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You Asked About CES 2018. We Answered. - The New York Times - 0 views

  • You Asked About CES 2018. We Answered. By BRIAN X. CHEN At the International Consumer Electronics Show this week in Las Vegas, thousands of tech companies showcased some of the hottest new innovations: artificial intelligence, self-driving car tech, the smart home, voice-controlled accessories, fifth-generation cellular connectivity and more.Curious about the new products and how they will affect your personal technology? Readers asked Brian X. Chen, our lead consumer technology writer who is attending the trade show, their questions about wireless, TV and the Internet of Things. 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  • At the International Consumer Electronics Show this week in Las Vegas, thousands of tech companies showcased some of the hottest new innovations: artificial intelligence, self-driving car tech, the smart home, voice-controlled accessories, fifth-generation cellular connectivity and more.
  • Curious about the new products and how they will affect your personal technology? Readers asked Brian X. Chen, our lead consumer technology writer who attended the trade show, their questions about wireless, TV and the Internet of Things. (In addition,
Javier E

Holly the Cat's Incredible Journey - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • “I really believe these stories, but they’re just hard to explain,” said Marc Bekoff, a behavioral ecologist at the University of Colorado. “Maybe being street-smart, maybe reading animal cues, maybe being able to read cars, maybe being a good hunter. I have no data for this.”There is, in fact, little scientific dogma on cat navigation. Migratory animals like birds, turtles and insects have been studied more closely, and use magnetic fields, olfactory cues, or orientation by the sun.
  • Strange, faraway locations would seem problematic, although he and Patrick Bateson, a behavioral biologist at Cambridge University, say that cats can sense smells across long distances. “Let’s say they associate the smell of pine with wind coming from the north, so they move in a southerly direction,”
  • Professor Tabor cited longer-distance reports he considered credible: Murka, a tortoiseshell in Russia, traveling about 325 miles home to Moscow from her owner’s mother’s house in Voronezh in 1989; Ninja, who returned to Farmington, Utah, in 1997, a year after her family moved from there to Mill Creek, Wash.; and Howie, an indoor Persian cat in Australia who in 1978 ran away from relatives his vacationing family left him with and eventually traveled 1,000 miles to his family’s home.
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  • The closest, said Roger Tabor, a British cat biologist, may have been a 1954 study in Germany which cats placed in a covered circular maze with exits every 15 degrees most often exited in the direction of their homes, but more reliably if their homes were less than five kilometers away.
  • “We haven’t the slightest idea how they do this,” Mr. Galaxy said. “Anybody who says they do is lying, and, if you find it, please God, tell me what it is.”
  • Nobody knows how it happened: an indoor housecat who got lost on a family excursion managing, after two months and about 200 miles, to return to her hometown.
Javier E

Want the Good Life? This Philosopher Suggests Learning From Cats. - The New York Times - 0 views

  • On the face of it, “Feline Philosophy” would seem like a departure for Gray — a playful exploration of what cats might have to teach humans in our never-ending quest to understand ourselves. But the book, in true Gray fashion, suggests that this very quest may itself be doomed. “Consciousness,” he writes, “has been overrated.”
  • We get worried, anxious and miserable. Our vaunted capacity for abstract thought often gets us (or others) into trouble. We may be the only species to pursue scientific inquiry, but we’re also the only species that has consciously perpetrated genocides. Cats, unlike humans, don’t trick themselves into believing they are saviors, wreaking havoc in the process.
  • Humans like to think of themselves as special, in other words, but what makes us special also, not infrequently, makes us worse
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  • In “The Silence of Animals” (2013), he connected a belief in progress, which he ascribes to both the left and the right, to the hubris that denies our animal nature
  • We are human supremacists whose vanity and moralism and tortured ambivalence make us uniquely unhappy and destructive.
  • Gray, who has been critiquing the follies of humanity and humanism for some time now. “Humans are like any other plague animal,” he wrote in “Straw Dogs” (2002). “They cannot destroy the Earth, but they can easily wreck the environment that sustains them.”
  • A recent profile of Gray in The Guardian remarked on his unusual political journey — from a working-class upbringing in Northern England; to support for Thatcherism in the 1980s; to a dalliance with New Labour in the ’90s before he abandoned that, too, after it became yet another “universal project” he considered in thrall to a distorted view of human possibility
  • He was in favor of Brexit, and has written sympathetically of those who voted Leave, deeming the European Union another grand scheme shot through with arrogant idealism. In its place, Gray wants to see … well, something that’s never fully defined.
Javier E

Dogs, Cats and Leadership - The New York Times - 1 views

  • the performance of presidents, especially on foreign policy, is shaped by how leaders attach to problems. Some leaders are like dogs: They want to bound right in and make things happen. Some are more like cats: They want to detach and maybe look for a pressure point here or there.
  • we should be asking them a different set of questions:
  • How much do you think a president can change the flow of world events? President Obama, for example, has a limited or, if you want to put it that way, realistic view of the extent of American influence. He subscribes to a series of propositions that frequently push him toward nonintervention: The world “is a tough, complicated, messy, mean place and full of hardship and tragedy,” he told Goldberg. You can’t fix everything. Sometimes you can only shine a spotlight.
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  • Furthermore, Obama argues, because of our history, American military efforts are looked at with suspicion. Allies are unreliable. Ukraine is always going to be in Russia’s sphere of influence, so its efforts there will always trump ours. The Middle East is a morass and no longer that important to U.S. interests.
  • Do you think out loud in tandem with a community, or do you process internally? Throughout the Goldberg article, Obama is seen thinking deeply and subtly, but apart from the group around him. In catlike fashion, he is a man who knows his own mind and trusts his own judgment. His decision not to bomb Syria after it crossed the chemical weapons red line was made almost entirely alone.
  • More generally, Obama expresses disdain with the foreign policy community. He is critical of most of his fellow world leaders — impatient with most European ones, fed up with most Middle Eastern ones.
  • When seeking a description of a situation, does your mind leap for the clarifying single truth or do you step back to see the complex web of factors? Ronald Reagan typified the single clarifying truth habit of mind, both when he was describing an enemy (Evil Empire) and when he was calling for change (tear down this wal
  • , Obama leans to the other side of the spectrum. He is continually stepping back, starting with analyses of human nature, how people behave when social order breaks down, the roots and nature of tribalism.
  • Do you see international affairs as a passionate struggle or a conversation and negotiation? Continue reading the main story 343 Comments Obama shows a continual distrust of passion. He doesn’t see much value in macho bluffing or chest-thumping, or in lofty Churchillian rhetoric, or in bombings done in the name of “credibility.”
  • He may be critical, but he is not a hater. He doesn’t even let anger interfere with his appraisal of Vladimir Putin
  • it’s striking how many Americans have responded by going for Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, who are bad versions of the bounding in/we-can-change-everything doggy type.
Javier E

At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails with Jean-P... - 0 views

  • The phenomenologists’ leading thinker, Edmund Husserl, provided a rallying cry, ‘To the things themselves!’ It meant: don’t waste time on the interpretations that accrue upon things, and especially don’t waste time wondering whether the things are real. Just look at this that’s presenting itself to you, whatever this may be, and describe it as precisely as possible.
  • You might think you have defined me by some label, but you are wrong, for I am always a work in progress. I create myself constantly through action, and this is so fundamental to my human condition that, for Sartre, it is the human condition, from the moment of first consciousness to the moment when death wipes it out. I am my own freedom: no more, no less.
  • Sartre wrote like a novelist — not surprisingly, since he was one. In his novels, short stories and plays as well as in his philosophical treatises, he wrote about the physical sensations of the world and the structures and moods of human life. Above all, he wrote about one big subject: what it meant to be free. Freedom, for him, lay at the heart of all human experience, and this set humans apart from all other kinds of object.
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  • Sartre listened to his problem and said simply, ‘You are free, therefore choose — that is to say, invent.’ No signs are vouchsafed in this world, he said. None of the old authorities can relieve you of the burden of freedom. You can weigh up moral or practical considerations as carefully as you like, but ultimately you must take the plunge and do something, and it’s up to you what that something is.
  • Even if the situation is unbearable — perhaps you are facing execution, or sitting in a Gestapo prison, or about to fall off a cliff — you are still free to decide what to make of it in mind and deed. Starting from where you are now, you choose. And in choosing, you also choose who you will be.
  • The war had made people realise that they and their fellow humans were capable of departing entirely from civilised norms; no wonder the idea of a fixed human nature seemed questionable.
  • If this sounds difficult and unnerving, it’s because it is. Sartre does not deny that the need to keep making decisions brings constant anxiety. He heightens this anxiety by pointing out that what you do really matters. You should make your choices as though you were choosing on behalf of the whole of humanity, taking the entire burden of responsibility for how the human race behaves. If you avoid this responsibility by fooling yourself that you are the victim of circumstance or of someone else’s bad advice, you are failing to meet the demands of human life and choosing a fake existence, cut off from your own ‘authenticity’.
  • Along with the terrifying side of this comes a great promise: Sartre’s existentialism implies that it is possible to be authentic and free, as long as you keep up the effort.
  • almost all agreed that it was, as an article in Les nouvelles littéraires phrased it, a ‘sickening mixture of philosophic pretentiousness, equivocal dreams, physiological technicalities, morbid tastes and hesitant eroticism … an introspective embryo that one would take distinct pleasure in crushing’.
  • he offered a philosophy designed for a species that had just scared the hell out of itself, but that finally felt ready to grow up and take responsibility.
  • In this rebellious world, just as with the Parisian bohemians and Dadaists in earlier generations, everything that was dangerous and provocative was good, and everything that was nice or bourgeois was bad.
  • Such interweaving of ideas and life had a long pedigree, although the existentialists gave it a new twist. Stoic and Epicurean thinkers in the classical world had practised philosophy as a means of living well, rather than of seeking knowledge or wisdom for their own sake. By reflecting on life’s vagaries in philosophical ways, they believed they could become more resilient, more able to rise above circumstances, and better equipped to manage grief, fear, anger, disappointment or anxiety.
  • In the tradition they passed on, philosophy is neither a pure intellectual pursuit nor a collection of cheap self-help tricks, but a discipline for flourishing and living a fully human, responsible life.
  • For Kierkegaard, Descartes had things back to front. In his own view, human existence comes first: it is the starting point for everything we do, not the result of a logical deduction. My existence is active: I live it and choose it, and this precedes any statement I can make about myself.
  • Studying our own moral genealogy cannot help us to escape or transcend ourselves. But it can enable us to see our illusions more clearly and lead a more vital, assertive existence.
  • What was needed, he felt, was not high moral or theological ideals, but a deeply critical form of cultural history or ‘genealogy’ that would uncover the reasons why we humans are as we are, and how we came to be that way. For him, all philosophy could even be redefined as a form of psychology, or history.
  • For those oppressed on grounds of race or class, or for those fighting against colonialism, existentialism offered a change of perspective — literally, as Sartre proposed that all situations be judged according to how they appeared in the eyes of those most oppressed, or those whose suffering was greatest.
  • She observed that we need not expect moral philosophers to ‘live by’ their ideas in a simplistic way, as if they were following a set of rules. But we can expect them to show how their ideas are lived in. We should be able to look in through the windows of a philosophy, as it were, and see how people occupy it, how they move about and how they conduct themselves.
  • the existentialists inhabited their historical and personal world, as they inhabited their ideas. This notion of ‘inhabited philosophy’ is one I’ve borrowed from the English philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch, who wrote the first full-length book on Sartre and was an early adopter of existentialism
  • What is existentialism anyway?
  • An existentialist who is also phenomenological provides no easy rules for dealing with this condition, but instead concentrates on describing lived experience as it presents itself. — By describing experience well, he or she hopes to understand this existence and awaken us to ways of living more authentic lives.
  • Existentialists concern themselves with individual, concrete human existence. — They consider human existence different from the kind of being other things have. Other entities are what they are, but as a human I am whatever I choose to make of myself at every moment. I am free — — and therefore I’m responsible for everything I do, a dizzying fact which causes — an anxiety inseparable from human existence itself.
  • On the other hand, I am only free within situations, which can include factors in my own biology and psychology as well as physical, historical and social variables of the world into which I have been thrown. — Despite the limitations, I always want more: I am passionately involved in personal projects of all kinds. — Human existence is thus ambiguous: at once boxed in by borders and yet transcendent and exhilarating. —
  • The first part of this is straightforward: a phenomenologist’s job is to describe. This is the activity that Husserl kept reminding his students to do. It meant stripping away distractions, habits, clichés of thought, presumptions and received ideas, in order to return our attention to what he called the ‘things themselves’. We must fix our beady gaze on them and capture them exactly as they appear, rather than as we think they are supposed to be.
  • Husserl therefore says that, to phenomenologically describe a cup of coffee, I should set aside both the abstract suppositions and any intrusive emotional associations. Then I can concentrate on the dark, fragrant, rich phenomenon in front of me now. This ‘setting aside’ or ‘bracketing out’ of speculative add-ons Husserl called epoché — a term borrowed from the ancient Sceptics,
  • The point about rigour is crucial; it brings us back to the first half of the command to describe phenomena. A phenomenologist cannot get away with listening to a piece of music and saying, ‘How lovely!’ He or she must ask: is it plaintive? is it dignified? is it colossal and sublime? The point is to keep coming back to the ‘things themselves’ — phenomena stripped of their conceptual baggage — so as to bail out weak or extraneous material and get to the heart of the experience.
  • Husserlian ‘bracketing out’ or epoché allows the phenomenologist to temporarily ignore the question ‘But is it real?’, in order to ask how a person experiences his or her world. Phenomenology gives a formal mode of access to human experience. It lets philosophers talk about life more or less as non-philosophers do, while still being able to tell themselves they are being methodical and rigorous.
  • Besides claiming to transform the way we think about reality, phenomenologists promised to change how we think about ourselves. They believed that we should not try to find out what the human mind is, as if it were some kind of substance. Instead, we should consider what it does, and how it grasps its experiences.
  • For Brentano, this reaching towards objects is what our minds do all the time. Our thoughts are invariably of or about something, he wrote: in love, something is loved, in hatred, something is hated, in judgement, something is affirmed or denied. Even when I imagine an object that isn’t there, my mental structure is still one of ‘about-ness’ or ‘of-ness’.
  • Except in deepest sleep, my mind is always engaged in this aboutness: it has ‘intentionality’. Having taken the germ of this from Brentano, Husserl made it central to his whole philosophy.
  • Husserl saw in the idea of intentionality a way to sidestep two great unsolved puzzles of philosophical history: the question of what objects ‘really’ are, and the question of what the mind ‘really’ is. By doing the epoché and bracketing out all consideration of reality from both topics, one is freed to concentrate on the relationship in the middle. One can apply one’s descriptive energies to the endless dance of intentionality that takes place in our lives: the whirl of our minds as they seize their intended phenomena one after the other and whisk them around the floor,
  • Understood in this way, the mind hardly is anything at all: it is its aboutness. This makes the human mind (and possibly some animal minds) different from any other naturally occurring entity. Nothing else can be as thoroughly about or of things as the mind is:
  • Some Eastern meditation techniques aim to still this scurrying creature, but the extreme difficulty of this shows how unnatural it is to be mentally inert. Left to itself, the mind reaches out in all directions as long as it is awake — and even carries on doing it in the dreaming phase of its sleep.
  • a mind that is experiencing nothing, imagining nothing, or speculating about nothing can hardly be said to be a mind at all.
  • Three simple ideas — description, phenomenon, intentionality — provided enough inspiration to keep roomfuls of Husserlian assistants busy in Freiburg for decades. With all of human existence awaiting their attention, how could they ever run out of things to do?
  • For Sartre, this gives the mind an immense freedom. If we are nothing but what we think about, then no predefined ‘inner nature’ can hold us back. We are protean.
  • way of this interpretation. Real, not real; inside, outside; what difference did it make? Reflecting on this, Husserl began turning his phenomenology into a branch of ‘idealism’ — the philosophical tradition which denied external reality and defined everything as a kind of private hallucination.
  • For Sartre, if we try to shut ourselves up inside our own minds, ‘in a nice warm room with the shutters closed’, we cease to exist. We have no cosy home: being out on the dusty road is the very definition of what we are.
  • One might think that, if Heidegger had anything worth saying, he could have communicated it in ordinary language. The fact is that he does not want to be ordinary, and he may not even want to communicate in the usual sense. He wants to make the familiar obscure, and to vex us. George Steiner thought that Heidegger’s purpose was less to be understood than to be experienced through a ‘felt strangeness’.
  • He takes Dasein in its most ordinary moments, then talks about it in the most innovative way he can. For Heidegger, Dasein’s everyday Being is right here: it is Being-in-the-world, or In-der-Welt-sein. The main feature of Dasein’s everyday Being-in-the-world right here is that it is usually busy doing something.
  • Thus, for Heidegger, all Being-in-the-world is also a ‘Being-with’ or Mitsein. We cohabit with others in a ‘with-world’, or Mitwelt. The old philosophical problem of how we prove the existence of other minds has now vanished. Dasein swims in the with-world long before it wonders about other minds.
  • Sometimes the best-educated people were those least inclined to take the Nazis seriously, dismissing them as too absurd to last. Karl Jaspers was one of those who made this mistake, as he later recalled, and Beauvoir observed similar dismissive attitudes among the French students in Berlin.
  • In any case, most of those who disagreed with Hitler’s ideology soon learned to keep their view to themselves. If a Nazi parade passed on the street, they would either slip out of view or give the obligatory salute like everyone else, telling themselves that the gesture meant nothing if they did not believe in it. As the psychologist Bruno Bettelheim later wrote of this period, few people will risk their life for such a small thing as raising an arm — yet that is how one’s powers of resistance are eroded away, and eventually one’s responsibility and integrity go with them.
  • for Arendt, if you do not respond adequately when the times demand it, you show a lack of imagination and attention that is as dangerous as deliberately committing an abuse. It amounts to disobeying the one command she had absorbed from Heidegger in those Marburg days: Think!
  • ‘Everything takes place under a kind of anaesthesia. Objectively dreadful events produce a thin, puny emotional response. Murders are committed like schoolboy pranks. Humiliation and moral decay are accepted like minor incidents.’ Haffner thought modernity itself was partly to blame: people had become yoked to their habits and to mass media, forgetting to stop and think, or to disrupt their routines long enough to question what was going on.
  • Heidegger’s former lover and student Hannah Arendt would argue, in her 1951 study The Origins of Totalitarianism, that totalitarian movements thrived at least partly because of this fragmentation in modern lives, which made people more vulnerable to being swept away by demagogues. Elsewhere, she coined the phrase ‘the banality of evil’ to describe the most extreme failures of personal moral awareness.
  • His communicative ideal fed into a whole theory of history: he traced all civilisation to an ‘Axial Period’ in the fifth century BC, during which philosophy and culture exploded simultaneously in Europe, the Middle East and Asia, as though a great bubble of minds had erupted from the earth’s surface. ‘True philosophy needs communion to come into existence,’ he wrote, and added, ‘Uncommunicativeness in a philosopher is virtually a criterion of the untruth of his thinking.’
  • The idea of being called to authenticity became a major theme in later existentialism, the call being interpreted as saying something like ‘Be yourself!’, as opposed to being phony. For Heidegger, the call is more fundamental than that. It is a call to take up a self that you didn’t know you had: to wake up to your Being. Moreover, it is a call to action. It requires you to do something: to take a decision of some sort.
  • Being and Time contained at least one big idea that should have been of use in resisting totalitarianism. Dasein, Heidegger wrote there, tends to fall under the sway of something called das Man or ‘the they’ — an impersonal entity that robs us of the freedom to think for ourselves. To live authentically requires resisting or outwitting this influence, but this is not easy because das Man is so nebulous. Man in German does not mean ‘man’ as in English (that’s der Mann), but a neutral abstraction, something like ‘one’ in the English phrase ‘one doesn’t do that’,
  • for Heidegger, das Man is me. It is everywhere and nowhere; it is nothing definite, but each of us is it. As with Being, it is so ubiquitous that it is difficult to see. If I am not careful, however, das Man takes over the important decisions that should be my own. It drains away my responsibility or ‘answerability’. As Arendt might put it, we slip into banality, failing to think.
  • Jaspers focused on what he called Grenzsituationen — border situations, or limit situations. These are the moments when one finds oneself constrained or boxed in by what is happening, but at the same time pushed by these events towards the limits or outer edge of normal experience. For example, you might have to make a life-or-death choice, or something might remind you suddenly of your mortality,
  • Jaspers’ interest in border situations probably had much to do with his own early confrontation with mortality. From childhood, he had suffered from a heart condition so severe that he always expected to die at any moment. He also had emphysema, which forced him to speak slowly, taking long pauses to catch his breath. Both illnesses meant that he had to budget his energies with care in order to get his work done without endangering his life.
  • If I am to resist das Man, I must become answerable to the call of my ‘voice of conscience’. This call does not come from God, as a traditional Christian definition of the voice of conscience might suppose. It comes from a truly existentialist source: my own authentic self. Alas, this voice is one I do not recognise and may not hear, because it is not the voice of my habitual ‘they-self’. It is an alien or uncanny version of my usual voice. I am familiar with my they-self, but not with my unalienated voice — so, in a weird twist, my real voice is the one that sounds strangest to me.
  • Marcel developed a strongly theological branch of existentialism. His faith distanced him from both Sartre and Heidegger, but he shared a sense of how history makes demands on individuals. In his essay ‘On the Ontological Mystery’, written in 1932 and published in the fateful year of 1933, Marcel wrote of the human tendency to become stuck in habits, received ideas, and a narrow-minded attachment to possessions and familiar scenes. Instead, he urged his readers to develop a capacity for remaining ‘available’ to situations as they arise. Similar ideas of disponibilité or availability had been explored by other writers,
  • Marcel made it his central existential imperative. He was aware of how rare and difficult it was. Most people fall into what he calls ‘crispation’: a tensed, encrusted shape in life — ‘as though each one of us secreted a kind of shell which gradually hardened and imprisoned him’.
  • Bettelheim later observed that, under Nazism, only a few people realised at once that life could not continue unaltered: these were the ones who got away quickly. Bettelheim himself was not among them. Caught in Austria when Hitler annexed it, he was sent first to Dachau and then to Buchenwald, but was then released in a mass amnesty to celebrate Hitler’s birthday in 1939 — an extraordinary reprieve, after which he left at once for America.
  • we are used to reading philosophy as offering a universal message for all times and places — or at least as aiming to do so. But Heidegger disliked the notion of universal truths or universal humanity, which he considered a fantasy. For him, Dasein is not defined by shared faculties of reason and understanding, as the Enlightenment philosophers thought. Still less is it defined by any kind of transcendent eternal soul, as in religious tradition. We do not exist on a higher, eternal plane at all. Dasein’s Being is local: it has a historical situation, and is constituted in time and place.
  • For Marcel, learning to stay open to reality in this way is the philosopher’s prime job. Everyone can do it, but the philosopher is the one who is called on above all to stay awake, so as to be the first to sound the alarm if something seems wrong.
  • Second, it also means understanding that we are historical beings, and grasping the demands our particular historical situation is making on us. In what Heidegger calls ‘anticipatory resoluteness’, Dasein discovers ‘that its uttermost possibility lies in giving itself up’. At that moment, through Being-towards-death and resoluteness in facing up to one’s time, one is freed from the they-self and attains one’s true, authentic self.
  • If we are temporal beings by our very nature, then authentic existence means accepting, first, that we are finite and mortal. We will die: this all-important realisation is what Heidegger calls authentic ‘Being-towards-Death’, and it is fundamental to his philosophy.
  • Hannah Arendt, instead, left early on: she had the benefit of a powerful warning. Just after the Nazi takeover, in spring 1933, she had been arrested while researching materials on anti-Semitism for the German Zionist Organisation at Berlin’s Prussian State Library. Her apartment was searched; both she and her mother were locked up briefly, then released. They fled, without stopping to arrange travel documents. They crossed to Czechoslovakia (then still safe) by a method that sounds almost too fabulous to be true: a sympathetic German family on the border had a house with its front door in Germany and its back door in Czechoslovakia. The family would invite people for dinner, then let them leave through the back door at night.
  • As Sartre argued in his 1943 review of The Stranger, basic phenomenological principles show that experience comes to us already charged with significance. A piano sonata is a melancholy evocation of longing. If I watch a soccer match, I see it as a soccer match, not as a meaningless scene in which a number of people run around taking turns to apply their lower limbs to a spherical object. If the latter is what I’m seeing, then I am not watching some more essential, truer version of soccer; I am failing to watch it properly as soccer at all.
  • Much as they liked Camus personally, neither Sartre nor Beauvoir accepted his vision of absurdity. For them, life is not absurd, even when viewed on a cosmic scale, and nothing can be gained by saying it is. Life for them is full of real meaning, although that meaning emerges differently for each of us.
  • For Sartre, we show bad faith whenever we portray ourselves as passive creations of our race, class, job, history, nation, family, heredity, childhood influences, events, or even hidden drives in our subconscious which we claim are out of our control. It is not that such factors are unimportant: class and race, in particular, he acknowledged as powerful forces in people’s lives, and Simone de Beauvoir would soon add gender to that list.
  • Sartre takes his argument to an extreme point by asserting that even war, imprisonment or the prospect of imminent death cannot take away my existential freedom. They form part of my ‘situation’, and this may be an extreme and intolerable situation, but it still provides only a context for whatever I choose to do next. If I am about to die, I can decide how to face that death. Sartre here resurrects the ancient Stoic idea that I may not choose what happens to me, but I can choose what to make of it, spiritually speaking.
  • But the Stoics cultivated indifference in the face of terrible events, whereas Sartre thought we should remain passionately, even furiously engaged with what happens to us and with what we can achieve. We should not expect freedom to be anything less than fiendishly difficult.
  • Freedom does not mean entirely unconstrained movement, and it certainly does not mean acting randomly. We often mistake the very things that enable us to be free — context, meaning, facticity, situation, a general direction in our lives — for things that define us and take away our freedom. It is only with all of these that we can be free in a real sense.
  • Nor did he mean that privileged groups have the right to pontificate to the poor and downtrodden about the need to ‘take responsibility’ for themselves. That would be a grotesque misreading of Sartre’s point, since his sympathy in any encounter always lay with the more oppressed side. But for each of us — for me — to be in good faith means not making excuses for myself.
  • Camus’ novel gives us a deliberately understated vision of heroism and decisive action compared to those of Sartre and Beauvoir. One can only do so much. It can look like defeatism, but it shows a more realistic perception of what it takes to actually accomplish difficult tasks like liberating one’s country.
  • Camus just kept returning to his core principle: no torture, no killing — at least not with state approval. Beauvoir and Sartre believed they were taking a more subtle and more realistic view. If asked why a couple of innocuous philosophers had suddenly become so harsh, they would have said it was because the war had changed them in profound ways. It had shown them that one’s duties to humanity could be more complicated than they seemed. ‘The war really divided my life in two,’ Sartre said later.
  • Poets and artists ‘let things be’, but they also let things come out and show themselves. They help to ease things into ‘unconcealment’ (Unverborgenheit), which is Heidegger’s rendition of the Greek term alētheia, usually translated as ‘truth’. This is a deeper kind of truth than the mere correspondence of a statement to reality, as when we say ‘The cat is on the mat’ and point to a mat with a cat on it. Long before we can do this, both cat and mat must ‘stand forth out of concealedness’. They must un-hide themselves.
  • Heidegger does not use the word ‘consciousness’ here because — as with his earlier work — he is trying to make us think in a radically different way about ourselves. We are not to think of the mind as an empty cavern, or as a container filled with representations of things. We are not even supposed to think of it as firing off arrows of intentional ‘aboutness’, as in the earlier phenomenology of Brentano. Instead, Heidegger draws us into the depths of his Schwarzwald, and asks us to imagine a gap with sunlight filtering in. We remain in the forest, but we provide a relatively open spot where other beings can bask for a moment. If we did not do this, everything would remain in the thickets, hidden even to itself.
  • The astronomer Carl Sagan began his 1980 television series Cosmos by saying that human beings, though made of the same stuff as the stars, are conscious and are therefore ‘a way for the cosmos to know itself’. Merleau-Ponty similarly quoted his favourite painter Cézanne as saying, ‘The landscape thinks itself in me, and I am its consciousness.’ This is something like what Heidegger thinks humanity contributes to the earth. We are not made of spiritual nothingness; we are part of Being, but we also bring something unique with us. It is not much: a little open space, perhaps with a path and a bench like the one the young Heidegger used to sit on to do his homework. But through us, the miracle occurs.
  • Beauty aside, Heidegger’s late writing can also be troubling, with its increasingly mystical notion of what it is to be human. If one speaks of a human being mainly as an open space or a clearing, or a means of ‘letting beings be’ and dwelling poetically on the earth, then one doesn’t seem to be talking about any recognisable person. The old Dasein has become less human than ever. It is now a forestry feature.
  • Even today, Jaspers, the dedicated communicator, is far less widely read than Heidegger, who has influenced architects, social theorists, critics, psychologists, artists, film-makers, environmental activists, and innumerable students and enthusiasts — including the later deconstructionist and post-structuralist schools, which took their starting point from his late thinking. Having spent the late 1940s as an outsider and then been rehabilitated, Heidegger became the overwhelming presence in university philosophy all over the European continent from then on.
  • As Levinas reflected on this experience, it helped to lead him to a philosophy that was essentially ethical, rather than ontological like Heidegger’s. He developed his ideas from the work of Jewish theologian Martin Buber, whose I and Thou in 1923 had distinguished between my relationship with an impersonal ‘it’ or ‘them’, and the direct personal encounter I have with a ‘you’. Levinas took it further: when I encounter you, we normally meet face-to-face, and it is through your face that you, as another person, can make ethical demands on me. This is very different from Heidegger’s Mitsein or Being-with, which suggests a group of people standing alongside one another, shoulder to shoulder as if in solidarity — perhaps as a unified nation or Volk.
  • For Levinas, we literally face each other, one individual at a time, and that relationship becomes one of communication and moral expectation. We do not merge; we respond to one another. Instead of being co-opted into playing some role in my personal drama of authenticity, you look me in the eyes — and you remain Other. You remain you.
  • This relationship is more fundamental than the self, more fundamental than consciousness, more fundamental even than Being — and it brings an unavoidable ethical obligation. Ever since Husserl, phenomenologists and existentialists had being trying to stretch the definition of existence to incorporate our social lives and relationships. Levinas did more: he turned philosophy around entirely so that these relationships were the foundation of our existence, not an extension of it.
  • Her last work, The Need for Roots, argues, among other things, that none of us has rights, but each one of us has a near-infinite degree of duty and obligation to the other. Whatever the underlying cause of her death — and anorexia nervosa seems to have been involved — no one could deny that she lived out her philosophy with total commitment. Of all the lives touched on in this book, hers is surely the most profound and challenging application of Iris Murdoch’s notion that a philosophy can be ‘inhabited’.
  • Other thinkers took radical ethical turns during the war years. The most extreme was Simone Weil, who actually tried to live by the principle of putting other people’s ethical demands first. Having returned to France after her travels through Germany in 1932, she had worked in a factory so as to experience the degrading nature of such work for herself. When France fell in 1940, her family fled to Marseilles (against her protests), and later to the US and to Britain. Even in exile, Weil made extraordinary sacrifices. If there were people in the world who could not sleep in a bed, she would not do so either, so she slept on the floor.
  • The mystery tradition had roots in Kierkegaard’s ‘leap of faith’. It owed much to the other great nineteenth-century mystic of the impossible, Dostoevsky, and to older theological notions. But it also grew from the protracted trauma that was the first half of the twentieth century. Since 1914, and especially since 1939, people in Europe and elsewhere had come to the realisation that we cannot fully know or trust ourselves; that we have no excuses or explanations for what we do — and yet that we must ground our existence and relationships on something firm, because otherwise we cannot survive.
  • One striking link between these radical ethical thinkers, all on the fringes of our main story, is that they had religious faith. They also granted a special role to the notion of ‘mystery’ — that which cannot be known, calculated or understood, especially when it concerns our relationships with each other. Heidegger was different from them, since he rejected the religion he grew up with and had no real interest in ethics — probably as a consequence of his having no real interest in the human.
  • Meanwhile, the Christian existentialist Gabriel Marcel was also still arguing, as he had since the 1930s, that ethics trumps everything else in philosophy and that our duty to each other is so great as to play the role of a transcendent ‘mystery’. He too had been led to this position partly by a wartime experience: during the First World War he had worked for the Red Cross’ Information Service, with the unenviable job of answering relatives’ inquiries about missing soldiers. Whenever news came, he passed it on, and usually it was not good. As Marcel later said, this task permanently inoculated him against warmongering rhetoric of any kind, and it made him aware of the power of what is unknown in our lives.
  • As the play’s much-quoted and frequently misunderstood final line has it: ‘Hell is other people.’ Sartre later explained that he did not mean to say that other people were hellish in general. He meant that after death we become frozen in their view, unable any longer to fend off their interpretation. In life, we can still do something to manage the impression we make; in death, this freedom goes and we are left entombed in other’s people’s memories and perceptions.
  • We have to do two near-impossible things at once: understand ourselves as limited by circumstances, and yet continue to pursue our projects as though we are truly in control. In Beauvoir’s view, existentialism is the philosophy that best enables us to do this, because it concerns itself so deeply with both freedom and contingency. It acknowledges the radical and terrifying scope of our freedom in life, but also the concrete influences that other philosophies tend to ignore: history, the body, social relationships and the environment.
  • The aspects of our existence that limit us, Merleau-Ponty says, are the very same ones that bind us to the world and give us scope for action and perception. They make us what we are. Sartre acknowledged the need for this trade-off, but he found it more painful to accept. Everything in him longed to be free of bonds, of impediments and limitations
  • Of course we have to learn this skill of interpreting and anticipating the world, and this happens in early childhood, which is why Merleau-Ponty thought child psychology was essential to philosophy. This is an extraordinary insight. Apart from Rousseau, very few philosophers before him had taken childhood seriously; most wrote as though all human experience were that of a fully conscious, rational, verbal adult who has been dropped into this world from the sky — perhaps by a stork.
  • For Merleau-Ponty, we cannot understand our experience if we don’t think of ourselves in part as overgrown babies. We fall for optical illusions because we once learned to see the world in terms of shapes, objects and things relevant to our own interests. Our first perceptions came to us in tandem with our first active experiments in observing the world and reaching out to explore it, and are still linked with those experiences.
  • Another factor in all of this, for Merleau-Ponty, is our social existence: we cannot thrive without others, or not for long, and we need this especially in early life. This makes solipsistic speculation about the reality of others ridiculous; we could never engage in such speculation if we hadn’t already been formed by them.
  • As Descartes could have said (but didn’t), ‘I think, therefore other people exist.’ We grow up with people playing with us, pointing things out, talking, listening, and getting us used to reading emotions and movements; this is how we become capable, reflective, smoothly integrated beings.
  • In general, Merleau-Ponty thinks human experience only makes sense if we abandon philosophy’s time-honoured habit of starting with a solitary, capsule-like, immobile adult self, isolated from its body and world, which must then be connected up again — adding each element around it as though adding clothing to a doll. Instead, for him, we slide from the womb to the birth canal to an equally close and total immersion in the world. That immersion continues as long as we live, although we may also cultivate the art of partially withdrawing from time to time when we want to think or daydream.
  • When he looks for his own metaphor to describe how he sees consciousness, he comes up with a beautiful one: consciousness, he suggests, is like a ‘fold’ in the world, as though someone had crumpled a piece of cloth to make a little nest or hollow. It stays for a while, before eventually being unfolded and smoothed away. There is something seductive, even erotic, in this idea of my conscious self as an improvised pouch in the cloth of the world. I still have my privacy — my withdrawing room. But I am part of the world’s fabric, and I remain formed out of it for as long as I am here.
  • By the time of these works, Merleau-Ponty is taking his desire to describe experience to the outer limits of what language can convey. Just as with the late Husserl or Heidegger, or Sartre in his Flaubert book, we see a philosopher venturing so far from shore that we can barely follow. Emmanuel Levinas would head out to the fringes too, eventually becoming incomprehensible to all but his most patient initiates.
  • Sartre once remarked — speaking of a disagreement they had about Husserl in 1941 — that ‘we discovered, astounded, that our conflicts had, at times, stemmed from our childhood, or went back to the elementary differences of our two organisms’. Merleau-Ponty also said in an interview that Sartre’s work seemed strange to him, not because of philosophical differences, but because of a certain ‘register of feeling’, especially in Nausea, that he could not share. Their difference was one of temperament and of the whole way the world presented itself to them.
  • The two also differed in their purpose. When Sartre writes about the body or other aspects of experience, he generally does it in order to make a different point. He expertly evokes the grace of his café waiter, gliding between the tables, bending at an angle just so, steering the drink-laden tray through the air on the tips of his fingers — but he does it all in order to illustrate his ideas about bad faith. When Merleau-Ponty writes about skilled and graceful movement, the movement itself is his point. This is the thing he wants to understand.
  • We can never move definitively from ignorance to certainty, for the thread of the inquiry will constantly lead us back to ignorance again. This is the most attractive description of philosophy I’ve ever read, and the best argument for why it is worth doing, even (or especially) when it takes us no distance at all from our starting point.
  • By prioritising perception, the body, social life and childhood development, Merleau-Ponty gathered up philosophy’s far-flung outsider subjects and brought them in to occupy the centre of his thought.
  • In his inaugural lecture at the Collège de France on 15 January 1953, published as In Praise of Philosophy, he said that philosophers should concern themselves above all with whatever is ambiguous in our experience. At the same time, they should think clearly about these ambiguities, using reason and science. Thus, he said, ‘The philosopher is marked by the distinguishing trait that he possesses inseparably the taste for evidence and the feeling for ambiguity.’ A constant movement is required between these two
  • As Sartre wrote in response to Hiroshima, humanity had now gained the power to wipe itself out, and must decide every single day that it wanted to live. Camus also wrote that humanity faced the task of choosing between collective suicide and a more intelligent use of its technology — ‘between hell and reason’. After 1945, there seemed little reason to trust in humanity’s ability to choose well.
  • Merleau-Ponty observed in a lecture of 1951 that, more than any previous century, the twentieth century had reminded people how ‘contingent’ their lives were — how at the mercy of historical events and other changes that they could not control. This feeling went on long after the war ended. After the A-bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, many feared that a Third World War would not be long in coming, this time between the Soviet Union and the United States.
carolinewren

Schrödinger's cat gets a reality check - 0 views

  • At the root of quantum physics there is something of a reality crisis. Multiple interpretations of the theory exist, and they paint very different pictures of the world
  • wave function describes the quantum state of a physical system.
  • the quantum state in general only gives probabilistic predictions.
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  • describe bizarre situations, like physical systems existing simultaneously in multiple states, such as different positions or velocities. It gives very precise probabilities for the possible outcomes of laboratory experiments, but it defies an intuitive interpretation.
  • But the theorems show that this explanation simply cannot work.
ilanaprincilus06

Supreme Court Mulls Whether Police Can Enter Home Without Warrant To Save A Life : NPR - 0 views

  • Just what sort of emergency allows police to enter your home without a warrant? That was the question before the U.S. Supreme Court Wednesday.
  • Later that day, doctors concluded he was not a threat to himself or others and released him. In the meantime, police had confiscated his guns and ammunition. So he sued, alleging an illegal seizure and search of his home.
  • she isn't answering her phone, and her back door is open, so the neighbors call the police. "Would that be enough" for the police to enter the house without a warrant to check up on the missing neighbor?"No" answered Dvoretzky, "I think that alone would not be enough."
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  • The lower courts ruled that police could enter the home and under the so-called the community care-taking exception to the Constitution's warrant requirement.
  • Dvoretzky contended that a warrantless entry could only occur in a true emergency, but his definition was so narrow it didn't seem to satisfy many of the justices.
  • "No," replied lawyer Dvoretzky. Police can only enter if there were a genuine emergency going on at that very moment.
  • "Every single day, on average, there are 65 suicides by gunshot in the United States," he said, noting that "police officers are critical...as in this instance" to suicide prevention.
  • The Supreme Court has never explicitly recognized that police may enter the home without a warrant as part of their "community care-taking" duties.
  • There are some long-standing exceptions to the warrant requirement in "exigent circumstances, " such as hot pursuit of a suspect.
  • Can the police enter their locked fence around the yard to get the the cat down. "Is that community care-taking?" Roberts asked.Yes, replied DeSisto. "To me, climbing a tree and getting a cat doesn't interfere with the privacy rights."
  • "the key principle is if someone is at risk of serious harm and it's reasonable for officials to intervene now, that is enough. The officials don't need to show that the harm is mere moments away."
Javier E

The War in Ukraine Has Unleashed a New Word - The New York Times - 0 views

  • As I read about Irpin, about Bucha, about Trostyanets, of the bodies crushed by tanks, of the bicyclists shot on the street, of the desecrated corpses, there it was, “рашизм,” again and again
  • Grasping its meaning requires crossing differences in alphabet and pronunciation, thinking our way into the experience of a bilingual society at war with a fascist empire.
  • “Pашизм” sounds like “fascism,” but with an “r” sound instead of an “f” at the beginning; it means, roughly, “Russian fascism.”
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  • The aggressor in this war keeps trying to push back toward a past as it never happened, toward nonsensical and necrophiliac accounts of history. Russia must conquer Ukraine, Vladimir Putin says, because of a baptism a thousand years ago, or because of bloodshed during World War II.
  • The new word “рашизм” is a useful conceptualization of Putin’s worldview. Far more than Western analysts, Ukrainians have noticed the Russian tilt toward fascism in the last decade.
  • Undistracted by Putin’s operational deployment of genocide talk, they have seen fascist practices in Russia: the cults of the leader and of the dead, the corporatist state, the mythical past, the censorship, the conspiracy theories, the centralized propaganda and now the war of destruction
  • we have tended to overlook the central example of fascism’s revival, which is the Putin regime in the Russian Federation.
  • A bilingual nation like Ukraine is not just a collection of bilingual individuals; it is an unending set of encounters in which people habitually adjust the language they use to other people and new settings, manipulating language in ways that are foreign to monolingual nations
  • I have gone on Ukrainian television and radio, taken questions in Russian and answered them in Ukrainian, without anyone for a moment finding that switch worthy of mention.
  • Ukrainians change languages effortlessly — not just as situations change, but also to make situations change, sometimes in the middle of a sentence, or even in the middle of a word.
  • “Pашизм” is a word built up from the inside, from several languages, as a complex of puns and references that reveal a bilingual society thinking out its predicament and communicating to itself.
  • Putin’s ethnic imperialism insists that Ukrainians must be Russians because they speak Russian. They do — and they speak Ukrainian. But Ukrainian identity has as much to do with an ability to live between languages than it does with the use of any one of them
  • Those six Cyrillic letters contain references to Italian, Russian and English, all of which a mechanical, letter-by-letter transliteration would block
  • The best (if imperfect) way I have found to render “рашизм” from Ukrainian into English is “ruscism”
  • When we see “ruscism” we might guess this word has to do with Russia (“rus”), with politics (“ism”) and with the extreme right (“ascism”) — as, indeed, it does
  • I have had to spell “рашизм” as “ruscism” in English because we need “rus,” with a “u,” to see the reference to Russia. In losing the original Ukrainian “a,” though, we weaken a multilayered reference — because the “a” in “рашизм,” conveniently, allows the Ukrainian word to associate Russia and fascism in a way English cannot.
  • If you don’t know either language, you might think that Russian and Ukrainian are very similar. They are pretty close — much as, say, Spanish and Italian are.
  • the semantics are not that close
  • From a Russian perspective, the false friends are legion. There is an elegant four-syllable Ukrainian word that simply means “soon” or “without delay,” but to a Russian it sounds like “not behind the bar.” The Ukrainian word for “cat” sounds like the Russian for “whale,” while the Ukrainian for “female cats” sounds like Russian for “intestines.”
  • Russians do not understand Ukrainian, because they have not learned it. Ukrainians do understand Russian, because they have learned it.
  • Ukrainian soldiers often speak Russian, though they are instructed to use Ukrainian to spot infiltrators and spies. This is a drastic example of a general practice of code-switching.
  • Ukrainians are perfectly capable of writing Russian correctly, but during the war some internet commentators have spelled the occasional Russian word using the Ukrainian writing system, leaving it looking unmoored and pitiable. Writing in Ukrainian, you might spell “oсвобождение” as “aсвобaждениe,” the way it is pronounced — a bit of lexicographic alchemy that makes it (and, by extension, Russians) look silly, and mocks the political concepts being used to justify a war. In a larger sense, such efforts are a means of displacing Russia from its central position in regional culture.
Javier E

A Hair-Raising Hypothesis About Rodent Hair - The New York Times - 0 views

  • It’s tough out there for a mouse
  • Mice compensate with sharp senses of sight, hearing and smell. But they may have another set of tools we’ve overlooked. A paper published last week in Royal Society Open Science details striking similarities between the internal structures of certain small mammal and marsupial hairs and those of man-made optical instruments.
  • Over the years, he has developed an appreciation for “how comfortable animals are in complete darkness,” he said. That led him to wonder about the extent of their sensory powers.
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  • Observations of predator behavior further piqued his interest. While filming and playing back his videos, he noted how cats stack their bodies behind their faces when they’re hunting. He interprets this, he said, as cats “trying to hide their heat” with their cold noses. He has also observed barn owls twisting as they swoop down, perhaps to shield their warmer parts — legs and wingpits — with cooler ones.
  • Maybe, he thought, “predators have to conceal their infrared to be able to catch a mouse.”
  • Eventually, these and other musings led Dr. Baker to place mouse hairs under a microscope. As it came into view, he felt a strong sense of familiarity. The guard hair in particular — the bristliest type of mouse hair — contained evenly-spaced bands of pigment that, to Dr. Baker, closely resembled structures that allow optical sensors to tune into specific wavelengths of light.
  • Thermal cameras, for instance, focus specifically on 10-micron radiation: the slice of the spectrum that most closely corresponds with heat released by living things. By measuring the stripes, Dr. Baker found they were tuned to 10 microns as well — apparently homed in on life’s most common heat signature. “That was my Eureka moment,” he said.
sissij

Trash dove: how a purple bird took over Facebook | Technology | The Guardian - 0 views

  • As noted by meme database Know Your Meme, Trash Dove exploded in popularity after it was featured alongside a dancing cat on a Thai Facebook page with millions of followers
  • Pigeons are such strange birds, they have very beautiful mottled, shimmery feathers, but they waddle around and bob their heads and beg for crumbs. They’re like beautiful doves, except they eat trash.
  • The fan art and nice comments have been the highlight for me, but I’m amazed at how mean people can be to someone they’ve never met, because of something silly online.
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  • It’s better to spend time building a dedicated viewer base that will support you for you.
  •  
    The popularity of a meme can sometimes reflect on the culture online and how people feel about the current events. I think the popularity of the Trash Dove might be suggesting that people feel negative about this world because the meaning behind the Trash Dove is that "They're like beautiful doves, except they eat trash". I feel like this meaning is ironic. Internet is such transparent space that every big hit somehow reflect people's value and opinion. --Sissi (2/16/2017)
Emily Freilich

The Arab American News - Obama offers no evidence Assad was behind chemical a... - 0 views

  • the president tellingly didn’t make a single effort to present hard, compelling evidence to prove that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad had been behind the alleged Sarin Aug. 21 attack on residents of a suburb of Damascus.Not one piece of evidence.Instead, he continued the talking point of the past week, focusing on the admitted horror of seeing young children “writhing in pain and going still on a cold hospital floor.”
  • “We know the Assad regime was responsible” for the gas attack.Except that we don’t. As I have written (but as the corporate media have blacked out throughout this latest crisis), a group of 12 veteran intelligence officers has written to the president telling him that the intelligence does not point to Assad, but to the rebel forces as the source of the gas attack.
  • world is decidedly not a better place because of America’s endless, unilateral and criminal wars and depredations, and Syria will fare no better following an American assault.
Javier E

E.D. Hirsch Jr.'s 'Cultural Literacy' in the 21st Century - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • much of this angst can be interpreted as part of a noisy but inexorable endgame: the end of white supremacy. From this vantage point, Americanness and whiteness are fitfully, achingly, but finally becoming delinked—and like it or not, over the course of this generation, Americans are all going to have to learn a new way to be American.
  • What is the story of “us” when “us” is no longer by default “white”? The answer, of course, will depend on how aware Americans are of what they are, of what their culture already (and always) has been.
  • The thing about the list, though, was that it was—by design—heavy on the deeds and words of the “dead white males” who had formed the foundations of American culture but who had by then begun to fall out of academic fashion.
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  • Conservatives thus embraced Hirsch eagerly and breathlessly. He was a stout defender of the patrimony. Liberals eagerly and breathlessly attacked him with equal vigor. He was retrograde, Eurocentric, racist, sexist.
  • Lost in all the crossfire, however, were two facts: First, Hirsch, a lifelong Democrat who considered himself progressive, believed his enterprise to be in service of social justice and equality. Cultural illiteracy, he argued, is most common among the poor and power-illiterate, and compounds both their poverty and powerlessness. Second: He was right.
  • A generation of hindsight now enables Americans to see that it is indeed necessary for a nation as far-flung and entropic as the United States, one where rising economic inequality begets worsening civic inequality, to cultivate continuously a shared cultural core. A vocabulary. A set of shared referents and symbols.
  • So, first of all, Americans do need a list. But second, it should not be Hirsch’s list. And third, it should not made the way he made his. In the balance of this essay, I want to unpack and explain each of those three statements.
  • If you take the time to read the book attached to Hirsch’s appendix, you’ll find a rather effective argument about the nature of background knowledge and public culture. Literacy is not just a matter of decoding the strings of letters that make up words or the meaning of each word in sequence. It is a matter of decoding context: the surrounding matrix of things referred to in the text and things implied by it
  • That means understanding what’s being said in public, in the media, in colloquial conversation. It means understanding what’s not being said. Literacy in the culture confers power, or at least access to power. Illiteracy, whether willful or unwitting, creates isolation from power.
  • his point about background knowledge and the content of shared public culture extends well beyond schoolbooks. They are applicable to the “texts” of everyday life, in commercial culture, in sports talk, in religious language, in politics. In all cases, people become literate in patterns—“schema” is the academic word Hirsch uses. They come to recognize bundles of concept and connotation like “Party of Lincoln.” They perceive those patterns of meaning the same way a chess master reads an in-game chessboard or the way a great baseball manager reads an at bat. And in all cases, pattern recognition requires literacy in particulars.
  • Lots and lots of particulars. This isn’t, or at least shouldn’t be, an ideologically controversial point. After all, parents on both left and right have come to accept recent research that shows that the more spoken words an infant or toddler hears, the more rapidly she will learn and advance in school. Volume and variety matter. And what is true about the vocabulary of spoken or written English is also true, one fractal scale up, about the vocabulary of American culture.
  • those who demonized Hirsch as a right-winger missed the point. Just because an endeavor requires fluency in the past does not make it worshipful of tradition or hostile to change.
  • radicalism is made more powerful when garbed in traditionalism. As Hirsch put it: “To be conservative in the means of communication is the road to effectiveness in modern life, in whatever direction one wishes to be effective.”
  • Hence, he argued, an education that in the name of progressivism disdains past forms, schema, concepts, figures, and symbols is an education that is in fact anti-progressive and “helps preserve the political and economic status quo.” This is true. And it is made more urgently true by the changes in American demography since Hirsch gave us his list in 1987.
  • If you are an immigrant to the United States—or, if you were born here but are the first in your family to go to college, and thus a socioeconomic new arrival; or, say, a black citizen in Ferguson, Missouri deciding for the first time to participate in a municipal election, and thus a civic neophyte—you have a single overriding objective shared by all immigrants at the moment of arrival: figure out how stuff really gets done here.
  • So, for instance, a statement like “One hundred and fifty years after Appomattox, our house remains deeply divided” assumes that the reader knows that Appomattox is both a place and an event; that the event signified the end of a war; that the war was the Civil War and had begun during the presidency of a man, Abraham Lincoln, who earlier had famously declared that “a house divided against itself cannot stand”; that the divisions then were in large part about slavery; and that the divisions today are over the political, social, and economic legacies of slavery and how or whether we are to respond to those legacies.
  • But why a list, one might ask? Aren’t lists just the very worst form of rote learning and standardized, mechanized education? Well, yes and no.
  • it’s not just newcomers who need greater command of common knowledge. People whose families have been here ten generations are often as ignorant about American traditions, mores, history, and idioms as someone “fresh off the boat.”
  • The more serious challenge, for Americans new and old, is to make a common culture that’s greater than the sum of our increasingly diverse parts. It’s not enough for the United States to be a neutral zone where a million little niches of identity might flourish; in order to make our diversity a true asset, Americans need those niches to be able to share a vocabulary. Americans need to be able to have a broad base of common knowledge so that diversity can be most fully activated.
  • as the pool of potential culture-makers has widened, the modes of culture creation have similarly shifted away from hierarchies and institutions to webs and networks. Wikipedia is the prime embodiment of this reality, both in how the online encyclopedia is crowd-created and how every crowd-created entry contains links to other entries.
  • so any endeavor that makes it easier for those who do not know the memes and themes of American civic life to attain them closes the opportunity gap. It is inherently progressive.
  • since I started writing this essay, dipping into the list has become a game my high-school-age daughter and I play together.
  • I’ll name each of those entries, she’ll describe what she thinks to be its meaning. If she doesn’t know, I’ll explain it and give some back story. If I don’t know, we’ll look it up together. This of course is not a good way for her teachers to teach the main content of American history or English. But it is definitely a good way for us both to supplement what school should be giving her.
  • And however long we end up playing this game, it is already teaching her a meta-lesson about the importance of cultural literacy. Now anytime a reference we’ve discussed comes up in the news or on TV or in dinner conversation, she can claim ownership. Sometimes she does so proudly, sometimes with a knowing look. My bet is that the satisfaction of that ownership, and the value of it, will compound as the years and her education progress.
  • The trouble is, there are also many items on Hirsch’s list that don’t seem particularly necessary for entry into today’s civic and economic mainstream.
  • Which brings us back to why diversity matters. The same diversity that makes it necessary to have and to sustain a unifying cultural core demands that Americans make the core less monochromatic, more inclusive, and continuously relevant for contemporary life
  • it’s worth unpacking the baseline assumption of both Hirsch’s original argument and the battles that erupted around it. The assumption was that multiculturalism sits in polar opposition to a traditional common culture, that the fight between multiculturalism and the common culture was zero-sum.
  • As scholars like Ronald Takaki made clear in books like A Different Mirror, the dichotomy made sense only to the extent that one imagined that nonwhite people had had no part in shaping America until they started speaking up in the second half of the twentieth century.
  • The truth, of course, is that since well before the formation of the United States, the United States has been shaped by nonwhites in its mores, political structures, aesthetics, slang, economic practices, cuisine, dress, song, and sensibility.
  • In its serious forms, multiculturalism never asserted that every racial group should have its own sealed and separate history or that each group’s history was equally salient to the formation of the American experience. It simply claimed that the omni-American story—of diversity and hybridity—was the legitimate American story.
  • as Nathan Glazer has put it (somewhat ruefully), “We are all multiculturalists now.” Americans have come to see—have chosen to see—that multiculturalism is not at odds with a single common culture; it is a single common culture.
  • it is true that in a finite school year, say, with finite class time and books of finite heft, not everything about everyone can be taught. There are necessary trade-offs. But in practice, recognizing the true and longstanding diversity of American identity is not an either-or. Learning about the internment of Japanese Americans does not block out knowledge of D-Day or Midway. It is additive.
  • As more diverse voices attain ever more forms of reach and power we need to re-integrate and reimagine Hirsch’s list of what literate Americans ought to know.
  • To be clear: A 21st-century omni-American approach to cultural literacy is not about crowding out “real” history with the perishable stuff of contemporary life. It’s about drawing lines of descent from the old forms of cultural expression, however formal, to their progeny, however colloquial.
  • Nor is Omni-American cultural literacy about raising the “self-esteem” of the poor, nonwhite, and marginalized. It’s about raising the collective knowledge of all—and recognizing that the wealthy, white, and powerful also have blind spots and swaths of ignorance
  • What, then, would be on your list? It’s not an idle question. It turns out to be the key to rethinking how a list should even get made.
  • the Internet has transformed who makes culture and how. As barriers to culture creation have fallen, orders of magnitude more citizens—amateurs—are able to shape the culture in which we must all be literate. Cat videos and Star Trek fan fiction may not hold up long beside Toni Morrison. But the entry of new creators leads to new claims of right: The right to be recognized. The right to be counted. The right to make the means of recognition and accounting.
  • It is true that lists alone, with no teaching to bring them to life and no expectation that they be connected to a broader education, are somewhere between useless and harmful.
  • This will be a list of nodes and nested networks. It will be a fractal of associations, which reflects far more than a linear list how our brains work and how we learn and create. Hirsch himself nodded to this reality in Cultural Literacy when he described the process he and his colleagues used for collecting items for their list, though he raised it by way of pointing out the danger of infinite regress.
  • His conclusion, appropriate to his times, was that you had to draw boundaries somewhere with the help of experts. My take, appropriate to our times, is that Americans can draw not boundaries so much as circles and linkages, concept sets and pathways among them.
  • Because 5,000 or even 500 items is too daunting a place to start, I ask here only for your top ten. What are ten things every American—newcomer or native born, affluent or indigent—should know? What ten things do you feel are both required knowledge and illuminating gateways to those unenlightened about American life? Here are my entries: Whiteness The Federalist Papers The Almighty Dollar Organized labor Reconstruction Nativism The American Dream The Reagan Revolution DARPA A sucker born every minute
maddieireland334

What Your Pet Reveals about You - 0 views

  •  
    Is there a typical cat person or snake owner? Here's what research shows or THIS IS A PREVIEW. subscribe to access the full article.Already a subscriber or purchased this issue? Sign In Most of us think our pets say a lot about who we are.
lucieperloff

Protecting Lions Helps the Whole Food Chain? Actually, We Don't Know. - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Although South Africa’s 30-plus species of smaller carnivores play important roles in their ecosystems by keeping populations of prey species in check, which in turn affects plant communities, managers give little, if any, thought to their protection.
  • scientists lack evidence about whether these predictions play out in the real world, especially in small reserves of the sort found in South Africa.
  • While the presence of lions slightly increases the number of small carnivore species living in an area, it decreases their overall range.
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  • If lions are present, they have usually been reintroduced.
  • After reintroduction, managers tend to invest significant money and effort into maintaining lion populations, i
  • They found that overall species counts were slightly higher in reserves with lions, but that, on average, lions reduced the amount of land that small carnivores are found on by roughly 30 percent.
  • “The question is, is this the natural role and a good thing for conservation, or is it a negative thing because we’re doing this in a very artificial way?”
  • More study will be required, but if smaller predators are being killed by lions or confined to certain locations where the big cats do not tread, that could lead to population declines of these species and create imbalances for other animals and plants.
  • “However, we need to take heed of the findings of this paper and direct research to ensure we have sufficient information to adapt management to a more holistic approach for the benefit of the whole ecosystem”
  • “There’s more research needed before we can say how much management and conservation priorities are aligned.”
anonymous

The Dress Promised Me Something the Doctors Couldn't - The New York Times - 0 views

  • The Dress Promised Me Something the Doctors Couldn’t
  • My obsessive online shopping wasn’t really about the clothes.
  • I said to my friend, “I want you to bury me in this dress,” which I found funny because I thought I was dying. And then I thought it wasn’t funny at all.
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  • Even if the doctors couldn’t pin down what was going on with me, I was so alarmed by my symptoms and the doctors’ gravest guesses that I felt anxious about whether or not I would have a future.
  • What was certain is that I was shrinking. Rapidly, uncontrollably.
  • My clothes hung loose at the waist and sloughed off my shoulders as if they belonged to a stranger, so I bought a stranger’s dress. Kate Spade, $348 retail.
  • I found it for $50 at an online designer consignment store while on hold with the hospital; a nurse was checking on the results of my bone marrow biopsy.
  • Online shopping was the sort of thing one might do if she were on hold with her cable company, not awaiting a possible blood cancer diagnosis.
  • I filled my cart with a cobalt dress, a blush silk blouse, a slinky skirt.
  • On paper, the doctors said, it looked like it could be lymphoma. The symptoms were classic: fever, night sweats, weight loss.
  • A biopsy of my enlarged lymph node showed it to be benign.
  • Two weeks earlier, a doctor had taken a surgical drill to my hip and hollowed out my bones with a syringe fit for a large horse. “Painful” was a deficient descriptor.
  • “I just don’t know what else to do,” my doctor said.
  • I sat still while my insides turned over. A cold sweat crept across my face. I closed my eyes, shook my head and returned to my shopping cart. I was not going to dwell.
  • No — I was going to shop. I was going to shop until I could think of nothing else. I punched in my credit card number and bought the Kate Spade.
  • Then I rushed to my closet, threw open the double doors and began rifling through Target impulse buys and ill-fitting hand-me-down
  • I hurled the clothes into boxes and garbage bags. They smelled like the hospital, all burned coffee and antiseptic. I didn’t want them. I didn’t even want to look at them. I wanted silk. I wanted velvet.
  • I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t do illness anymore. I could only do this.
  • I spun around in it, watching the hem rise and fall. Something about it made me feel less like a haggard patient and more like the kind of woman who went to cocktail parties dripping with perfume and family money.
  • Over the next few months, I made it my mission to build a new wardrobe from scratch. The process demanded every moment of my free time, every spare thought
  • We both knew it was impractical. The clothes were expensive and high maintenance, most of them over-the-top fancy for my modest life in nonprofit communications.
  • But they felt vital. I told myself I was overdue for some frivolity, that I deserved to treat myself.
  • For my next doctor’s appointment, I picked out a Valentino pencil skirt that fit snugly against my new, withered body.
  • we’ll have to keep looking
  • “Can I see you again in six weeks? We can repeat blood work then and come up with a timeline for scans. Does that sound like an OK plan?”
  • “Just that I live here,” I said, gesturing at my body. “I have to live here.”
  • That night I ran my fingers through my hair, and a clump of blond strands fell loose into my palm. “It’s just stress,” I told my cat. I brushed my hands together, letting my hair fall into the trash, and returned to my shopping list.
  • Each one had lived a life before me. Now I held onto them in the dim light of my bedroom like tangible hope.
  • We’re forced to find hope in what we used to mock: God, the afterlife, miracles, hemp oil. Healing, by any means. Healing, against all odds.
  • After every appointment, after every failed attempt to name my illness, I would prop myself in bed, choose new dresses and think of all the places I would wear them.
  • The clothes promised me something the doctors, as they continue to search for a diagnosis, still can’t: an uncomplicated future. And I promised a future to the clothes.
  • This was their life after life. And they deserved that, didn’t they?
  •  
    This is an extremely moving and well written article. It discusses mental reactions and decisions of a woman facing an unrecognized illness.
anonymous

Opinion | Biden Plots a Revolution for America's Children - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Biden Plots a Revolution for America’s Children
  • National pre-K and affordable day care don’t have to be a dream.
  • The most revolutionary part of President Biden’s agenda so far is his focus on a constituency that doesn’t write whiny op-ed columns, doesn’t vote, doesn’t hire lobbyists and so has been neglected for half a century: children.
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  • Biden’s proposal to establish a national pre-K and child care system would be a huge step forward for children and for working parents alike.
  • You drop a kid off at a high-quality prekindergarten program in the morning and pick the child up on the way home from work.
  • When my wife and I lived in Japan in the late 1990s, we sent our kids to one of these nurseries, and they were a dream.
  • But the United States never developed such a system, because for half a century as other countries were investing in children, the United States was stiffing them.
  • Today one of our saddest statistics is this: American children ages 1 to 19 are 57 percent more likely to die than children in other rich countries.
  • Some of those kids die because the United States doesn’t provide universal health care to children — only to senior citizens, who vote and thus are a priority.
  • Just as Franklin Roosevelt revolutionized conditions for the elderly by instituting Social Security, Biden may be able to do the same for children.
  • But still more important for America’s future, in my view, will be the elements focused on children.
  • Making his child allowances permanent.
  • Expanding home visitation programs that help at-risk moms and dads from pregnancy through early childhood
  • Working toward universal access to high-quality pre-K for 3- and 4-year-olds.
  • Ensuring high-quality affordable day care for parents
  • One model the White House is studying is the excellent day care system offered by the U.S. military,
  • For some of my middle-aged friends wrestling with homelessness, mental health crises and decades of addiction, with more of a criminal record than an educational record, it may not be possible to turn lives around. For their kids and grandkids, we have to try.
  • please, President Biden, push on. This is about America’s future. This is your chance to preside over a Rooseveltian revolution that sprinkles opportunity and averts tragedies for decades to come.
  • he question isn’t whether we can afford to invest in children and break cycles of poverty, educational failure and substance abuse. It’s whether we can afford not to.
cvanderloo

Biden's German Shepherd, A Rescue Dog, To Get 'Indoguration' : NPR - 0 views

  • President-elect Joe Biden is set to restore a bipartisan norm upon moving into the White House: presidential dogs.
  • Joe Biden showed up."He just dropped in on Easter Sunday of all days," Carroll said, "and wanted to meet the puppies."
  • Biden returned to the shelter with a grown Major to officially adopt him in November 2018.
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  • Sunday's "indoguration," co-hosted by Pumpkin Pet Insurance, touts Jill Martin of NBC's Today show along with "notable rescue dogs and their parents." Proceeds support the Delaware Humane Association.
  • Though Major is digging up new ground as the first shelter pup in the White House,
  • President Trump is the first president in more than a century not to have a dog. William McKinley had only cats and birds, including a parrot named Washington Post.
  • Biden even targeted dog lovers with a campaign message shortly before Election Day.
  • "If you need pet food because you're struggling, or you need low cost vaccinations to keep your pet healthy, all the things people need, they should see their shelter as a resource."
Javier E

Opinion | Why a Digital Diary Will Change Your Life - The New York Times - 0 views

  • At first, my plan was to do what I always do when I see something halfway noteworthy, which is to tell a few hundred thousand people on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram or, in my lowest moments, even LinkedIn.
  • Smartphones and social networks have turned me into a lonely, needy man who requires constant affirmation. In desperate pursuit of such affirmation, my mind has come to resemble one of those stamping-machine assembly lines you see in cartoons, but for shareable content: The raw, analog world in all its glory enters via conveyor belt on one end, and, after some raucous puffs of smoke, it gets flattened and packaged in my head into insipid quips meant to inspire you to tap a tiny heart on a screen.
  • instead of sharing the silly lampshade joke, I journaled it in Day One, a magnificent digital diary app that has transformed my relationship with my phone, improved my memory, and given me a deeper perspective on my life than the one I was getting through the black mirror of social media.
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  • In recent years, Twitter and much of the rest of the internet have been getting hotter, more reflexively outraged, less fun. Venturing onto social media these days, I often feel like a cat burglar stepping through a field of upturned rakes. I could imagine my dumb joke getting picked apart for all the ways it was problematic — “New York Times writer casually encourages bestial sexual assault! #deertoo” — bringing me ever closer to cancellation.
  • It’s unsocial. Indeed, it’s downright antisocial. Nothing about the app is meant to be shared — it is protected with your Apple security credentials and backs up its data to the cloud using end-to-end encryption, so that the only way someone can get into your diary is by getting hold of your device and your system passcode.
  • You post updates to it just as you might on Instagram or Facebook.
  • The app — which runs on Macs, iPhones and iPads, syncing your entries between your devices — can handle long text journals, short picture-focused status updates, and pretty much anything else that comes across the digital transom.
  • I use it to jot down my deepest thoughts and shallowest jokes; to rant and to vent; to come to terms with new ideas I’m playing with, ideas that need time to marinate in secret before they’re ready for the world; and to collect and reflect upon all the weird and crazy and touching artifacts of life
  • Think of Day One as a private social network for an audience of one: yourself.
  • Day One creates something so rare it feels almost sacred: A completely private digital space.
  • The best way to describe this feeling is to liken it to friendship. I feel comfortable dishing to Day One the way I would to a close friend I trust completely.
  • one of the few digital spaces that provides you mental space for contemplation and consideration
  • journaling has been shown to be good for mind and body, reducing stress and anxiety, improving interpersonal relationships, and promoting creativity
  • a digital journal offers several benefits over paper. Easy accessibility is a big one
  • you can tap out a journal while you’re in line at the supermarket
  • because so much happens on screens now, Day One offers greater fidelity to daily life. Instead of describing the insane conversation I had with my co-worker, I can just post a screenshot.
  • photography, which adds emotional heft to the rigidity of text.
knudsenlu

Outsmarting Our Primitive Responses to Fear - The New York Times - 0 views

  • fear drives much of human behavior. And it’s not just fear of physical harm that makes us want to hide under the covers. The twin fears of intimacy and rejection, for example, shape many of our social interactions.
  • Scientists say fear and its companion — the fight, flight or freeze response — can save us when faced with imminent physical harm.
  • It’s why you jump when you sense rustling in the bushes before realizing it’s just your neighbor’s cat. That reflex can save your life in certain circumstances such as leaping out of the way of an oncoming car. Trouble starts when you can’t tamp down your amygdala’s response, which makes you obsess and perhaps do counterproductive things when faced with concerning but not life-threatening events like the Equifax hack or a vulnerable social situation like asking someone out on a date.
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  • Consciously activating the more measured, analytical part of your brain is the key to controlling runaway fear and anxiety.
  • But it’s not so easy in an era when social media and cable news make us aware of every actual or potential disaster occurring anywhere in the world (and in a repeating loop). It’s even more difficult if you have lots of stress or instability at home or work.
  • “Our culture valorizes strength and power and showing fear is considered weakness,” said Leon Hoffman, co-director of the Pacella Research Center at the New York Psychoanalytic Society & Institute in Manhattan. “But you are actually stronger if you can acknowledge fear.”
  • “The more you try to suppress fear, either by ignoring it or doing something else to displace it, the more you will actually experience it,” said Kristy Dalrymple, a clinical assistant professor of psychiatry and human behavior at Alpert Medical School of Brown University.
  • Psychologists and neuroscientists are also finding that the amygdala is less apt to freak out if you are reminded that you are loved or could be loved. For example, seeing images of people with frightened expressions is usually a huge trigger for the amygdala, but that response is greatly diminished when subjects are first shown pictures of people being cared for or hugged.
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