunt? Shutting down a city?), I would probably, under normal circumstances, have moved on by now. The news cycle is, bit by bit and rightly so, starting to. But it wasn’t really the action element that hooked me, that made me obsessed.

Much has been made of little brother Dzhokhar’s Twitter account (ominous tweets!), and I looked into it on Saturday out of curiosity.

Friends’ accounts in the media are adamant about how nice the kid was, how normal and social and funny he was, how shocked they were. People say things like this after people snap pretty often (“quiet, a good student”) because most sociopaths do OK blending in socially. But Jahar’s world of tweets completely captured me–because it so perfectly and utterly reflected the exact opposite of what I would expect a terrorist’s Twitter feed, were I asked to imagine one, to look like.

It is the bro-iest thing I’ve ever seen. Mainly he tweets about cars, pot, TV shows, girls, food. Sometimes he shares jokes or mundane observations. He retweets uncontroversial, random facts or pictures from users like “Science Porn” and “Not Common Facts” and “Earth Pics.” (...)

As horrifying as it sounds, I kind of get why people are susceptible to the conspiracies—because both Dzhokhar’s jokey online persona (“Beemer, benz, bentley? Honda, bro” [December 23]) and his moody good looks (moppety hair, clean/symmetrical features) make him seem an unlikely terrorist (see: the halo effect).

But I’m not a conspiracy theorist—he was spotted in surveillance images, he was involved in a carjacking and a shootout, he ran from police and emerged bloodied from a boat, and he allegedly admitted involvement from his hospital bed. It seems highly unlikely that he did not bomb people in Boston on April 15.

It’s just that when my mind tries to leap from Jahar (“Peanut butter, fluff, and nutella #iwentthere”)—to Suspect #2, coolly planting a bomb next to an 8-year-old, shooting at the police—it falls into the void every single time. Even when taking into account the heavy influence his brother most likely had. When you’re young you sometimes get mixed up in things, but they’re not usually bombings.

Because if he drank, and smoked weed, and immersed himself in American pop culture (The Walking Dead, Breaking Bad, Game of Thrones), and loved cars, and loved money, and loved women, and blew up three people and wounded hundreds more on a Monday afternoon in the name of Allah, that makes him either a brilliantly deceitful sociopath—which I have trouble believing—or, somehow, a casual terrorist, showing up to a bombing the way I might show up to a protest.

I admitted my obsession with the Tsarnaev case the other day to a friend, who responded pragmatically, “There’s probably a lot we don’t know.” While it’s absolutely true, why do I feel like I know this kid, like having never known him even I have a right to be shocked?

by Emilie Shumway, The Point |  Read more:
Image: uncredited

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The Economics of Social Status

In economics, a good is anything that “satisfies human wants and provides utility.” This includes not just tangible goods like gold, grain, and real estate, but also services (housecleaning, dentistry, etc.) as well as abstract goods like love, health, and social status.

As an economic good, social status is a lot like health. They’re both intangible and highly personal. In proper economic terms, they are private goods – rivalrous and mostly excludable. And the fact that they’re hard to measure doesn’t make them any less valuable — in fact we spend trillions of dollars a year in their pursuit (though they often elude us).

But status differs from health in one very important respect: It can be transacted – spent as well as earned. It’s not a terminal good, but rather an intermediate good that helps us acquire other things of value. For example, I can trade some of my status for money, favors, sex, or information — and vice versa.

Health, if it’s possible to spend at all (e.g. in pursuit of career success), is extremely illiquid. But as I will argue today, status is so liquid — so easy to transact, and in real time — that it plays a fundamental economic role in our day-to-day lives.

Before we dig into the transactional nature of social status, let’s ground ourselves, briefly, in its biology and sociology.

The biology of status

No one plays status games in Heaven. Why bother? Souls have no want for food, sex, or smartphones — and thanks to His omnipresence, God even takes the fun out competing for an audience with Him.

Meanwhile, here on Earth, we (embodied primates) engage in all manner of status games. It’s one of the ways we compete over access to scarce resources like food and mates. And it’s something we share with a lot of other social animals — chickens, dogs, chimps, etc.

Here are some of the concepts that govern the day-to-day biology of social status:

• Prestige vs. dominance. Joseph Henrich (of WEIRD fame) distinguishes two types of status. Prestige is the kind of status we get from being an impressive human specimen (think Meryl Streep), and it’s governed by our ‘approach’ instincts. Dominance, on the other hand, is the kind of status we get from being able to intimidate others (think Joseph Stalin), and is governed by fear and other ‘avoid’ instincts. Of course these two types of status aren’t mutually exclusive, but they’re analytically distinct strategies with different biological expressions.
• Fitness displays. In The Mating Mind, Geoffrey Miller argues that many of our most prized, socially-desirable qualities — athleticism, artistic skill, eloquence, intelligence, physical beauty — serve as fitness displays, i.e., advertisements for the quality of our genes. We are attracted, socially and sexually, to people with high skill and beauty, largely because these traits are honest signals of good genes. [1]
• Hormones. There are at least two hormones involved in processing social status: testosterone and cortisol. To grossly oversimplify, testosterone is the ‘aggression hormone’ while cortisol is the ‘stress hormone.’ In a recent paper (and also a great TED talk), Amy Cuddy et al. asked participants to adopt either a high-status pose or a low-status pose for ten minutes. The researchers then measured participants’ hormone levels and their willingness to take risks on games of chance (a behavior associated with feelings of power). Participants who took high-status poses showed increased testosterone and reduced cortisol levels, and took greater risks, relative to their counterparts who were asked to adopt low-status poses.
• Body language. Cuddy’s experiment also illustrates the role played by our bodies in mediating status. Specifically, we’re wired to interpret people’s use of space in terms of status — the more space you take up, the higher your status. Also relevant are postures of intimidation, submission, and vulnerability.

The point I’m trying to make here is that social status is not arbitrary. Instead, it’s grounded, very concretely, in the biology of honest signals – and as such, it’s subject to very real constraints. Wild swings of status are possible, but they’re mostly the stuff of stories. Our daily lives are governed by much smaller — and more predictable — gains and losses.

by Kevin Simler, Ribbonfarm |  Read more:

Image: uncredited via:

Remote Control: Our Drone Delusion

The Fifth Amendment asserts that no “person” shall be “deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law,” a statement that the Supreme Court has usually interpreted as requiring, among other things, that American citizens receive a fair trial and the right of appeal. The Obama Administration has never made clear why it thought that capturing Awlaki and bringing him to trial was infeasible. Nor has it described the specific standards it used to approve Awlaki’s execution. As things stand, Obama will bequeath to his successors a worrisome precedent: without trial, the President has the right to kill any U.S. citizen who is judged, on the basis of unpublished criteria, to have become an enemy combatant.

But Awlaki’s case, troubling as it may be, raises a broader issue: the Administration’s refusal to disclose the criteria by which it condemns anyone, American or otherwise, to death. The information used in such cases is intelligence data rather than evidence; it is not subject to cross-examination or judicial review. Unanswered questions abound. Does the President require that intelligence used to convict a terror suspect in absentia be based on multiple sources, or is one sufficient? Must intercepts, photographs, or credible firsthand testimony be obtained, or can people be executed on the basis of hearsay from paid informants? How directly involved in violence must an individual be to receive a death sentence? At what point does a preacher’s hate speech warrant his being killed?

Mazzetti describes how the imperative to protect American troops in Afghanistan from cross-border attacks originating in Pakistan led to a slackening of the standards used to mark terror suspects for assassination. After 2008, the C.I.A. won approval for a category of drone attacks known as “signature strikes,” in which, even without a specific target, an attack is justified by a pattern of behavior—young men of military age test-firing mortars at a training camp in South Waziristan, say, or riding under arms in a truck toward the Afghan border.

Under the laws of war, strikes of that kind are typically legal on a formal battlefield like that in Afghanistan—in war, if an enemy camp is discovered, it is not necessary to know the names of the fighters inside in order to attack. In secret, Obama unilaterally extended such permission to Pakistan’s border region, where the United States had never declared war. The President put the C.I.A., not the Pentagon, in charge of these attacks, in order to maintain deniability.

Without judicial review or informed public debate, the potential for abuse and overreach is vast. In one of the most disquieting passages in his book, Mazzetti notes that, as the death toll in Pakistan mounted, Obama Administration officials at one point claimed that the increased drone strikes in Pakistan had not led to any civilian deaths. “It was something of a trick of logic,” Mazzetti writes. “In an area of known militant activity, all military-age males were considered to be enemy fighters. Therefore, anyone who was killed in a drone strike there was categorized as a combatant.”

by Steve Coll, New Yorker |  Read more:

Illustration by Noma Bar

The Coming Bold Transformation of the American City

In 40 years, 2.7 billion more people will live in world cities than do now, according to the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs. Urban growth in China, India, and most of the developing world will be massive. But what is less known is that population growth will also be enormous in the United States.

The U.S. population will grow 36 percent to 438 million in 2050 from 322 million today. At today’s average of 2.58 persons per household, such growth would require 44.9 million new homes. However American households are getting smaller. If one were to estimate 2.2 persons per household—the household size in Germany today and the likely U.S. size by 2050—the United States would need 74.3 million new homes, not including secondary vacation homes. This means that over the next 40 years, the United States will build more homes than all those existing today in the United Kingdom, France, and Canada combined. Urban planner and theorist Peter Calthorpe predicts that California alone will add 20 million people and 7 million households by 2050.

To meet this demand, completely new urban environments will have to be created in the United States. Where and how will the new American homes be built? What urban structures are to be created?

It is unlikely that city building on the scale to be seen through 2050 will happen ever again. Cities are a means to a way of life: the kind of urban structures created over the next few decades will have profound consequences in terms of quality of life, environmental sustainability, economic well-being, and even happiness and the civilization for hundreds of years to come. If we consider the influence American cities will exert on the rest of the world, the way they are built will determine, as well, much of the world’s sustainability and well-being.

Until today, the United States’ main legacy for the urban world has been low-density suburbs, which, most agree, have many shortcomings in terms of the environment and quality of life. The inadequacies of the suburbs are well known. They are high-energy-use environments: homes are large and thus consume much energy for cooling and heating; occupants’ mobility is dependent on the automobile; distances to reach jobs, shops, and recreation areas are long; and low-cost and high-frequency public transport is not viable in such a low-density environment. Suburbs severely restrict the mobility of vulnerable citizens—youngsters, the poor, and the very old—who usually lack access to a car. Because most destinations are unreachable on foot, suburban public spaces tend to be devoid of people—making them boring in their almost eerie silence interrupted only by the sound of cars that sporadically zoom by or lawnmowers with their maddening engines. Suburbs are not propitious for diversity: Russian literature courses or Afghan restaurants require high concentrations of people nearby from which to draw the small percentage who are interested.

Despite the ills of the suburbs, most Americans do not want to live in a Manhattan-like environment either. So, what should the third-millennium American city be like?

by Enrique Penalosa, Atlantic Cities |  Read more:

Photo: Carlos Barria/Reuters