CAT VARC READING COMPREHENSION QUESTIONS

A corked wine does not mean a wine that has tiny particles of cork floating around in the glass, which many drinkers still think. Sommeliers now use the term ‘corked wine’ for a wine that has become contaminated with cork taint caused by the presence of a chemical compound called TCA (2,4,6 - trichloroanisole).

This increased awareness is largely due to the battle now waging between defenders of the traditional cork stopper and its opponents, who believe that an unacceptable percentage of wine is affected by “corkiness”. Unfortunately the battle has developed into a dialogue of the deaf. No one knows exactly how to evaluate the positive contribution made by cork to the quality of a wine, which some claim has to do with its porosity, which allows a desirably slow oxydation – though this is controversial. To complicate matters estimates of the “corkiness” due to defective corks rather than to the wine or to bad storage vary between less than 1% and 8%.

In Britain cork’s defenders have unleashed a ferociously negative (and largely counter-productive) public-relations campaign. They have attacked plastic substitutes as imparting their own impurities and claimed that their use would destroy the cork-oak forests of Spain and Portugal, together with their dozens of rare species of birds.

The public battle started when a number of big British supermarket groups stated flatly that any systematic fault was as unacceptable in wine as it was in any other product. They were joined by American and Australian producers more aware of profit margins than more traditional wine makers and less inclined to accept the idea of cork contamination as an inescapable act of God. The battle has, belatedly, forced the cork industry into action. For years the price of cork had been increasing and the quality declining as the cork oaks were stripped of their precious bark too frequently. The manufacturing processes remained primitive and continued to rely on the use of chlorine washes which increased the likelihood of contamination. Today, washes have been changed, quality controls tightened and more care, generally, is taken that the corks are not exposed to moisture which encourages the development of TCA during the manufacturing process. Today corks can be treated in a process called INOS designed to use its inherent sponginess as a way of squeezing out possible contaminants. Amorim, the biggest producer, not only uses INOS but has also introduced a new cork “twin top” based on those used in champagne – where the cork’s centre is made of agglomerated cork (cork granules stuck together) topped and tailed with slivers of pure cork.

But even Amorim and other quality-conscious producers such as Sabate are going to have to accept that plastic corks – and the screw caps used in many cheaper wines in the United States and by the Swiss for even their finest bevvies – are going to take an increasing share of the market. This is not because they are cheaper. They aren’t, and they create their own problems: the perfection of the seal they provide means that the air in the bottle has to be expensively removed before the stopper is inserted, and they are harder to extract than their natural competitors, although they do provide the expected satisfying plop when the bottle is opened.

One obvious winner is the Supreme Corq from America, devised after its inventor had seen plastic bungs being used to seal the casks in some of the classiest estates in France. It is made from a recyclable, inert thermoplastic polymer used to store medicines – a field where cork was abandoned 80 years ago – thus answering many of the accusations hurled at plastic closures.

How likely is the wine-stopper war to end in open hostilities? Demand for wine in bottles (as opposed to wine in bags) is growing faster than the supply of properly prepared cork, so there is actually plenty of room in the market for different types of topper. At the top end of the market, that does not necessarily favour plastic. For nobody can yet know whether plastic stoppers will remain sound for the 20 or more years during which the greatest wines mature before they are drunk. On the other hand, “the top end” accounts for a very small amount of the total wine drunk, and plastic’s chances look correspondingly better. As over 90% of all wine is consumed within a year of being bottled (and within 24 hours of being purchased) for most drinkers the argument about the long-term effects of plastic will seem fairly theoretical.

The sociological theory, that the loss of the support of objectively established religion, the dissolution of the last remnants of pre-capitalism, together with technological and social differentiation or specialization, have led to cultural chaos is disproved every day; for culture now impresses the same stamp on everything. Films, radio and magazines make up a system which is uniform as a whole and in every part. Even the aesthetic activities of political opposites are one in their enthusiastic obedience to the rhythm of the iron. The decorative industrial management buildings and exhibition centres in authoritarian countries are much the same as anywhere else.

City housing projects designed to perpetuate the individual as a supposedly independent unit in a small hygienic dwelling make him all the more subservient to his adversary – the absolute power of capitalism. Because the inhabitants, as producers and as consumers, are drawn into the centre in search of work and pleasure, all the living units crystallize into well-organized complexes. The striking unity of microcosm and macrocosm presents men with a model of their culture: the false identity of the general and the particular. Under monopoly, all mass culture is identical, and the lines of its artificial framework begin to show through. The people at the top are no longer so interested in concealing monopoly: as its violence becomes more open, so its power grows. Movies and radio need no longer pretend to be art. The truth that they are just business is made into an ideology in order to justify the rubbish they deliberately produce. They call themselves industries; and when their directors’ incomes are published, any doubt about the social utility of the finished products is removed. Interested parties explain the culture industry in technological terms. It is alleged that because millions participate in it, certain reproduction processes are necessary that inevitably require identical needs in innumerable places to be satisfied with identical goods. The technical contrast between the few production centres and the large number of widely dispersed consumption points is said to demand organization and planning by management. Furthermore, it is claimed that standards were based in the first place on consumers’ needs, and for that reason were accepted with so little resistance. The result is the circle of manipulation and retroactive need in which the unity of the system grows ever stronger.

No mention is made of the fact that the basis on which technology acquires power over society is the power of those whose economic hold over society is greatest. A technological rationale is the rationale of domination itself. It is the coercive nature of society alienated from itself. Automobiles, bombs and movies keep the whole thing together until their levelling element shows its strength in the very wrong which it furthered.

Two millennia ago, a small Greco-Roman temple in present-day Turkey awed and enthralled its residents. Just beyond its stone gate, in a grotto shrouded in a heavy mist, a strange force worked dark deeds: Bulls ushered inside would lie down and perish; the castrated priests in charge would emerge unscathed.

Was it the bloodthirsty will of Pluto, the god of the underworld? The supernatural power of the priests? New research published in the journal Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences suggests a far earthlier explanation to the cave’s mystery: noxious carbon dioxide.

Using a portable gas analyser, volcano biologist Hardy Pfanz led a team of scientists to discover that vapours emitted from the mouth of the cave — belched from a fissure running deep beneath the area—reached levels of 4% to 53% volcanic carbon dioxide, depending on the distance from the ground. The lower the cave floor, the higher the amount of suffocating gas, which formed a lethal lake of carbon dioxide. The noxious gas is heavier than oxygen, so it settles lower, which is one reason CO₂ leaks in your house make basements deadly. Animals with noses to the ground likely breathed in far more gas than the humans walking upright beside them, which could explain the priests’ miraculous imperviousness.

Although rediscovered only in 2013 near the town of Pamukkale — famous for its surreal, UNESCO-designate travertine hot spring terraces — the cave’s existence has been known since antiquity as part of what was then Hierapolis. Known as “Plutonium” after Pluto, it was thought to be a gate to the underworld and a way to convene with the god by offering animal sacrifices. Spectators would watch in disbelief from a nearby arena. A description written by the Greek geographer Strabo, who lived from 63 B.C. to 24 A.D., makes a great deal more sense given what we know today: “This space is full of a vapor so misty and dense that one can scarcely see the ground … bulls that are led into it fall and are dragged out dead,” he wrote. But although priests entered and left the cave unharmed, Strabo noted that they would “hold their breath as much as they [could]” and displayed “an indication of a kind of suffocating attack.”

Two thousand years later, visitors should still be wary of the gate; during the 2013 excavation, archaeologists witnessed several birds drop dead after flying too close.

Granted, merely getting here might prove a challenge. Beginning in 2015, Turkey’s rough relationship with Russia has tanked its tourism industry, which despite a brief resurgence last year continues to suffer following tensions with the U.S. government. In December, the U.S. and Turkey mutually suspended visa services amid a feud over the arrest of a local employee of the U.S. Consulate in Istanbul. Services later resumed, but the U.S. government urged its citizens in January to hold off on travel plans to the region, citing terrorism concerns.

The silver lining? Fear generally keeps tourist crowds at bay. Should you visit, you might have the plutonium all to yourself.

Concentration is the sine qua non of the chess experience. In chess, concentration usually unfolds in quick succession through perceiving, desiring and searching. One could describe the feeling as a kind of evaluative hunting – not so much for a particular target, but for trails of ideas that look right and feel right. I am drawn towards some transfigurations of the patterns that make me look deeper, and repelled by others. Good moves have the qualities of truth and beauty. They are discoveries of how things are, and should be. The forces on the board are always embroiled, but concentration is particularly important when the pieces stop eyeing each other from a strategic distance, and come into direct tactical contact. At such moments, spotting a hidden detail could guarantee victory, while missing it could lead to inexorable defeat.

Concentration is not like a bulb that we can turn on and off with a switch, because we are not just the bulb; we are also the switcher and the switch. Humans are more like thermostats receiving and sending out signals, seeking the optimal ‘mental temperature’ as ambient conditions around and within us change, and we’re often abruptly adjusted against our will. We succeed in concentrating when we manage to convene the dispositions that matter for a task at hand – for instance, our awareness, attention, discernment and willpower – and that is possible only if the right emotions co-arise and come along for the ride.

The process of concentrating is more like a method of corralling and coordinating fissiparous parts of our psyche. It is important to distinguish concentration from similar or related phenomena that provide different ‘meta-cognitive views’ – contexts of meaning and activity that are valuable because they allow the mind to become aware of itself. Chess thinking provides a rich metacognitive context that leads me to believe that we should tease apart three notions that are related but often conflated – attention, flow and concentration. Attention is fundamentally grounded in perception (how we attend), flow is fundamentally grounded in experience (how we feel), and concentration is grounded in praxis (how we purposively coalesce).

We ask too much of attention and not enough of concentration. The recent cultural emphasis on attention risks subsuming too many variables of human experience, as if they could ever be held constant. We have to pay attention with the body, the will, the place, the mood, the memory, the moment, the relationships, the affordances, not the least the smartphone. All these variables are implicated in our capacity to attend, but they have their own kinds of agency, too, and they play with each other in unpredictable ways. The emergent properties arising from the psyche at play with itself in the world include amusement, enchantment, dissonance and distraction: these are not mere hindrances but more like a kind of data to be understood and integrated before we can exercise agency that is truly our own. We need to coalesce in order to concentrate, and concentrate to coalesce.

Sans concentration, we will not be able to enjoy the state of consciousness – called flow – that is part of the chess experience. Flow is a mental state characterised by intense absorption, loss of self-consciousness, goal-related feedback from the world and an altered sense of time. Flow experiences are deeply rewarding, and they arise when our skill level and challenge level are optimally matched; too little challenge and we get bored, too much and we feel anxious. Chess is a great way to access flow, yet – as a lodestar for living – flow has limitations. Mostly, it describes a quality of consciousness, not a method for obtaining it. Ultimately, flow is not a virtue but a form of pleasure. While flow is a desirable state of mind, promoting it might not lead to desirable qualities of character; just as likely it could yield an atomised society of sophisticated hedonists with gaming addictions and virtual-reality sickness. Unlike attention or flow, concentration prompts an awareness of mood, even a commitment to meaning, and an appreciation for method.

One of the last things Albert Camus averred before his untimely death was that “a man’s work is nothing but a long journey to recover through the detours of art, the two or three simple and great images which first gained access to his heart.” At times I ask my students to write of nothing at all until they can define those images. Only when they have done so are they in some measure prepared for that long journey of which Camus spoke.

For the benefit of one of my students who actually believed that writers must be intellectuals, Robert Frost sat down with me and her and explained the vast difference between the two. “Intellectuals,” he said, with a gesture of impatience at the thought of them, “deal in abstractions. It’s much safer that way. Writers take risks. They deal in anecdotes and parables. The Bible is written in anecdotes and parables.”

It is not always easy to convince students that what Frost said is true. To the recalcitrant who may, quite paradoxically, accept the miracle of Christianity while rejecting the inner world created by the mind of man, I tell the following anecdote:

My friend, a French painter and Resistance fighter, was put in a concentration camp by the Nazis. Every evening during his long incarceration, he and two or three of his fellow prisoners created a world to which their jailers had no access. Entirely by means of conversation and gestures, they dressed for dinner in immaculate white shirts that did not exist, and placed, at times with some difficulty because of the starched material that wasn’t there, pearl or ruby studs and cuff links in those shirts. With the greatest gallantry and deference, they helped one another into jackets that were formal or informal, as befitted the restaurant in which they had chosen to dine.

Moreover, these imprisoned men took on different identities every evening, and the conversation therefore differed as they sat down at a table glittering with silver and crystal that their eyes only could perceive. With their varying identities, the menu and the wine also differed. If they were playing the role of distinguished diplomats, the conversation was of wooded alpine regions and the hunt, and they ordered wild boar and pheasant from the waiter who was not there. On occasion, they sent dishes back if the food was not done to their liking.

They drank Châteauneuf-du-Pape throughout the meal and Château d’Yquem with the dessert pastry. At times, after tasting the wine, they found it had not been properly corked and they had it taken away. There were certain restaurants they did not patronize a second time because the lobster had been overcooked or the after-dinner brandy had not been served in the traditional wide-bowled crystal that one could cradle in the hand.

On the evenings that they saw themselves as men of letters, they quoted from the great poets while they dined, reciting all the lines they could remember of Homer, Dante, Milton, and Shakespeare. If they were scientists, at least one among them would be a Nobel Prize winner, and they would discuss Da Vinci and Spengler and Einstein. The words they spoke were real, if nothing else was, and the lonely courage that other men had expressed gave them the courage to survive.

So, to those students who have not found the way to write from inside the bottle of Chablis, one must never cease to offer bottles of even richer, finer wines. And one can ask them as well to listen to the words of a very great young writer of our time, James Baldwin, whose fervent essays put much of contemporary, so-called creative writing to everlasting shame. “Although we do not wholly believe it yet,” Baldwin has said, “the interior life is a real life, and the intangible dreams of people have a tangible effect upon the world.” If we as writers and as teachers can communicate that quite simple truth to others, then we shall have fulfilled our roles.

Around the mid-20th century, the rise of television in the United States was often celebrated as a revolutionary force in shaping cultural tastes and political engagement. Advocates argued that television brought educational programming into homes, expanded access to news coverage, and fostered a shared national identity through popular entertainment. Proponents claimed that television democratized information, enabling citizens from diverse socioeconomic backgrounds to participate more fully in cultural and political discourse.

However, this optimistic narrative overlooks significant limitations in television's early impact. The majority of programming prioritized entertainment over education, with networks favoring commercially viable shows over content with intellectual or cultural depth. News coverage, while more accessible, often lacked diversity in perspectives, reflecting the biases of predominantly male, white editors and producers. Furthermore, television ownership was initially concentrated among wealthier households; it was not until the late 1950s that television sets became affordable for lower-income families. Even then, rural areas lagged behind urban centers in access due to limited infrastructure for broadcasting signals.

The perception of television as a unifying force also masked its role in reinforcing societal divisions. Gender stereotypes were perpetuated through programming that emphasized domestic roles for women, while racial minorities were either underrepresented or depicted through reductive and often harmful caricatures.

Literature and the Holocaust have a complicated relationship. Literature qua art—innately concerned with representation and appropriation—seemingly stands opposed to the immutability of the Holocaust and our oversized obligations to its memory. Good literature makes artistic demands, flexes and contorts narratives, resists limpid morality, compromises reality's details. Regarding the Holocaust, this seems unconscionable, even blasphemous. The horrors of Auschwitz and Buchenwald need no artistic amplification. The memoir, the first-person unembellished account, has long been considered the apotheosis of the form—confining Holocaust literature to documentation, and reflexively censuring everything else for crassly misrepresenting the unrepresentable.

Elie Wiesel—the personification of Holocaust remembrance—is the fiercest exponent of art's illegitimacy with respect to the Holocaust. "Then, [Auschwitz] defeated culture; later, it defeated art," he wrote. "The truth of Auschwitz remains hidden in its ashes." Theodore Adorno's famous dictum, that to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric, has been frequently invoked to criticize any artistic appropriation of the Holocaust.

Too many critics, instead of assessing, parsing and criticizing (in the healthiest sense), treat Holocaust works as inviolable, beyond judgment or even approach. Such sacralization is a disservice, smothering the critical dialogue that great literature engenders. Ruth Franklin's new book,A Thousand Darknesses: Lies and Truth in Holocaust Fiction, is therefore more than a towering work of criticism and insight—it's an invaluable corrective. Franklin seeks to reclaim Holocaust literature as just that—literature about and inspired by the Holocaust.

The memoir's primacy over 'standard' literature is misguided for two overlapping reasons: first, the distinction between the two is deceivingly small; and second, their respective functions are aligned. Franklin devotes each chapter to a major Holocaust work, from Wiesel’s Night to Thomas Keneally’s Schindler's List, repeatedly demonstrating just how slippery and arbitrary the division between fact and fiction really is. Because the memoir as unfiltered actuality is a myth. Franklin illustrates how many exemplary Holocaust works dance between genres—and are no less valuable for it. Jakob Littners Aufzeichnungen aus einem Erdlochis a book originally believed to be fiction and later discovered to be based on fact (its history is a dizzying stream of authorships, ghost-authorships, translations, and revisions, all superbly traced by Franklin).

Literature is supplementary, not antithetical, to history: it allows, and in the best instances demands readers to universalize, empathize, to visualize, not merely to be informed. Testimony is critical, of course, as are scholarship and personal histories. The Holocaust is one of the most thoroughly documented events in history, and still entirely resists comprehension. The unadorned facts and uninflected history—pictures, texts, accounts—are almost unbearably distressing. Viewing images of stacked corpses or skimming meticulously organized lists of dead children, what soul doesn't collapse?

Literature, though, affects us in ways that even the most brutal history cannot. It vivifies and propels an event, however geographically, temporally and psychologically removed, towards the personal and immediate. Literature is an emotional chronicle, a history of the intangible, a quest to impart sentiment. Conveyance of the Holocaust is an impossible but necessary appeal to our imagination; and literature is the pathos to history's logos. For the role of Holocaust literature—the eternal role of literature, period—is to make it new again, to make it real, to make it felt.

A commonplace view of geography is that it is ‘pre-eminently an empirical discipline, concerned with understanding the world and transmitting that understanding to a wide audience’. How this distinguishes it from other fields is unclear, since most fields have empirical subject-matter. Perhaps what is meant is that geography addresses the concrete questions of where and under what conditions a wide range of phenomena connected to the Earth and its occupance occur. To do so, however, has required recourse to theoretical concepts including some that are explicitly geographical, i.e. relate directly to the geographical context and scope of the phenomenon in question. From this point of view, geography is as intrinsically theoretical as most other fields of knowledge.

Geography is also often seen as a uniquely ‘practical’ field. As one late nineteenth-century exponent expressed it, geography is ‘the Science of Distances − the science of the merchant, the statesman, and the strategist’. The basis for this view lay in the uses – commercial, political, and geopolitical – to which the accumulation of geographical knowledge could be put. This conception is still very much alive in contemporary debates in the United States over the contribution of geography to ‘national competitiveness’: understanding the features of competing national economies such as Japan, learning about potential markets for American goods, etc. But in fact, many of the fields of knowledge defined by the emerging intellectual division of labour of the late nineteenth century could claim similar practical origins. Such fields, for example, as sociology, political science and economics had at their origins the practical interests of states in, respectively, social control, state management, and the national accumulation of wealth.

One peculiar feature of geography relative to many other fields has been its claim to provide knowledge integrative of the so-called physical and human domains even as the intellectual division of labour and the way universities are organized into discrete faculties of arts, science, and social science were institutionalised. The claim to useful knowledge, therefore, involved the concomitant claim that human activities could be understood only in relation to the physical environment. This claim involved, for a time, a strong version of the relationship between the physical environment and the human occupants of the earth. Untainted by consideration of socio-economic causation, geography would attain its deserved status as a university ‘subject’ only by structuring ‘human geography in terms of physical geography’. But only as long as the human could be seen as a direct product of the physical did the claim about geography as an integrative field amount to more than mere rhetoric. Indeed, the division of physical and human geography as distinctive fields dates from the time in the 1920s when a strong environmental determinism was largely abandoned by professional geographers. If later the…

methodological appeal of the natural sciences (in the form of positivism, at least) replaced the causal primacy of the natural world as the rhetorical glue for geography as a whole, as far as research was concerned the field itself had in fact come substantively unstuck into separate physical and human parts with little concrete or theoretical communality. It is only in recent years that much attempt has been made at relaunching the relationship on substantive rather than rhetorical (or philosophical) grounds, largely as a result of the widespread sense of environmental crisis. Human geography now exists in practice as a separate field with its own readings of ‘nature’ and the physical environment. In physical geography, philosophical and conceptual debates take place without much reference to those in human geography.

Less controversially than the intellectual division of geography, perhaps, geographical concepts have been seen as largely the province of the professional geographer. For the period 1920-1960, it certainly makes sense to talk, for example, of the ‘devaluation’ of geographical space and place by other fields, especially in the social sciences. Nevertheless, many other fields do rely on certain key geographical assumptions that, though taken-for-granted, indicate the extent to which the use of geographical concepts has not been the intellectual monopoly of geographers. For example, dominant intellectual strands in such fields as political sociology and international relations have adopted a territorial conception of space in which a modern ‘national’ culture is seen as increasingly displacing ‘traditional’ or ‘local’ ones. This is an implicit rather than an explicit concept, a ‘hidden geography’. But just because it is not often written about very explicitly, this does not mean that it does not exist in the practice of a field. The social sciences are filled with geographical assumptions about how social processes are bounded and take place.

Finally, geography in general and human geography in particular is often alleged to be ‘isolationist’, without significant links to the larger intellectual world. Their concepts are thus very much their own and without ‘external’ connections. This is obviously less the case now than it may have been in the past. There was a political ‘quietism’ to post-war Anglo-American geography marked by a ‘fear’ of the social sciences and a reluctance to engage with ‘dangerous’ issues that were engendered, perhaps, by the ideological bipolarity of the Cold War and the urge to give the field its legitimacy in terms of a modern intellectual birth that took place in Germany at the end of the nineteenth century but whose progeny was still of uncertain character. Above all, to many major figures, politics was a doubtful business to be avoided by not talking about. Certainly, many of the leading geographers in the United States had been, or were, government employees and this set limits to their potential involvement in politics. This intellectual conservatism, identified in Smith’s essay on the logic and influence of Richard Hartshorne’s, 'The Nature of Geography', did lead to an internalist intellectual approach apparent in so many histories of geographic thought in which ‘geography’ appeared as if hermetically sealed from other fields.

This image of isolationism, certainly not accurate at the turn of the century, is even less true today. Geographers themselves have become voracious consumers of ideas from outside. In recent times, geographical terms have also begun to appear in the writings of such ‘new’ fields as cultural studies, indicating an affinity for geographical analysis that some have excitedly labelled a ‘geographical turn’ in the social sciences.

Understanding where you are in the world is a basic survival skill, which is why we, like most species come hard-wired with specialized brain areas to create cognitive maps of our surroundings. Where humans are unique, though, with the possible exception of honeybees, is that we try to communicate this understanding the world with others. We have along history of doing this by drawing maps – the earliest version yet discovered were scrawled on cave walls 14,000 years ago. Human cultures have been drawing them on stone tablets, papyrus, paper and now computer screens ever since.

Given such a long history of human map-making, it perhaps surprising that is only within the last few hundred years that north has been consistently considered to be at the top. In fact, for much of human history, north almost never appeared at the top, according to Jerry Brotton, a map historian... “North was rarely put at the top for the simple fact that north is where darkness comes from,” he says. “West is also very unlikely o be put at the top because west is where the sun disappears.”

Confusingly, early Chinese maps seem to buck this trend. But, Brotton, says, even though they did have compasses at the time, that isn’t the reason that they placed north at the top. Early Chinese compasses were actually oriented to point south, which was considered to be more desirable than deepest darkest north. But in Chinese maps, the emperor, who lived in the north of the country was always put at the top of the map, with everyone else, his loyal subjects, looking up towards him. “In Chinese culture the Emperor looks south because it’s where the winds come from, it’s a good direction. North is not very good but you are in a position of the subjection to the emperor, so you look up to him,” says Brotton.

Given that each culture has a very different idea of who, or what, they should look upto it’s perhaps not surprising that there is very little consistency in which way early maps pointed. In ancient Egyptian times the top of the world was east, the position of sunrise. Early Islamic maps favoured south at the top because most of the early Muslim cultures were north of Mecca, so they imagined looking up (south) towards it Christian maps from the same era (called Mappa Mundi) put east at the top, towards the Garden of Eden and with Jerusalem in the centre.

So when did everyone get together and decide that north was the top? It’s tempting to put it down to European explorers like Christopher Columbus and Ferdinand Megellan who were navigating by the North Star. But Brotton argues that these early explorers didn’t think of the world like that at all. “When Columbus describes the world it is in accordance with east being at the top,” he says “Columbus says he is going towards paradise, so his mentality is from a medieval mappa mundi.” We’ve got to remember, adds Brotton, that at the time, “no one knows what they are doing and where they are going.”

Most people associate bartering with poor or undeveloped societies, or with small, infrequent, and informal exchanges made within economies that use traditional currency. But bartering has also played a role when once robust economies have faltered. During the Great Depression, for example, farmers directly traded crops and other services with one another, since what little money the farmers had was of negligible value. And after the fall of communism, inflation was so high that individuals and businesses in the former Soviet Union found it safer to trade goods and services directly. (Traditional currency was still used, but the street value of the currency stretched to fit the need of the purchased item: rubles used to buy staples such as food were considered to be of greater value than rubles used to buy luxury items such as fur coats.)

We are now seeing a growing movement of individuals and businesses that prefer to use bartering in a wide variety of transactions, including multi-million-dollar purchases. In New Zealand, a house and surrounding property, valued at 5.1 million United States dollars, was recently sold for 1.7 Barterdollars (BDs), a form of credit used by about 9,000 individuals and 50 businesses in four countries. Though the deal did not involve legal tender, it was not illegal, and a contract secured the sale through business property owned by the buyer. In this case, the seller will use most of the BDs to obtain plumbing and electrical work — for both office space and his new home — from the buyer, who owns a business that provides these services. The seller is under no obligation to use the BDs this way, however, and can spend them elsewhere or simply save them as credits for later use. There is, however, little incentive to save, because, as with most barter systems, the currency does not generate interest. This also applies to loans: several bartering organizations have set up facilities that lend currency in exchange for an agreement that stipulates that the borrower will "pay" it back with products and services over a set period of time, interest-free, though a transaction fee is charged.

Community-based non-profit bartering is generally not subject to taxation, but virtually all governments consider bartering by businesses identical to cash transactions, and taxes need to be paid accordingly. However, the nature of these transactions has made them harder for governments to track, especially as bartering on the Internet has become more popular. Determining the value of the terms of a barter can also be problematic. If A designs a website for B in exchange for barter credits, A should pay taxes on the value of the credits received, while B can consider the credits as a business expense. For tax purposes, A has an incentive to underestimate the value of the transaction and B has an incentive to overestimate. To minimize this sort of problem, some governments have set a standard, so that 1 credit in a non-governmental but nationally recognized barter system corresponds to a certain valuation of the official currency.

In 1896 a Georgia couple suing for damages in the accidental death of their two year old was told that since the child had made no real economic contribution to the family, there was no liability for damages. In contrast, less than a century later, in 1979, the parents of a three-year-old sued in New York for accidental-death damages and won an award of $750,000.

The transformation in social values implicit in juxtaposing these two incidents is the subject of Viviana Zelizer’s excellent book, Pricing the Priceless Child. During the nineteenth century, she argues, the concept of the “useful” child who contributed to the family economy gave way gradually to the present-day notion of the “useless” child who, though producing no income for, and indeed extremely costly to, its parents, is yet considered emotionally “priceless.” Well established among segments of the middle and upper classes by the mid-1800’s, this new view of childhood spread throughout society in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries as reformers introduced child-labor regulations and compulsory education laws predicated in part on the assumption that a child’s emotional value made child labor taboo.

For Zelizer the origins of this transformation were many and complex. The gradual erosion of children’s productive value in a maturing industrial economy, the decline in birth and death rates, especially in child mortality, and the development of the companionate family (a family in which members were united by explicit bonds of love rather than duty) were all factors critical in changing the assessment of children’s worth. Yet “expulsion of children from the ‘cash nexus,’ although clearly shaped by profound changes in the economic, occupational, and family structures,” Zelizer maintains, “was also part of a cultural process ‘of sacralization’ of children’s lives.” Protecting children from the crass business world became enormously important for late-nineteenth-century middle-class Americans, she suggests; this sacralization was a way of resisting what they perceived as the relentless corruption of human values by the marketplace.

In stressing the cultural determinants of a child’s worth, Zelizer takes issue with practitioners of the new “sociological economics,” who have analyzed such traditionally sociological topics as crime, marriage, education, and health solely in terms of their economic determinants. Allowing only a small role for cultural forces in the form of individual “preferences,” these sociologists tend to view all human behaviors as directed primarily by the principle of maximizing economic gain. Zelizer is highly critical of this approach, and emphasizes instead the opposite phenomenon: the power of social values to transform price. As children became more valuable in emotional terms, she argues, their “exchange” or “surrender” value on the market, that is, the conversion of their intangible worth into cash terms, became much greater. 

I used a smartphone GPS to find my way through the cobblestoned maze of Geneva's Old Town, in search of a handmade machine that changed the world more than any other invention. Near a 13th-century cathedral in this Swiss city on the shores of a lovely lake, I found what I was looking for: a Gutenberg printing press. "This was the Internet of its day — at least as influential as the iPhone," said Gabriel de Montmollin, the director of the Museum of the Reformation, toying with the replica of Johann Gutenberg's great invention. [Before the invention of the printing press] it used to take four monks...up to a year to produce a single book. With the advance in movable type in 15th-century Europe, one press could crank out 3,000 pages a day.

Before long, average people could travel to places that used to be unknown to them — with maps! Medical information passed more freely and quickly, diminishing the sway of quacks...The printing press offered the prospect that tyrants would never be able to kill a book or suppress an idea. Gutenberg's brainchild broke the monopoly that clerics had on scripture. And later, stirred by pamphlets from a version of that same press, the American colonies rose up against a king and gave birth to a nation. So, a question in the summer of this 10th anniversary of the iPhone: has the device that is perhaps the most revolutionary of all time given us a single magnificent idea? Nearly every advancement of the written word through new technology has also advanced humankind. Sure, you can say the iPhone changed everything. By putting the world's recorded knowledge in the palm of a hand, it revolutionized work, dining, travel and socializing. It made us more narcissistic — here's more of me doing cool stuff! — and it unleashed an army of awful trolls. We no longer have the patience to sit through a baseball game without that reach to the pocket. And one more casualty of Apple selling more than a billion phones in a decade's time: daydreaming has become a lost art.

For all of that, I'm still waiting to see if the iPhone can do what the printing press did for religion and democracy...the Geneva museum makes a strong case that the printing press opened more minds than anything else...it's hard to imagine the French or American revolutions without those enlightened voices in print...

Not long after Steve Jobs introduced his iPhone, he said the bound book was probably headed for history's attic. Not so fast. After a period of rapid growth in e-books, something closer to the medium for Chaucer's volumes has made a great comeback.

The hope of the iPhone, and the Internet in general, was that it would free people in closed societies. But the failure of the Arab Spring, and the continued suppression of ideas in North Korea, China and Iran, has not borne that out... The iPhone is still young. It has certainly been "one of the most important, world-changing and successful products in history, “ as Apple CEO. Tim Cook said. But I'm not sure if the world changed for the better with the iPhone — as it did with the printing press — or merely, changed.

Human Biology does nothing to structure human society: age may enfeeble us all, but cultures vary considerably in the prestige and power they accord to the elderly. Giving birth is a necessary condition for being a mother, but it is not sufficient. We expect mothers to behave in maternal ways and to display appropriately maternal sentiments. We prescribe a clutch of norms or rules that govern the role of a mother. That the social role is independent of the biological base can be demonstrated by going back three sentences. (giving birth is certainly not sufficient to be a mother but, as adoption and fostering show, it is not even necessary!

The fine detail of what is expected of a mother or a father or a dutiful son differs from culture to culture, but everywhere behaviour is coordinated by the reciprocal nature of roles. Husbands and wives, parents and children, employers and employees, waiters and customers, teachers and pupils, warlords and followers: each makes sense only in its relation to the other. The term ‘role’ is an appropriate one. because the metaphor of an actor in a play neatly expresses the rule-governed nature or scripted nature of much of social life and the sense that society is a joint production. Social life occurs only because people play their parts (and that is as true for war and conflicts as for peace and love) and those parts make sense only in the context of the overall show. The drama metaphor also reminds us of the artistic licence available to the players. We can play a part straight or, as the following from J.P. Sartre conveys, we can ham it up.

Let us consider this waiter in the café. His movement is quick and forward, a little too precise, a little too rapid. He comes towards the patrons with a step a little too quick. He bends forward a little too eagerly: his voice, his eyes express an interest a little too solicitous for the order of the customer. Finally there he returns, trying to imitate in his walk the inflexible stiffness of some kind of automation while carrying his tray with the recklessness of a tightropewalker…..All his behaviour seems to us a game….But what is he playing? We need not watch long before we can explain it: he is playing at being a waiter in a café.

The American sociologist Frying Goffman built an influential body of social analysis on elaborations of the metaphor of social life as drama. Perhaps his most telling point was that it is only through acting out a part that we express character. It is not enough to be evil or virtuous: we have to be seen to be evil or virtuous.

There is distinction between the roles we play and some underlying self. Here we might note that some roles are more absorbing than others. We would not be surprised by the waitress who plays the part in such a way as to signal to us that she is much more than her occupation. We would be surprised and offended by the father who played his part ‘tongue in cheek’. Some roles are broader and more far-reaching than others. Describing someone as a clergyman or faith healer would say far more about that person than describing someone as a bus driver.

When I was little, children were bought two kinds of ice cream, sold from those white wagons with canopies made of silvery metal: either the two-cent cone or the four-cent ice-cream pie. The two-cent cone was very small, in fact it could fit comfortably into a child’s hand, and it was made by taking the ice cream from its container with a special scoop and piling it on the cone. Granny always suggested I eat only a part of the cone, then throw away the pointed end, because it had been touched by the vendor’s hand (though that was the best part, nice and crunchy, and it was regularly eaten in secret, after a pretence of discarding it).

The four-cent pie was made by a special little machine, also silvery, which pressed two disks of sweet biscuit against a cylindrical section of ice cream. First you had to thrust your tongue into the gap between the biscuits until it touched the central nucleus of ice cream; then, gradually, you ate the whole thing, the biscuit surfaces softening as they became soaked in creamy nectar. Granny had no advice to give here: in theory the pies had been touched only by the machine; in practice, the vendor had held them in his hand while giving them to us, but it was impossible to isolate the contaminated area

I was fascinated, however, by some of my peers, whose parents bought them not a four-cent pie but two two-cent cones. These privileged children advanced proudly with one cone in their right hand and one in their left; and expertly moving their head from side to side, they licked first one, then the other. This liturgy seemed to me so sumptuously enviable, that many times I asked to be allowed to celebrate it. In vain. My elders were inflexible: a four-cent ice, yes; but two two-cent ones, absolutely no.

As anyone can see, neither mathematics nor economy nor dietetics justified this refusal. Nor did hygiene, assuming that in due course the tips of both cones were discarded. The pathetic, and obviously mendacious, justification was that a boy concerned with turning his eyes from one cone to the other was more inclined to stumble over stones, steps, or cracks in the pavement. I dimly sensed that there was another secret justification, cruelly pedagogical, but I was unable to grasp it.

Today, citizen and victim of a consumer society, a civilization of excess and waste (which the society of the thirties was not), I realize that those dear and now departed elders were right. Two two-cent cones instead of one at four cents did not signify squandering, economically speaking, but symbolically they surely did. It was for this precise reason, that I yearned for them: because two ice creams suggested excess. And this was precisely why they were denied to me: because they looked indecent, an insult to poverty, a display of fictitious privilege, a boast of wealth. Only spoiled children ate two cones at once, those children who in fairy tales were rightly punished, as Pinocchio was when he rejected the skin and the stalk. And parents who encouraged this weakness, appropriate to little parvenus, were bringing up their children in the foolish theatre of “I’d like to but I can’t.” They were preparing them to turn up at tourist-class check-in with a fake Gucci bag bought from a street peddler on the beach at Rimini.

Nowadays the moralist risks seeming at odds with morality, in a world where the consumer civilization now wants even adults to be spoiled, and promises them always something more, from the wristwatch in the box of detergent to the bonus bangle sheathed, with the magazine it accompanies, in a plastic envelope. Like the parents of those ambidextrous gluttons I so envied, the consumer civilization pretends to give more, but actually gives, for four cents, what is worth four cents. You will throwaway the old transistor radio to purchase the new one, that boasts an alarm clock as well, but some inexplicable defect in the mechanism will guarantee that the radio lasts only a year. The new cheap car will have leather seats, double side mirrors adjustable from inside, and a panelled dashboard, but it will not last nearly so long as the glorious old Fiat 500, which, even when it broke down, could be started again with a kick.

The morality of the old days made Spartans of us all, while today’s morality wants all of us to be Sybarites.

Language is not a cultural artifact that we learn the way we learn to tell time or how the federal government works. Instead, it is a distinct piece of the biological makeup of our brains. Language is a complex, specialized skill, which develops in the child spontaneously, without conscious effort or formal instruction, is deployed without awareness of its underlying logic, is qualitatively the same in every individual, and is distinct from more general abilities to process information or behave intelligently. For these reasons some cognitive scientists have described language as a psychological faculty, a mental organ, a neural system, and a computational module. But I prefer the admittedly quaint term “instinct”. It conveys the idea that people know how to talk in more or less the sense that spiders know how to spin webs. Web-spinning was not invented by some unsung spider genius and does not depend on having had the right education or on having an aptitude for architecture or the construction trades. Rather, spiders spin spider webs because they have spider brains, which give them the urge to spin and the competence to succeed. Although there are differences between webs and words, I will encourage you to see language in this way, for it helps to make sense of the phenomena we will explore.

Thinking of language as an instinct inverts the popular wisdom, especially as it has been passed down in the canon of the humanities and social sciences. Language is no more a cultural invention than is upright posture. It is not a manifestation of a general capacity to use symbols: a three-year-old, we shall see, is a grammatical genius, but is quite incompetent at the visual arts, religious iconography, traffic signs, and the other staples of the semiotics curriculum. Though language is a magnificent ability unique to Homo sapiens among living species, it does not call for sequestering the study of humans from the domain of biology, for a magnificent ability unique to a particular living species is far from unique in the animal kingdom. Some kinds of bats home in on flying insects using Doppler sonar. Some kinds of migratory birds navigate thousands of miles by calibrating the positions of the constellations against the time of day and year. In nature’s talent show, we are simply a species of primate with our own act, a knack for communicating information about who did what to whom by modulating the sounds we make when we exhale.

Once you begin to look at language not as the ineffable essence of human uniqueness hut as a biological adaptation to communicate information, it is no longer as tempting to see language as an insidious shaper of thought, and, we shall see, it is not. Moreover, seeing language as one of nature’s engineering marvels — an organ with “that perfection of structure and co-adaptation which justly excites our admiration,” in Darwin’s words - gives us a new respect for your ordinary Joe and the much-maligned English language (or any language). The complexity of language, from the scientist’s point of view, is part of our biological birthright; it is not something that parents teach their children or something that must be elaborated in school — as Oscar Wilde said, “Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.” A preschooler’s tacit knowledge of grammar is more sophisticated than the thickest style manual or the most state-of-the-art computer language system, and the same applies to all healthy human beings, even the notorious syntaxfracturing professional athlete and the, you know, like, inarticulate teenage skateboarder. Finally, since language is the product of a wellengineered biological instinct, we shall see that it is not the nutty barrel of monkeys that entertainercolumnists make it out to be.

To summarize the Classic Maya collapse, we can tentatively identify five strands. I acknowledge, however, that Maya archaeologists still disagree vigorously among themselves in part, because the different strands evidently varied in importance among different parts of the Maya realm; because detailed archaeological studies are available for only some Maya sites; and because it remains puzzling why most of the Maya heartland remained nearly empty of population and failed to recover after the collapse and after re-growth of forests.

With those caveats, it appears to me that one strand consisted of population growth outstripping available resources: a dilemma similar to the one foreseen by Thomas Malthus in 1798 and being played out today in Rwanda, Haiti and elsewhere. As the archaeologist David Webster succinctly puts it, “Too many farmers grew too many crops on too much of landscape.” Compounding that mismatch between population and resources was the second strand: the effects of deforestation and hillside erosion, which caused a decrease in the amount of useable farmland at a time when more rather than less farmland was needed, and possibly exacerbated by an anthropogenic drought resulting from deforestation, by soil nutrient depletion and other soil problems, and by the struggle to prevent bracken ferns from overrunning the fields.

The third strand consisted of increased fighting, as more and more people fought over fewer resources. Maya warfare, already endemic, peaked just before the collapse. That is not surprising when one reflects that at least five million people, perhaps many more, were crammed into an area smaller than the US state of Colorado (104,000 square miles). That warfare would have decreased further the amount of land available for agriculture, by creating no-man’s lands between principalities where it was now unsafe to farm. Bringing matters to a head was the strand of climate change. The drought at the time of the Classic collapse was not the first drought that the Maya had lived through, but it was the most severe. At the time of previous droughts, there were still uninhabited parts of the Maya landscape, and people at a site affected by drought could save themselves by moving to another site. However, by the time of the Classic collapse the landscape was now full, there was no useful unoccupied land in the vicinity on which to begin anew, and the whole population could not be accommodated in the few areas that continued to have reliable water supplies.

As our fifth strand, we have to wonder why the kings and nobles failed to recognize and solve these seemingly obvious problems undermining their society. Their attention was evidently focused on their short-term concerns of enriching themselves, waging wars, erecting monuments, competing with each other, and extracting enough food from the peasants to support all those activities. Like most leaders throughout human history, the Maya kings and nobles did not heed long-term problems, insofar as they perceived them

Finally, while we still have some other past societies to consider before we switch our attention to the modern world, we must already he struck by some parallels between the Maya and the past societies. As on Mangareva, the Maya environmental and population problems led to increasing warfare and civil strife. Similarly, on Easter Island and at Chaco Canyon, the Maya peak population numbers were followed swiftly by political and social collapse. Paralleling the eventual extension of agriculture from Easter Island’s coastal lowlands to its uplands, and from the Mimbres floodplain to the hills, Copan’s inhabitants also expanded from the floodplain to the more fragile hill slopes, leaving them with a larger population to feed when the agricultural boom in the hills went bust. Like Easter Island chiefs erecting ever larger statues, eventually crowned by pukao, and like Anasazi elite treating themselves to necklaces of 2,000 turquoise beads, Maya kings sought to outdo each other with more and more impressive temples, covered with thicker and thicker plaster — reminiscent in turn of the extravagant conspicuous consumption by modern American CEOs. The passivity of Easter chiefs and Maya kings in the face of the real big threats to their societies completes our list of disquieting parallels.

Billie Holiday died a few weeks ago. I have been unable until now to write about her, but since she will survive many who receive longer obituaries, a short delay in one small appreciation will not harm her or us. When she died we — the musicians, critics, all who were ever transfixed by the most heart-rending voice of the past generation — grieved bitterly. There was no reason to. Few people pursed self-destruction more whole-heartedly than she, and when the pursuit was at an end, at the age of 44, she had turned herself into a physical and artistic wreck. Some of us tried gallantly to pretend otherwise, taking comfort in the occasional moments when she still sounded like a ravaged echo of her greatness. Others had not even the heart to see and listen any more. We preferred to stay home and, if old and lucky enough to own the incomparable records of her heyday from 1937 to 1946, many of which are not even available on British LP, to recreate those coarse-textured, sinuous, sensual and unbearable sad noises which gave her a sure corner of immortality. Her physical death called, if anything, for relief rather than sorrow. What sort of middle age would she have faced without the voice to earn money for her drinks and fixes, without the looks — and in her day she was hauntingly beautiful — to attract the men she needed, without business sense, without anything but the disinterested worship of ageing men who had heard and seen her in her glory?

And yet, irrational though it is, our grief expressed Billie Holiday’s art, that of a woman for whom one must be sorry. The great blues singers, to whom she may be justly compared, played their game from strength. Lionesses, though often wounded or at bay (did not Bessie Smith call herself ‘a tiger, ready to jump’?), their tragic equivalents were Cleopatra and Phaedra; Holiday’s was an embittered Ophelia. She was the Puccini heroine among blues singers, or rather among jazz singers, for though she sang a cabaret version of the blues incomparably, her natural idiom was the pop song. Her unique achievement was to have twisted this into a genuine expression of the major passions by means of a total disregard of its sugary tunes, or indeed of any tune other than her own few delicately crying elongated notes, phrased like Bessie Smith or Louis Armstrong in sackcloth, sung in a thin, gritty, haunting voice whose natural mood was an unresigned and voluptuous welcome for the pains of love. Nobody has sung, or will sing, Bess’s songs from Porgy as she did. It was this combination of bitterness and physical submission, as of someone lying still while watching his legs being amputated, which gives such a blood-curdling quality to her Strange Fruit, the anti-lynching poem which she turned into an unforgettable art song. Suffering was her profession; but she did not accept it.

Little need be said about her horrifying life, which she described with emotional, though hardly with factual, truth in her autobiography Lady Sings the Blues. After an adolescence in which self-respect was measured by a girl’s insistence on picking up the coins thrown to her by clients with her hands, she was plainly beyond help. She did not lack it, for she had the flair and scrupulous honesty of John Hammond to launch her, the best musicians of the 1930s to accompany her — notably Teddy Wilson, Frankie Newton and Lester Young — the boundless devotion of all serious connoisseurs, and much public success. It was too late to arrest a career of systematic embittered self-immolation. To be born with both beauty and selfrespect in the Negro ghetto of Baltimore in 1915 was too much of a handicap, even without rape at the age of 10 and drug-addiction in her teens. But, while she destroyed herself, she sang, unmelodious, profound and heartbreaking. It is impossible not to weep for her, or not to hate the world which made her what she was.

In the modern scientific story, light was created not once but twice. The first time was in the Big Bang, when the universe began its existence as a glowing, expanding, fireball, which cooled off into darkness after a few million years. The second time was hundreds of millions of years later, when the cold material condensed into dense suggests under the influence of gravity, and ignited to become the first stars.

Sir Martin Rees, Britain’s astronomer royal, named the long interval between these two enlightements the cosmic ‘Dark Age’. The name describes not only the poorly lit conditions, but also the ignorance of astronomers about that period. Nobody knows exactly when the first stars formed, or how they organised themselves into galaxies — or even whether stars were the first luminous objects. They may have been preceded by quasars, which are mysterious, bright spots found at the centres of some galaxies.

Now two independent groups of astronomers, one led by Robert Becker of the University of California, Davis, and the other by George Djorgovski of the Caltech, claim to have peered far enough into space with their telescopes (and therefore backwards enough in time) to observe the closing days of the Dark age.

The main problem that plagued previous efforts to study the Dark Age was not the lack of suitable telescopes, but rather the lack of suitable things at which to point them. Because these events took place over 13 billion years ago, if astronomers are to have any hope of unravelling them they must study objects that are at least 13 billion light years away. The best prospects are quasars, because they are so bright and compact that they can be seen across vast stretches of space. The energy source that powers a quasar is unknown, although it is suspected to be the intense gravity of a giant black hole. However, at the distances required for the study of Dark Age, even quasars are extremely rare and faint.

Recently some members of Dr Becker’s team announced their discovery of the four most distant quasars known. All the new quasars are terribly faint, a challenge that both teams overcame by peering at them through one of the twin Keck telescopes in Hawaii. These are the world’s largest, and can therefore collect the most light. The new work by Dr Becker’s team analysed the light from all four quasars. Three of them appeared to be similar to ordinary, less distant quasars.

However, the fourth and most distant, unlike any other quasar ever seen, showed unmistakable signs of being shrouded in a fog because new-born stars and quasars emit mainly ultraviolet light, and hydrogen gas is opaque to ultraviolet. Seeing this fog had been the goal of would-be Dark Age astronomers since 1965, when James Gunn and Bruce Peterson spelled out the technique for using quasars as backlighting beacons to observe the fog’s ultraviolet shadow.

The fog prolonged the period of darkness until the heat from the first stars and quasars had the chance to ionise the hydrogen (breaking it into its constituent parts, protons and electrons). Ionised hydrogen is transparent to ultraviolet radiation, so at that moment the fog lifted and the universe became the well-lit place it is today. For this reason, the end of the Dark Age is called the ‘Epoch of Re-ionisation’. Because the ultraviolet shadow is visible only in the most distant of the four quasars, Dr Becker’s team concluded that the fog had dissipated completely by the time the universe was about 900 million years old, and one-seventh of its current size.

Contemporary internet shopping conjures a perfect storm of choice anxiety. Research has consistently held that people who are presented with a few options make better, easier decisions than those presented with many. . . . Helping consumers figure out what to buy amid an endless sea of choice online has become a cottage industry unto itself. Many brands and retailers now wield marketing buzzwords such as curation, differentiation, and discovery as they attempt to sell an assortment of stuff targeted to their ideal customer. Companies find such shoppers through the data gold mine of digital advertising, which can catalog people by gender, income level, personal interests, and more. Since Americans have lost the ability to sort through the sheer volume of the consumer choices available to them, a ghost now has to be in the retail machine, whether it’s an algorithm, an influencer, or some snazzy ad tech to help a product follow you around the internet. Indeed, choice fatigue is one reason so many people gravitate toward lifestyle influencers on Instagram—the relentlessly chic young moms and perpetually vacationing 20-somethings—who present an aspirational worldview, and then recommend the products and services that help achieve it. . . .

For a relatively new class of consumer-products start-ups, there’s another method entirely. Instead of making sense of a sea of existing stuff, these companies claim to disrupt stuff as Americans know it. Casper (mattresses), Glossier (makeup), Away (suitcases), and many others have sprouted up to offer consumers freedom from choice: The companies have a few aesthetically pleasing and supposedly highly functional options, usually at mid-range prices. They’re selling nice things, but maybe more importantly, they’re selling a confidence in those things, and an ability to opt out of the stuff rat race. . . .

One-thousand-dollar mattresses and $300 suitcases might solve choice anxiety for a certain tier of consumer, but the companies that sell them, along with those that attempt to massage the larger stuff economy into something navigable, are still just working within a consumer market that’s broken in systemic ways. The presence of so much stuff in America might be more valuable if it were more evenly distributed, but stuff’s creators tend to focus their energy on those who already have plenty. As options have expanded for people with disposable income, the opportunity to buy even basic things such as fresh food or quality diapers has contracted for much of America’s lower classes.

For start-ups that promise accessible simplicity, their very structure still might eventually push them toward overwhelming variety. Most of these companies are based on hundreds of millions of dollars of venture capital, the investors of which tend to expect a steep growth rate that can’t be achieved by selling one great mattress or one great sneaker. Casper has expanded into bedroom furniture and bed linens. Glossier, after years of marketing itself as no-makeup makeup that requires little skill to apply, recently launched a full line of glittering color cosmetics. There may be no way to opt out of stuff by buying into the right thing.

Around the world, capital cities are disgorging bureaucrats. In the post-colonial fervour of the 20th century, coastal capitals picked by trade-focused empires were spurned for “regionally neutral” new ones . . . . But decamping wholesale is costly and unpopular; governments these days prefer piecemeal dispersal. The trend reflects how the world has changed. In past eras, when information travelled at a snail’s pace, civil servants had to cluster together. But now desk-workers can ping emails and video-chat around the world. Travel for face-to-face meetings may be unavoidable, but transport links, too, have improved. . . .

Proponents of moving civil servants around promise countless benefits. It disperses the risk that a terrorist attack or natural disaster will cripple an entire government. Wonks in the sticks will be inspired by new ideas that walled-off capitals cannot conjure up. Autonomous regulators perform best far from the pressure and lobbying of the big city. Some even hail a cure for ascendant cynicism and populism. The unloved bureaucrats of faraway capitals will become as popular as firefighters once they mix with regular folk.

Beyond these sunny visions, dispersing central-government functions usually has three specific aims: to improve the lives of both civil servants and those living in clogged capitals; to save money; and to redress regional imbalances. The trouble is that these goals are not always realised.

The first aim—improving living conditions—has a long pedigree. After the second world war Britain moved thousands of civil servants to “agreeable English country towns” as London was rebuilt. But swapping the capital for somewhere smaller is not always agreeable. Attrition rates can exceed 80%. . . . The second reason to pack bureaucrats off is to save money. Office space costs far more in capitals. . . . Agencies that are moved elsewhere can often recruit better workers on lower salaries than in capitals, where well-paying multinationals mop up talent.

The third reason to shift is to rebalance regional inequality. . . . Norway treats federal jobs as a resource every region deserves to enjoy, like profits from oil. Where government jobs go, private ones follow. . . . Sometimes the aim is to fulfil the potential of a country’s second-tier cities. Unlike poor, remote places, bigger cities can make the most of relocated government agencies, linking them to local universities and businesses and supplying a better-educated workforce. The decision in 1946 to set up America’s Centres for Disease Control in Atlanta rather than Washington, D.C., has transformed the city into a hub for health-sector research and business.

The dilemma is obvious. Pick small, poor towns, and areas of high unemployment get new jobs, but it is hard to attract the most qualified workers; opt for larger cities with infrastructure and better-qualified residents, and the country’s most deprived areas see little benefit. . . .

Others contend that decentralisation begets corruption by making government agencies less accountable. . . . A study in America found that state-government corruption is worse when the state capital is isolated—journalists, who tend to live in the bigger cities, become less watchful of those in power.

In a low-carbon world, renewable energy technologies are hot business. For investors looking to redirect funds, wind turbines and solar panels, among other technologies, seem a straightforward choice. But renewables need to be further scrutinized before being championed as forging a path toward a low-carbon future. Both the direct and indirect impacts of renewable energy must be examined to ensure that a climate-smart future does not intensify social and environmental harm. As renewable energy production requires land, water, and labor, among other inputs, it imposes costs on people and the environment. Hydropower projects, for instance, have led to community dispossession and exclusion . . . Renewable energy supply chains are also intertwined with mining, and their technologies contribute to growing levels of electronic waste . . . Furthermore, although renewable energy can be produced and distributed through small-scale, local systems, such an approach might not generate the high returns on investment needed to attract capital.

Although an emerging sector, renewables are enmeshed in long-standing resource extraction through their dependence on minerals and metals . . . Scholars document the negative consequences of mining . . . even for mining operations that commit to socially responsible practices[:] “many of the world’s largest reservoirs of minerals like cobalt, copper, lithium, [and] rare earth minerals”—the ones needed for renewable technologies—“are found in fragile states and under communities of marginalized peoples in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.” Since the demand for metals and minerals will increase substantially in a renewable-powered future . . . this intensification could exacerbate the existing consequences of extractive activities.

Among the connections between climate change and waste, O’Neill . . . highlights that “devices developed to reduce our carbon footprint, such as lithium batteries for hybrid and electric cars or solar panels[,] become potentially dangerous electronic waste at the end of their productive life.” The disposal of toxic waste has long perpetuated social injustice through the flows of waste to the Global South and to marginalized communities in the Global North . . .

While renewable energy is a more recent addition to financial portfolios, investments in the sector must be considered in light of our understanding of capital accumulation. As agricultural finance reveals, the concentration of control of corporate activity facilitates profit generation. For some climate activists, the promise of renewables rests on their ability not only to reduce emissions but also to provide distributed, democratized access to energy . . . But Burke and Stephens . . . caution that “renewable energy systems offer a possibility but not a certainty for more democratic energy futures.” Small-scale, distributed forms of energy are only highly profitable to institutional investors if control is consolidated somewhere in the financial chain. Renewable energy can be produced at the household or neighborhood level. However, such small-scale, localized production is unlikely to generate high returns for investors. For financial growth to be sustained and expanded by the renewable sector, production and trade in renewable energy technologies will need to be highly concentrated, and large asset management firms will likely drive those developments.

Mode of transportation affects the travel experience and thus can produce new types of travel writing and perhaps even new “identities.” Modes of transportation determine the types and duration of social encounters; affect the organization and passage of space and time; . . . and also affect perception and knowledge—how and what the traveler comes to know and write about. The completion of the first U.S. transcontinental highway during the 1920s . . . for example, inaugurated a new genre of travel literature about the United States—the automotive or road narrative. Such narratives highlight the experiences of mostly male protagonists “discovering themselves” on their journeys, emphasizing the independence of road travel and the value of rural folk traditions.

Travel writing’s relationship to empire building— as a type of “colonialist discourse”—has drawn the most attention from academicians. Close connections have been observed between European (and American) political, economic, and administrative goals for the colonies and their manifestations in the cultural practice of writing travel books. Travel writers’ descriptions of foreign places have been analyzed as attempts to validate, promote, or challenge the ideologies and practices of colonial or imperial domination and expansion. Mary Louise Pratt’s study of the genres and conventions of 18th- and 19th-century exploration narratives about South America and Africa (e.g., the “monarch of all I survey” trope) offered ways of thinking about travel writing as embedded within relations of power between metropole and periphery, as did Edward Said’s theories of representation and cultural imperialism. Particularly Said’s book, Orientalism, helped scholars understand ways in which representations of people in travel texts were intimately bound up with notions of self, in this case, that the Occident defined itself through essentialist, ethnocentric, and racist representations of the Orient. Said’s work became a model for demonstrating cultural forms of imperialism in travel texts, showing how the political, economic, or administrative fact of dominance relies on legitimating discourses such as those articulated through travel writing. . . .

Feminist geographers’ studies of travel writing challenge the masculinist history of geography by questioning who and what are relevant subjects of geographic study and, indeed, what counts as geographic knowledge itself. Such questions are worked through ideological constructs that posit men as explorers and women as travelers—or, conversely, men as travelers and women as tied to the home. Studies of Victorian women who were professional travel writers, tourists, wives of colonial administrators, and other (mostly) elite women who wrote narratives about their experiences abroad during the 19th century have been particularly revealing. From a “liberal” feminist perspective, travel presented one means toward female liberation for middle- and upper-class Victorian women. Many studies from the 1970s onward demonstrated the ways in which women’s gendered identities were negotiated differently “at home” than they were “away,” thereby showing women’s self-development through travel. The more recent poststructural turn in studies of Victorian travel writing has focused attention on women’s diverse and fragmented identities as they narrated their travel experiences, emphasizing women’s sense of themselves as women in new locations, but only as they worked through their ties to nation, class, whiteness, and colonial and imperial power structures.

[There is] a curious new reality: Human contact is becoming a luxury good. As more screens appear in the lives of the poor, screens are disappearing from the lives of the rich. The richer you are, the more you spend to be off-screen. . . . 

The joy — at least at first — of the internet revolution was its democratic nature. Facebook is the same Facebook whether you are rich or poor. Gmail is the same Gmail. And it’s all free. There is something mass market and unappealing about that. And as studies show that time on these advertisement-support platforms is unhealthy, it all starts to seem déclassé, like drinking soda or smoking cigarettes, which wealthy people do less than poor people. The wealthy can afford to opt out of having their data and their attention sold as a product. The poor and middle class don’t have the same kind of resources to make that happen.

Screen exposure starts young. And children who spent more than two hours a day looking at a screen got lower scores on thinking and language tests, according to early results of a landmark study on brain development of more than 11,000 children that the National Institutes of Health is supporting. Most disturbingly, the study is finding that the brains of children who spend a lot of time on screens are different. For some kids, there is premature thinning of their cerebral cortex. In adults, one study found an association between screen time and depression. . . .

Tech companies worked hard to get public schools to buy into programs that required schools to have one laptop per student, arguing that it would better prepare children for their screen-based future. But this idea isn’t how the people who actually build the screen-based future raise their own children. In Silicon Valley, time on screens is increasingly seen as unhealthy. Here, the popular elementary school is the local Waldorf School, which promises a back-to-nature, nearly screen-free education. So as wealthy kids are growing up with less screen time, poor kids are growing up with more. How comfortable someone is with human engagement could become a new class marker.

Human contact is, of course, not exactly like organic food . . . . But with screen time, there has been a concerted effort on the part of Silicon Valley behemoths to confuse the public. The poor and the middle class are told that screens are good and important for them and their children. There are fleets of psychologists and neuroscientists on staff at big tech companies working to hook eyes and minds to the screen as fast as possible and for as long as possible. And so human contact is rare. . . .

There is a small movement to pass a “right to disconnect” bill, which would allow workers to turn their phones off, but for now a worker can be punished for going offline and not being available. There is also the reality that in our culture of increasing isolation, in which so many of the traditional gathering places and social structures have disappeared, screens are filling a crucial void.

Since the sequencing of the human genome in 2003, genetics has become one of the key frameworks for how we all think about ourselves. From fretting about our health to debating how schools can accommodate non-neurotypical pupils, we reach for the idea that genes deliver answers to intimate questions about people’s outcomes and identities.

Recent research backs this up, showing that complex traits such as temperament, longevity, resilience to mental ill-health and even ideological leanings are all, to some extent, “hardwired”. Environment matters too for these qualities, of course. Our education and life experiences interact with genetic factors to create a fantastically complex matrix of influence. But what if the question of genetic inheritance were even more nuanced? What if the old polarised debate about the competing influences of nature and nurture was due a 21st-century upgrade?

Scientists working in the emerging field of epigenetics have discovered the mechanism that allows lived experience and acquired knowledge to be passed on within one generation, by altering the shape of a particular gene. This means that an individual’s life experience doesn’t die with them but endures in genetic form. The impact of the starvation your Dutch grandmother suffered during the second world war, for example, or the trauma inflicted on your grandfather when he fled his home as a refugee, might go on to shape your parents’ brains, their behaviours and eventually yours.

Much of the early epigenetic work was performed in model organisms, including mice. One study made use of mice’s love of cherries. The scientists exposed a group of mice first to a cherry-like smell and then immediately to a mild electric shock. The mice quickly learned to freeze in anticipation every time they smelled cherries. They had pups, and their pups were left to lead happy lives without electric shocks, though with no access to cherries. The pups grew up and had offspring of their own.

At this point, the scientists took up the experiment again. Could the acquired association of a shock with the sweet smell possibly have been transmitted to the third generation? It had. The grandpups were highly fearful of and more sensitive to the smell of cherries. How had this happened? The team discovered that the DNA in the grandfather mouse’s sperm had changed shape. This in turn changed the way the neuronal circuit was laid down in his pups and their pups, rerouting some nerve cells from the nose away from the pleasure and reward circuits and connecting them to the amygdala, which is involved in fear. The gene for this olfactory receptor had been demethylated (chemically tagged), so that the circuits for detecting it were enhanced. Through a combination of these changes, the traumatic memories cascaded across generations to ensure the pups would acquire the hard-won wisdom that cherries might smell delicious, but were bad news.

The study’s authors wanted to rule out the possibility that learning by imitation might have played a part. So they took some of the mice’s descendants and fostered them out. They also took the sperm from the original traumatised mice, used IVF to conceive more pups and raised them away from their biological parents. The fostered pups and those that had been conceived via IVF still had increased sensitivity and different neural circuitry for the perception of that particular scent. Just to clinch things, pups of mice that had not experienced the traumatic linking of cherries with shocks did not show these changes even if they were fostered by parents who had.

The most exciting thing of all occurred when the researchers set out to investigate whether this effect could be reversed so that the mice could heal and other descendants be spared this biological trauma. They took the grandparents and re-exposed them to the smell, this time without any accompanying shocks. After a certain amount of repetition of the pain-free experience, the mice stopped being afraid of the smell. Anatomically, their neural circuits reverted to their original format. Crucially, the traumatic memory was no longer passed on in the behaviour and brain structure of new generations.

One recent example of industrial hyper growth has taken place in the recycling industry, led by the rapid expansion of the recycled paper market. Though many laws were enacted in the late 1980s to encourage (and in some cases require) the collection of waste paper for recycling, there were not, at that time, companies with sufficient capacity to recycle it all. Consequently the collected paper accumulated in storage, usually at the expense of the recycling companies, thereby adding to their overhead and squeezing their already thin profit margins.

Today a different situation exists. Fifty-seven new paper mills have been built since 1991, and of these, at least twenty-nine use recycled fiber. This surge in capacity has resulted in a concurrent rise in profits. The price per Ton of waste paper has quadrupled in the past year, as have the prices of corrugated cardboard and used newsprint. Trash haulers have benefited from these conditions by combining their trash hauling and recycling operations.

Recycling centers are connected both to the clients to whom they sell end products and to those from whom they collect refuse; thus, the company gets paid twice for the same trash, once for hauling the waste and once for selling the usable material. Industry profits have increased more than tenfold during this period. As the industry has become more competitive, some haulers have chosen to rebate a portion of this money to their clients in the hopes of ensuring their loyalty.

Most students arrive at [college] using “discrete, concrete, and absolute categories to understand people, knowledge, and values.” These students live with a dualistic view, seeing “the world in polar terms of we-right-good vs. other-wrong-bad.” These students cannot acknowledge the existence of more than one point of view toward any issue. There is one “right” way. And because these absolutes are assumed by or imposed on the individual from external authority, they cannot be personally substantiated or authenticated by experience. These students are slaves to the generalizations of their authorities. An eye for an eye! Capital punish- ment is apt justice for murder. The Bible says so.

Most students break through the dualistic stage to another equally frustrating stage—multiplicity. Within this stage, students see a variety of ways to deal with any given topic or problem. However, while these students accept multiple points of view, they are unable to evaluate or justify them. To have an opinion is everyone’s right. While students in the dualistic stage are unable to produce evidence to support what they consider to be self-evident absolutes, students in the multiplistic stage are unable to connect instances into coherent generalizations. Every assertion, every point, is valid. In their democracy they are directionless. Capital punishment? What sense is there in answering one murder with another?

The third stage of development finds students living in a world of relativism. Knowledge is relative: right and wrong depend on the context. No longer recognizing the validity of each individual idea or action, relativists examine everything to find its place in an overall framework. While the multiplist views the world as unconnected, almost random, the relativist seeks always to place phenomena into coherent larger patterns. Students in this stage view the world analytically. They appreciate authority for its expertise, using it to defend their own generalizations. In addition, they accept or reject ostensible authority after systematically evaluating its validity. In this stage, however, students resist decision making. Suffering the ambivalence of finding several consistent and acceptable alternatives, they are almost overwhelmed by diversity and need means for managing it. Capital punishment is appropriate justice—in some instances.

In the final stage students manage diversity through individual commitment. Students do not deny relativism. Rather they assert an identity by forming commitments and assuming responsibility for them. They gather personal experience into a coherent framework, abstract principles to guide their actions, and use these principles to discipline and govern their thoughts and actions. The individual has chosen to join a particular community and agrees to live by its tenets. The accused has had the benefit of due process to guard his civil rights, a jury of peers has found him guilty, and the state has the right to end his life. This is a principle my community and I endorse.

Abortion remains one of the most contentious issues in the realm of women’s rights, inflaming debates among feminists, religious groups, and political leaders alike. While a growing global consensus views control over fertility as a basic human right, abortion laws continue to vary widely. About 40 percent of the world’s population live in countries where abortion is permitted on request, and another 25 percent in countries allowing it when the mother’s life is endangered. Each year, an estimated 26 to 31 million legal abortions occur, alongside 10 to 22 million illegal ones.

For feminists, abortion is central to the struggle against patriarchal control of women’s bodies. Historically, definitions of reproductive freedom have been shaped by male-dominated institutions, particularly patriarchal religions such as Roman Catholicism, orthodox Judaism, Islamic fundamentalism, and traditionalist Hindu practice. Governments, usually controlled by men, have granted or withdrawn abortion rights depending on demographic concerns—granting access when overpopulation was feared, restricting it when underpopulation was a concern.

In earlier centuries, abortion laws were more permissive under English common law, being challenged only after “quickening,” when fetal movements could be felt. By the late 19th century, however, abortion was banned across the United States except to save the mother’s life. This shift was influenced both by the medical profession, which sought to consolidate authority by discrediting midwives and traditional healers, and by political anxieties. The influx of southern and eastern European immigrants, who had larger families, alarmed Protestant elites. Restricting abortion was seen as a way to encourage white, middle-class Protestant women to bear more children, thereby preserving America’s demographic balance.

For much of the 20th century, abortion remained illegal in the U.S., even during health crises such as the thalidomide tragedy and the rubella outbreak in the 1960s, which produced severe birth defects. These public health disasters, combined with a growing recognition of women’s right to privacy, eventually spurred several states to liberalize abortion laws.

The modern debate is sharply polarized between “pro-life” and “pro-choice” positions. Pro-life advocates view the fetus as a human life and equate abortion with murder, citing religious and legal grounds. They see the rise in abortion numbers as morally unacceptable. Pro-choice advocates, in contrast, argue that women should have the right to decide whether to bear children, stressing that restrictive laws do not prevent abortions but only make them unsafe. They highlight the dangers of illegal abortions in the past and emphasize the particular importance of access for rape and incest victims, as well as for women facing serious health risks.

A deeper exploration of these competing perspectives is offered in Kristin Luker’s influential book Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood. Based on extensive archival research and over 200 interviews in California, Luker argues that pro-life and pro-choice activists hold fundamentally different worldviews shaped by contrasting experiences of gender, sexuality, and family life.

Pro-life women tend to support a division of gender roles, with men occupying the public sphere of work and women the private sphere of the home. They see motherhood as a woman’s natural and primary role, and believe children benefit most from mothers who remain full-time caregivers. Pro-choice women, on the other hand, reject the separation of public and private spheres. They regard reproductive and family responsibilities as potential barriers to equality and insist that motherhood should be voluntary, not mandatory.

Luker concludes that activism in either movement reflects broader life experiences, including differences in education, income, occupation, and family structure. For pro-life women, abortion represents a threat to traditional family and gender roles, while for pro-choice women it symbolizes autonomy and equality. In this sense, abortion debates serve as a battleground for competing visions of women’s place in modern society.

It is no revelation that people prefer immediate rewards. What is less well known is that people are willing to renounce a significant portion of a given reward in order to expedite delivery. This phenomenon is known as “discounting,” because the value of a delayed reward is discounted, or reduced, in the mind of the receiver. Discounting helps explain the straightforward “time value of money” (a dollar now is worth more than a dollar later), but its manifestations can be far more dramatic.

Behavioral economists have identified extreme discounting in experiments in which subjects were offered either a dollar immediately or three dollars the next day. Individuals who consistently choose significantly smaller rewards for their immediacy are described as “present-biased.” Present-bias may seem innocuous, but it has serious ramifications. In another experiment, young children were given a marshmallow, then told that if they could wait a few minutes to eat it, they would receive a second one. Those unable to endure the delay suffered from more behavioral problems in adolescence and scored markedly lower on standardized tests than the children who were able to wait and thereby earn another treat. Traits such as indolence and apathy may indeed be manifestations of present-bias; material success is predicated on one’s ability to recognize hedonistic impulses, understand their consequences, and delay or suppress gratification.

What was once known as “exponential discounting” (because the length of the delay before a reward was given seemed to correlate directly with the size of the perceived discount) has been renamed “hyperbolic discounting,” because the effects of time delay do not seem strictly linear. A study showed that people offered $50 now or $100 in a year were likely to choose the former. But when people were offered either $50 in 5 years or $100 in 6 years (the same choice 5 years in the future), the vast majority chose the latter. This experiment reveals the difficulty of making effective financial decisions about one’s future priorities, just as the choice to procrastinate requires the unlikely supposition that one’s future self will have a greater set of resources to accomplish the postponed task than one’s present self.

Almost every regulatory policy is created to achieve some desirable social goal. When more than 10,000 people are killed annually in industrial accidents, who would disagree with the goal of a safer workplace? Who would dissent from greater highway safety, when more than 50,000 perish each year in automobile accidents? Who would disagree with policies to promote equality in hiring, when the history of opportunities for women and minorities is one of discrimination? Who would disagree with policies to reduce industrial pollution, when pollution threatens health and lives? However, there may be more than one way to achieve these—and many other—desirable social goals.

Charles L. Schultze, chair of former President Carter’s Council of Economic Advisors, is a critic of the current state of federal regulation. Schultze reviewed the regulatory activities of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). Neither agency’s policies, he concluded, had worked very well. He described the existing system as a command and control policy. The government tells businesses how to reach certain goals, checks that these commands are followed, and punishes offenders.

Schultze advocates an incentive system. He argues that instead of telling construction businesses how their ladders must be constructed, measuring the ladders, and charging a small fine for violators, it would be more efficient and effective to levy a high tax on firms with excessive worker injuries. Instead of trying to develop standards for 62,000 pollution sources, as the EPA now does, it would be easier and more effective to levy a high tax on those who cause pollution. The government could even provide incentives in the form of rewards for such socially valuable behaviour as developing technology to reduce pollution. Incentives, Schultze argues, use market-like strategies to regulate the industry. They are, he claims, more effective and efficient than command-and-control regulation.

Not everyone is as keen on the use of incentives as Schultze. Defenders of the command-and-control system of regulation compare the present system to preventive medicine—it is designed to minimise pollution or workplace accidents before they become too severe. Defenders of the system argue, too, that penalties for excessive pollution or excessive workplace accidents would be imposed only after substantial damage had been done. They also add that if taxes on pollution or unsafe work environments were merely externalised (that is, passed along to the consumer as higher prices), they would not be much of a deterrent. Moreover, it would take a large bureaucracy to monitor carefully the level of pollution discharged, and it would require a complex calculation to determine the level of tax necessary to encourage businesses not to pollute.

As software improves, the people using it become less likely to sharpen their own know-how. Applications that offer lots of prompts and tips are often to blame; simpler, less solicitous programs push people harder to think, act and learn.

Ten years ago, information scientists at Utrecht University in the Netherlands had a group of people carry out complicated analytical and planning tasks using either rudimentary software that provided no assistance or sophisticated software that offered a great deal of aid. The researchers found that the people using the simple software developed better strategies, made fewer mistakes and developed a deeper aptitude for the work. The people using the more advanced software, meanwhile, would often "aimlessly click around" when confronted with a tricky problem. The supposedly helpful software actually short-circuited their thinking and learning.

[According to] philosopher Hubert Dreyfus . . . . our skills get sharper only through practice, when we use them regularly to overcome different sorts of difficult challenges. The goal of modern software, by contrast, is to ease our way through such challenges. Arduous, painstaking work is exactly what programmers are most eager to automate-after all, that is where the immediate efficiency gains tend to lie. In other words, a fundamental tension ripples between the interests of the people doing the automation and the interests of the people doing the work.

Nevertheless, automation's scope continues to widen. With the rise of electronic health records, physicians increasingly rely on software templates to guide them through patient exams. The programs incorporate valuable checklists and alerts, but they also make medicine more routinized and formulaic-and distance doctors from their patients. . . . Harvard Medical School professor Beth Lown, in a 2012 journal article . . . warned that when doctors become "screen-driven," following a computer's prompts rather than "the patient's narrative thread," their thinking can become constricted. In the worst cases, they may miss important diagnostic signals. . . .

In a recent paper published in the journal Diagnosis, three medical researchers . . . examined the misdiagnosis of Thomas Eric Duncan, the first person to die of Ebola in the U.S., at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital Dallas. They argue that the digital templates used by the hospital's clinicians to record patient information probably helped to induce a kind of tunnel vision. "These highly constrained tools," the researchers write, "are optimized for data capture but at the expense of sacrificing their utility for appropriate triage and diagnosis, leading users to miss the forest for the trees." Medical software, they write, is no "replacement for basic history-taking, examination skills, and critical thinking." . . .

There is an alternative. In "human-centered automation," the talents of people take precedence. . . . In this model, software plays an essential but secondary role. It takes over routine functions that a human operator has already mastered, issues alerts when unexpected situations arise, provides fresh information that expands the operator's perspective and counters the biases that often distort human thinking. The technology becomes the expert's partner, not the expert's replacement.

The Byzantine Empire, successor to the Eastern Roman Empire, endured for over a millennium from its founding in Constantine’s refoundation of Constantinople in AD 330 until the fall of its capital in 1453. Traditionally portrayed as the “decaying Roman Empire,” modern scholarship reframes Byzantium as a dynamic, adaptive polity that preserved classical heritage while driving innovation in governance, religion, and cultural identity.

Central to Byzantine resilience was its administrative structure, evolved from Roman systems yet transformed to meet medieval realities. The emperor possessed absolute authority, but practical governance rested on a bureaucracy organized into themes—military-administrative districts governed by generals responsible for local defense and civil administration. This dual structure allowed Byzantium to mobilize regional defense against invasions by Arabs, Slavs, and Turks, while maintaining central cohesion.

Religion played a key role in legitimating imperial power and forming a unifying ideology. The emperor functioned as God’s representative on Earth, embodying synergy between sacred and secular authority. Church and state were intertwined, illustrated by the Council of Nicaea convened by Emperor Constantine, and later, by iconoclastic controversies where emperors like Leo III enforced bans on religious imagery, only to see successors like Empress Theodora restore icon veneration—highlighting the deeply contested intersection of piety and power.

Culturally, Byzantium became a bastion of Orthodox Christianity and classical learning. Its scholars preserved ancient Greek texts, producing influential works in theology, law, and the arts. Byzantine art, particularly mosaic iconography, introduced new modes of spiritual expression, blending Roman realism with spiritual abstraction. Constantinople’s architectural marvel, the Hagia Sophia, constructed under Justinian in the 6th century, symbolized imperial grandeur and theological vision with its massive dome and luminous interiors.

Byzantine diplomacy also proved resourceful. Outnumbered by Arab and later Ottoman incursions, Byzantium leveraged marriage alliances, bribes, religious diplomacy, and strategic truces, often delaying conquest long enough to survive for centuries. While its territorial control gradually shrunk—with only Anatolia and the capital city remaining by the 13th century—this strategic festivity reflects political ingenuity rather than decline.

Ultimately, the fall of Constantinople in 1453 did not diminish Byzantine cultural influence. Orthodox Christianity and Byzantine architectural and theological traditions persisted in regions like Russia, the Balkans, and the Middle East. The empire’s preservation of classical knowledge later helped shape the Renaissance through migration of scholars to the West.

In reappraising the Byzantine Empire, we see less a decaying remnant of Rome and more a durable and ingenious civilization—one that adapted, preserved, and innovated amid shifting forces. Its blend of Roman administrative order, Christian theology, and Hellenic culture models the complexity and resilience of human governance across time.

In the digital era, humans increasingly outsource decisions—both trivial and momentous—to algorithmic systems. Whether it is deciding what news to read, what route to take, or whom to date, algorithms are invoked as rational agents, immune to bias, fatigue, or emotion. Yet the faith placed in algorithmic objectivity often rests on a fundamental misunderstanding: that these systems offer clarity, control, and neutrality. In reality, algorithms are neither disinterested nor infallible. They reflect the priorities, prejudices, and limitations of their creators, and in doing so, often reproduce—and sometimes amplify—existing societal asymmetries.

Consider the widespread use of predictive policing tools, which rely on historical crime data to allocate resources. These systems are often assumed to be neutral because they are “data-driven.” But the data itself is already shaped by human decisions: which neighborhoods were over-policed, which crimes were recorded, and whose infractions were ignored. Feeding these skewed datasets into algorithms leads to feedback loops, where over-surveilled communities continue to be targeted, not because they are inherently more criminal, but because the system has been trained to expect crime there. The result is not a break from human prejudice, but its reinforcement through code.

Ironically, as algorithmic systems grow more complex, human oversight often diminishes. The opacity of machine learning models—sometimes called the “black box” problem—renders them resistant to interrogation, even by their own developers. When an AI-driven credit scoring model denies a loan, or a facial recognition system misidentifies a suspect, there may be no clear explanation for why it happened. This erodes the principle of accountability. Who is responsible for a decision that no one fully understands?

Meanwhile, users are offered the illusion of control. Customization settings, toggles, and user interfaces simulate agency, but most critical parameters remain hidden or inaccessible. When a streaming service recommends a film or a search engine ranks a page, these outcomes are framed as personalized and organic, but they are in fact structured by commercial incentives and hidden levers. The architecture of these systems nudges users toward choices without ever declaring its hand. In this sense, algorithms do not merely make decisions; they shape the conditions under which decisions are made.

To speak of algorithmic neutrality, then, is to ignore the complex social, economic, and political infrastructure in which these technologies are embedded. The danger is not merely that algorithms might make errors, but that their veneer of impartiality masks deeper patterns of control. What emerges is not a more rational world, but a more opaque one—where power operates invisibly, insulated from scrutiny by a rhetoric of objectivity.

The narrative of Dersu Uzala is divided into two major sections, set in 1902, and 1907, that deal with separate expeditions which Arseniev conducts into the Ussuri region. In addition, a third time frame forms a prologue to the film. Each of the temporal frames has a different focus, and by shifting them Kurosawa is able to describe the encroachment of settlements upon the wilderness and the consequent erosion of Dersu’s way of life. As the film opens, that erosion has already begun. The first image is a long shot of a huge forest, the trees piled upon one another by the effects of the telephoto lens so that the landscape becomes an abstraction and appears like a huge curtain of green. A title informs us that the year is 1910. This is as late into the century as Kurosawa will go. After this prologue, the events of the film will transpire even farther back in time and will be presented as Arseniev’s recollections. The character of Dersu Uzala is the heart of the film, his life the example that Kurosawa wishes to affirm.

Yet the formal organization of the film works to contain, to close, to circumscribe that life by erecting a series of obstacles around it. The film itself is circular, opening and closing by Dersu’s grave, thus sealing off the character from the modern world to which Kurosawa once so desperately wanted to speak. The multiple time frames also work to maintain a separation between Dersu and the contemporary world. We must go back father even than 1910 to discover who he was. But this narrative structure has yet another implication. It safeguards Dersu’s example, inoculates it from contamination with history, and protects it from contact with the industrialised, urban world. Time is organised by the narrative into a series of barriers, which enclose Dersu in a kind of vacuum chamber, protecting him from the social and historical dialectics that destroyed the other Kurosawa heroes. Within the film, Dersu does die, but the narrative structure attempts to immortalise him and his example, as Dersu passes from history into myth.

We see all this at work in the enormously evocative prologue. The camera tilts down to reveal felled trees littering the landscape and an abundance of construction. Roads and houses outline the settlement that is being built. Kurosawa cuts to a medium shot of Arseniev standing in the midst of the clearing, looking uncomfortable and disoriented. A man passing in a wagon asks him what he is doing, and the explorer says he is looking for a grave. The driver replies that no one has died here, the settlement is too recent. These words enunciate the temporal rupture that the film studies. It is the beginning of things (industrial society) and the end of things (the forest), the commencement of one world so young that no one has had time yet to die and the eclipse of another, in which Dersu had died. It is his grave for which the explorer searches. His passing symbolises the new order, the development that now surrounds Arseniev. The explorer says he buried his friend three years ago next to huge cedar and fir trees, but now they are all gone. The man on the wagon replies they were probably chopped down when the settlement was built, and he drives off. Arseniev walks to a barren, treeless spot next to a pile of bricks. As he moves, the camera tracks and pans to follow, revealing a line of freshly built houses and a woman hanging her laundry to dry. A distant train whistle is heard, and the sounds of construction in the clearing vie with the cries of birds and the rustle of wind in the trees. Arseniev pauses, looks around for the grave that once was, and murmurs desolately, ‘Dersu’. The image now cuts farther into the past, to 1902, and the first section of the film commences, which describes Arseniev’s meeting with Dersu and their friendship.

Kurosawa defines the world of the film initially upon a void, a missing presence. The grave is gone, brushed aside by a world rushing into modernism, and now the hunter exists only in Arseniev’s memories. The hallucinatory dreams and visions of Dodeskaden are succeeded by nostalgic, melancholy ruminations. Yet by exploring these ruminations, the film celebrates the timelessness of Dersu’s wisdom. The first section of the film has two purposes: to describe the magnificence and in human vastness of nature and to delineate the code of ethics by which Dersu lives and which permits him to survive in these conditions. When Dersu first appears, the other soldiers treat him with condescension and laughter, but Arseniev watches him closely and does not share their derisive response. Unlike them, he is capable of immediately grasping Dersu’s extraordinary qualities. In camp, Kurosawa frames Arseniev by himself, sitting on the other side of the fire from his soldiers. While they sleep or joke among themselves, he writes in his diary and Kurosawa cuts in several point-of-view shots from his perspective of trees that appear animated and sinister as the fire light dances across their gnarled, leafless outlines. This reflective dimension, this sensitivity to the spirituality of nature, distinguishes him from the others and forms the basis of his receptivity to Dersu and their friendship. It makes him a fit pupil for the hunter.

Serial killers are rare. Perhaps a dozen are active today, down from an estimated 198 in 1987. Female serial killers are even rarer, representing roughly 10%. The most famous might be Aileen Wuornos, who was immortalized in the movie Monster. As a street prostitute, she robbed and murdered seven men between 1989 and 1990. For her crimes, Wuornos was executed by lethal injection in 2002.

Wuornos’ story no doubt fascinates the public because it is so unheard of. Women tend to shy away from committing crimes of all kinds. About one-quarter of people arrested in the U.S. each year are female. Women only commit 20% of violent crimes and 37% of property crimes. They perpetrate only one out of every 10 homicides. If you break down criminal acts into subsets such as arson, vandalism, and fraud, women commit the minority of almost all of them. The only crimes they commit at rates roughly equal to men are embezzlement and murder of a child or stepchild. So, why is it that women tend to commit far less crime than men?

Criminologists have been researching this question for decades. Over that time, they’ve explored numerous theories. First and foremost, men are more aggressive, impulsive, and inclined to take risks. Studies find this sex difference holds true even from a young age, before cultural influences can “program” boys and girls into prescribed gender roles. That suggests there’s a biological component to male recklessness, likely stemming from the sway of higher testosterone levels. One study found that for every single adolescent girl who commits a minor criminal act, 15 boys do the same. This disparity in adolescent delinquency can send girls and boys on very different life paths.

Although past criminologists tended to point to biological differences between the sexes and say “case closed” when it comes to imbalances in offending, today’s researchers are more discerning, citing various social factors that reduce the likelihood of women committing crimes. For starters, over the vast majority of history and in many cultures today, women have been confined to child-rearing and household roles. From a young age, they’ve been encouraged to be nurturing and caring. As they grew up, they typically lacked the independence of men, and so they simply had less time, freedom, and opportunity to engage in criminal acts. What’s more, women also haven’t typically been pressured to be breadwinners, reducing the incentive to steal.

Another theory suggests that women do commit crimes at rates closer to those of men, but have historically been overlooked or treated leniently by authorities. Men have historically dominated law enforcement, and many of these men likely held stereotypical views about women. These views meant that female criminals may have been able to escape apprehension. (“She shouldn’t have done it. She’s a woman!”) And if caught, they might have been turned over to husbands or family to deal out punishment.

Since the 1950s, as women across the world have gained greater independence and traditional gender stereotypes have faded, the offending gap between men and women has indeed narrowed. Researchers have broadly found that men are committing crimes at lower rates than in the past, while women are doing so at similar or slightly higher rates.

Still, a significant offending divide persists between the sexes, particularly when it comes to violent crime. And it doesn’t seem likely to close anytime soon. This could suggest that gendered cultural stereotypes remain sticky, but it more likely indicates that biology is the driving force behind the gap.

A mysterious illness has killed billions of sea stars in the past decade. After a four-year search, scientists have uncovered the culprit: a bacterium known as Vibrio pectenicida. The team reported its findings this week in Nature Ecology & Evolution.

The strange illness is known as sea star wasting disease, and it causes starfish to disintegrate to death. It is the largest marine epidemic among noncommercial species that has ever been documented, and it has affected more than 20 species of sea stars along the Pacific Coast of North America. Approximately 90 percent of sunflower sea stars (Pycnopodia helianthoides) have died from the ailment, so many that they are now a critically endangered species.

Researchers are unsure of where this bacterium came from and why it broke out. But there is evidence that warmer ocean temperatures are linked to bigger outbreaks. In British Columbia, the most severe outbreaks happen late in the summer, says study co-author Alyssa Gehman, a marine disease ecologist at the province’s Hakai Institute and the University of British Columbia. And that suggests that temperature and possibly even climate change might affect this disease.

“Sea stars [such as] sunflower stars are really important members of their communities,” Gehman says. When the sunflower sea stars lost about 90 percent of their population, there were huge increases in sea urchins (a prey of sea stars) off the coast of California. The spiny creatures are massive grazers of kelp forests, which are crucial members of marine ecosystems, Gehman says. Underwater kelp forests store carbon and are homes for thousands of species. But once sea urchin populations boomed, there was a widespread loss of kelp forests.

To identify the disease, researchers ran more than 20 experiments from 2021 to 2024. In one experiment, they analyzed the genes of eight healthy sea stars and eight infected ones. While sitting in her office and comparing the genetics of the two groups, Melanie Prentice, a research scientist now at the Hakai Institute, thought, “Gosh, there’s so much Vibrio in these wasting sea stars, and there’s really not much happening in these healthy sea stars in terms of Vibrio.” After toggling the data to see the specific Vibrio species, she found V. pectenicida in every single one of the wasting sea star samples. To validate the finding, Prentice and her team exposed healthy sea stars to V. pectenicida. From the 20 sunflower stars that the researchers exposed to V. pectenicida at varying doses, only one survived (this sea star was exposed to the lowest dose of the bacteria tested). The rest died from sea star wasting disease, providing the conclusive evidence the team needed, Prentice says.

“If you don’t know what it is that’s killing them, there’s only so much you can do to try and save them,” Gehman says. “So, there’s a bunch of work that we can do now.”

One next step is to determine if the pathogen is unique to the sunflower sea star because there are still many other species affected by the disease, says Oregon State University marine ecologist Bruce Menge, who wasn’t involved in the study. Prentice and her colleagues hope to breed sea stars that are resistant to the pathogen so they can survive in the wild.

The First World War did not merely shatter empires and redraw borders—it destabilized the very intellectual foundations upon which 19th-century Europe had rested. Before 1914, there was a widespread belief in the inevitability of progress, rational governance, and the resilience of liberal institutions. The war’s unprecedented scale of destruction and mechanized violence made a mockery of such assumptions. What followed was not just political instability but a deeper crisis of confidence in human reason, international cooperation, and the ideals of Enlightenment thought.

Among the most visible consequences was the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman, German, and Russian empires. But beneath these geopolitical shifts was a more profound unraveling: the conviction that history moved forward through reasoned negotiation and moral advancement was replaced by a fear that irrationality, mass hysteria, and brutality were the true drivers of events. The war did not just happen to Europe—it revealed Europe to itself, and what it saw was terrifying.

The Treaty of Versailles in 1919 symbolized both the desire to restore order and the inability to do so. Ostensibly crafted to prevent another conflict, the treaty was a curious mix of moralism and vengeance. Its harsh terms, especially toward Germany, were justified by an appeal to justice, but many contemporaries—Keynes among them—warned that such punitive measures would plant the seeds of future conflict. The treaty became emblematic of a new problem: the failure of institutions to restrain emotion and power under the guise of legality. It showed how peace could be as politically loaded, and as unstable, as war.

This disillusionment had ripple effects across philosophy, literature, and political thought. The orderly optimism of the Victorian age gave way to existentialism, psychoanalysis, and surrealism—intellectual movements united more by their skepticism than their solutions. Across Europe, democracy faltered. In Italy and Germany, the war’s veterans returned to societies in turmoil and found solace not in liberal reform but in fascist mythologies of rebirth and national glory. The war had brutalized not only the body but the imagination, preparing the ground for totalitarian ideologies.

Yet amid the rubble, there were also attempts to salvage hope. The League of Nations, formed in the aftermath of the war, was a fragile but symbolic attempt to replace power politics with dialogue. Its failure to prevent the Second World War has often overshadowed its pioneering efforts at global cooperation. Likewise, intellectuals such as Karl Popper and Isaiah Berlin—both shaped by the traumas of early 20th-century Europe—would spend their lives defending pluralism, open societies, and critical reasoning. The postwar world was divided between those who succumbed to despair and those who responded by imagining better systems.

What makes the First World War especially significant is not just the devastation it caused but the epistemological rupture it initiated. The war did not simply change political regimes; it transformed how people thought about truth, authority, and civilization itself. In that sense, its consequences were less visible but more lasting than the trenches and treaties suggest. It inaugurated an age of suspicion—toward ideology, grand narratives, and the idea that history was the story of uninterrupted progress.

For Hegel, the contradictions that drive history exist first of all in the realm of human consciousness, i.e. on the level of ideas – in the sense of large unifying world views that might best be understood under the rubric of ideology. Ideology in this sense is not restricted to the secular and explicit political doctrines we usually associate with the term, but can include religion, culture, and the complex of moral values underlying any society as well.

Hegel’s view of the relationship between the ideal and the real or material worlds was an extremely complicated one, beginning with the fact that for him the distinction between the two was only apparent. He did not believe that the real world conformed or could be made to conform to ideological preconceptions of philosophy professors in any simpleminded way, or that the "material" world could not impinge on the ideal. While Hegel’s writing and thinking could be stopped by a bullet from the material world, the hand on the trigger of the gun was motivated in turn by the ideas of liberty and equality that had driven the French Revolution.

For Hegel, all human behavior in the material world, and hence all human history, is rooted in a prior state of consciousness. This consciousness may not be explicit and self-aware, as are modern political doctrines, but may rather take the form of religion or simple cultural or moral habits. And yet this realm of consciousness in the long run necessarily becomes manifest in the material world, indeed creates the material world in its own image.

Consciousness is cause and not effect, and can develop autonomously from the material world; hence the real subtext underlying the apparent jumble of current events is the history of ideology.

 Hegel’s idealism has fared poorly at the hands of later thinkers. Marx reversed the priority of the real and the ideal completely, relegating the entire realm of consciousness – religion, art, culture, philosophy itself – to a "superstructure" that was determined entirely by the prevailing material

mode of production. Yet another unfortunate legacy of Marxism is our tendency to retreat into materialist or utilitarian explanations of political or historical phenomena, and our disinclination to believe in the autonomous power of ideas. Paul Kennedy ascribed the decline of great powers to simple economic overextension. Obviously, this is true on some level: an empire whose economy is barely above the level of subsistence cannot bankrupt its treasury indefinitely. But whether a highly productive modern industrial society chooses to spend 3 or 7 percent of its GNP on defence rather than consumption is entirely a matter of that society’s political priorities, which are in turn determined in the realm of consciousness.

The materialist bias of modern thought is characteristic not only of people on the Left who may be sympathetic to Marxism, but of many passionate anti-Marxists as well. Indeed, there is on the Right what one might label the Wall Street Journal school of deterministic materialism that discounts the importance of ideology and culture and sees man as essentially a rational, profit-maximizing individual. But one small example will illustrate the problematic character of such materialist views.

Max Weber begins his famous book, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, by noting the different economic performance of Protestant and Catholic communities throughout Europe and America, summed up in the proverb that Protestants eat well while Catholics sleep well. Weber noted that in many traditional peasant communities, raising the piece-work rate had the opposite effect of lowering labor productivity: at the higher rate, a peasant accustomed to earning two and one-half marks per day found he could earn the same amount by working less, and did so because he valued leisure more than income. The choices of leisure over income, or of the militaristic life of the Spartan hoplite over the wealth of the Athenian trader, or even the ascetic life of the early capitalist entrepreneur over that of a traditional leisured aristocrat, cannot possibly be explained by the impersonal working of material forces, but come preeminently out of the sphere of consciousness.

A central theme of Weber’s work was to prove that contrary to Marx, the material mode of production, far from being the "base," was itself a "superstructure" with roots in religion and culture, and that to understand the emergence of modern capitalism and the profit motive one had to study their antecedents in the realm of the spirit.

Abortion remains one of the most contentious issues in the sphere of women’s rights, provoking conflicts among feminist groups, religious authorities, and political actors. Across the globe, abortion laws vary widely, but a growing consensus supports a woman’s right to control her fertility as a basic human right. Today, about 40 per cent of the world’s population lives in countries where abortion is permitted on request, while another 25 per cent live in countries where it is allowed to save the woman’s life. Despite millions of legal abortions annually, illegal procedures remain widespread.

Feminists see control over reproduction as central to the women’s movement, arguing that men—through religion, politics, and law—have historically defined and restricted women’s reproductive choices. Patriarchal religious traditions, from Islamic fundamentalism to Roman Catholicism, continue to shape abortion debates. Governments have also treated abortion rights as a demographic tool: expanding access when overpopulation was feared, but withdrawing it when birth rates fell. Until the 19th century, English common law allowed abortion before “quickening” (when fetal movement is first felt). By 1900, however, abortion was banned in most U.S. states, justified by claims of protecting women’s health and the sanctity of life, but also serving professional and political aims. Physicians used the campaign to marginalize midwives and traditional healers, while nativist fears of immigrant fertility motivated restrictions to protect the demographic dominance of middle-class Protestants.

These prohibitions persisted in the U.S. well into the 20th century. Even in the early 1960s, when drugs like thalidomide caused severe birth defects and a rubella outbreak threatened fetal health, abortion remained illegal. Public health crises, combined with shifting attitudes toward privacy and women’s autonomy, eventually spurred some states to liberalize abortion laws.

The contemporary debate is polarized between “pro-life” and “pro-choice” positions. Pro-life advocates view the fetus as a human life and see abortion as morally equivalent to murder, citing religious and legal arguments to restrict or ban the practice. They point to rising abortion rates as evidence of moral decay. Pro-choice advocates counter that women—not governments—should decide whether to bear children. They argue that bans do not stop abortions but drive them underground, endangering women’s lives. Legal access, they contend, is especially vital for victims of rape or incest, and for safeguarding women’s physical and mental health.

Sociologist Kristin Luker, in Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood, offers a deeper explanation for this divide. Based on decades of research and hundreds of interviews in California, she finds that pro-life and pro-choice activists inhabit fundamentally different moral and social worlds. Pro-life women embrace a traditional gender order: men belong to the public sphere of work, while women belong to the private sphere of home and motherhood. They see children as the ultimate beneficiaries of this arrangement, with mothers providing full-time care and fathers offering protection. Pro-choice women reject separate spheres, viewing motherhood as a voluntary choice and family roles as potential barriers to equality.

Luker concludes that activism on either side reflects the concrete realities of women’s lives—their education, income, occupations, and family structures. The abortion debate is thus more than a legal or medical controversy; it is a clash of worldviews about gender, sexuality, family, and the meaning of motherhood itself.

The earliest controversies about the relationship between photography and art centered on whether photography’s fidelity to appearances and dependence on a machine allowed it to be a fine art as distinct from merely a practical art. Throughout the nineteenth century, the defense of photography was identical with the struggle to establish it as a fine art. Against the charge that photography was a soulless, mechanical copying of reality, photographers asserted that it was instead a privileged way of seeing, a revolt against commonplace vision, and no less worthy an art than painting.

Ironically, now that photography is securely established as a fine art, many photographers find it pretentious or irrelevant to label it as such. Serious photographers variously claim to be finding, recording, impartially observing, witnessing events, exploring themselves—anything but making works of art. In the nineteenth century, photography’s association with the real world placed it in an ambivalent relation to art; late in the twentieth century, an ambivalent relation exists because of the Modernist heritage in art. That important photographers are no longer willing to debate whether photography is or is not a fine art, except to proclaim that their own work is not involved with art, shows the extent to which they simply take for granted the concept of art imposed by the triumph of Modernism: the better the art, the more subversive it is of the traditional aims of art.

Photographers’ disclaimers of any interest in making art tell us more about the harried status of the contemporary notion of art than about whether photography is or is not art. For example, those photographers who suppose that, by taking pictures, they are getting away from the pretensions of art as exemplified by painting remind us of those Abstract Expressionist painters who imagined they were getting away from the intellectual austerity of classical Modernist painting by concentrating on the physical act of painting. Much of photography’s prestige today derives from the convergence of its aims with those of recent art, particularly with the dismissal of abstract art implicit in the phenomenon of Pop painting during the 1960’s. Appreciating photographs is a relief to sensibilities tired of the mental exertions demanded by abstract art. Classical Modernist painting—that is, abstract art as developed in different ways by Picasso, Kandinsky, and Matiss—presupposes highly developed skills of looking and a familiarity with other paintings and the history of art. Photography, like Pop painting, reassures viewers that art is not hard; photography seems to be more about its subjects than about art.

Photography, however, has developed all the anxieties and self-consciousness of a classic Modernist art. Many professionals privately have begun to worry that the promotion of photography as an activity subversive of the traditional pretensions of art has gone so far that the public will forget that photography is a distinctive and exalted activity—in short, an art.

The term diaspora once evoked images of exile and dispossession: communities forcibly scattered by war, slavery, or persecution, who nursed a nostalgic longing for a homeland they could not return to. Jewish and Armenian histories furnished the archetypes, where the trauma of displacement forged a collective identity defined by loss. Yet in an era of accelerating globalization, the meaning of diaspora has expanded and blurred. Today, millions migrate voluntarily for education, work, or lifestyle, maintaining ties to ancestral homelands while cultivating attachments to host countries. This new diaspora is less a wound than a strategy—an adaptive mode of living in multiple worlds.

Paradoxically, the very technologies that ease migration complicate the idea of belonging. Cheap flights and instant communication allow the Nigerian entrepreneur in London or the Filipino nurse in Dubai to remain socially, culturally, and even politically active in their countries of origin. But such constant connectivity can also sharpen awareness of exclusion. The second-generation immigrant, raised in Toronto yet told to “go back where you came from,” discovers that a passport does not guarantee acceptance. Similarly, the parent who dutifully remits money home may still be judged by relatives for being “too Western,” revealing that belonging is negotiated, not merely inherited.

States, for their part, exploit diaspora networks for economic and diplomatic gain. India courts its overseas citizens for investment and soft power, while China seeks to harness the knowledge and capital of its global Chinese communities. These policies frame diaspora as a resource rather than a tragedy, yet they also create hierarchies of loyalty. A government that celebrates its expatriates’ remittances may simultaneously question their political rights, offering economic incentives while withholding full citizenship. Such ambivalence exposes a deeper tension: diasporas are valued for what they send back, but mistrusted for the hybrid identities they embody.

The lived reality of diaspora thus unsettles neat categories of nationhood. If identity is rooted in place, what happens when people inhabit several places at once? Traditional nationalism assumes a singular allegiance to a bounded territory, but diasporic life normalizes overlapping affiliations. A Ghanaian-American may cheer for both nations’ soccer teams, donate to multiple political causes, and speak a hybrid language without feeling divided. For some, this flexibility signals the erosion of authentic belonging; for others, it represents a richer, more cosmopolitan selfhood.

Still, the privileges of global mobility are unevenly distributed. Highly skilled professionals may celebrate their “global citizen” status, but refugees and undocumented workers experience diaspora as precarity, not empowerment. The romanticized discourse of transnationalism can obscure the structural inequalities—visa regimes, racial discrimination, economic stratification—that determine whose multiple attachments are celebrated and whose are criminalized. In this sense, diaspora is not merely a sociological condition but a political lens, revealing how borders are selectively porous.

In the end, diaspora is neither purely loss nor pure liberation. It is an elastic category, stretching across forced exile and voluntary migration, pride and ambivalence, opportunity and constraint. Its significance lies less in where people come from than in how they negotiate the shifting boundaries of home, identity, and power.

Nature has all along yielded her flesh to humans. First, we took nature's materials as food, fibers, and shelter. Then we learned to extract raw materials from her biosphere to create our own new synthetic materials. Now Bios is yielding us her mind-we are taking her logic.

Clockwork logic-the logic of the machines-will only build simple contraptions. Truly complex systems such as a cell, a meadow, an economy, or a brain (natural or artificial) require a rigorous nontechnological logic. We now see that no logic except bio-logic can assemble a thinking device, or even a workable system of any magnitude.

It is an astounding discovery that one can extract the logic of Bios out of biology and have something useful. Although many philosophers in the past have suspected one could abstract the laws of life and apply them elsewhere, it wasn't until the complexity of computers and human-made systems became as complicated as living things, that it was possible to prove this. It's eerie how much of life can be transferred. So far, some of the traits of the living that have successfully been transported to mechanical systems are: self-replication, self-governance, limited self-repair, mild evolution, and partial learning.

We have reason to believe yet more can be synthesized and made into something new. Yet at the same time that the logic of Bios is being imported into machines, the logic of Technos is being imported into life. The root of bioengineering is the desire to control the organic long enough to improve it. Domesticated plants and animals are examples of technos-logic applied to life. The wild aromatic root of the Queen Anne's lace weed has been fine-tuned over generations by selective herb gatherers until it has evolved into a sweet carrot of the garden; the udders of wild bovines have been selectively enlarged in a "unnatural" way to satisfy humans rather than calves. Milk cows and carrots, therefore, are human inventions as much as steam engines and gunpowder are. But milk cows and carrots are more indicative of the kind of inventions humans will make in the future: products that are grown rather than manufactured.

Genetic engineering is precisely what cattle breeders do when they select better strains of Holsteins, only bioengineers employ more precise and powerful control. While carrot and milk cow breeders had to rely on diffuse organic evolution, modern genetic engineers can use directed artificial evolution-purposeful design-which greatly accelerates improvements.

The overlap of the mechanical and the lifelike increases year by year. Part of this bionic convergence is a matter of words. The meanings of "mechanical" and "life" are both stretching until all complicated things can be perceived as machines, and all self-sustaining machines can be perceived as alive. Yet beyond semantics, two concrete trends are happening: (1) Human-made things are behaving more lifelike, and (2) Life is becoming more engineered. The apparent veil between the organic and the manufactured has crumpled to reveal that the two really are, and have always been, of one being.

Interpretations of the Indian past . . . were inevitably influenced by colonial concerns and interests, and also by prevalent European ideas about history, civilization and the Orient. Orientalist scholars studied the languages and the texts with selected Indian scholars, but made little attempt to understand the world-view of those who were teaching them. The readings therefore are something of a disjuncture from the traditional ways of looking at the Indian past. . . .

Orientalism [which we can understand broadly as Western perceptions of the Orient] fuelled the fantasy and the freedom sought by European Romanticism, particularly in its opposition to the more disciplined Neo-Classicism. The cultures of Asia were seen as bringing a new Romantic paradigm. Another Renaissance was anticipated through an acquaintance with the Orient, and this, it was thought, would be different from the earlier Greek Renaissance. It was believed that this Oriental Renaissance would liberate European thought and literature from the increasing focus on discipline and rationality that had followed from the earlier Enlightenment. . . . [The Romantic English poets, Wordsworth and Coleridge,] were apprehensive of the changes introduced by industrialization and turned to nature and to fantasies of the Orient.

However, this enthusiasm gradually changed, to conform with the emphasis later in the nineteenth century on the innate superiority of European civilization. Oriental civilizations were now seen as having once been great but currently in decline. The various phases of Orientalism tended to mould European understanding of the Indian past into a particular pattern. . . . There was an attempt to formulate Indian culture as uniform, such formulations being derived from texts that were given priority. The so-called 'discovery' of India was largely through selected literature in Sanskrit. This interpretation tended to emphasize non-historical aspects of Indian culture, for example the idea of an unchanging continuity of society and religion over 3,000 years; and it was believed that the Indian pattern of life was so concerned with metaphysics and the subtleties of religious belief that little attention was given to the more tangible aspects.

German Romanticism endorsed this image of India, and it became the mystic land for many Europeans, where even the most ordinary actions were imbued with a complex symbolism. This was the genesis of the idea of the spiritual east, and also, incidentally, the refuge of European intellectuals seeking to distance themselves from the changing patterns of their own societies. A dichotomy in values was maintained, Indian values being described as 'spiritual' and European values as 'materialistic', with little attempt to juxtapose these values with the reality of Indian society. This theme has been even more firmly endorsed by a section of Indian opinion during the last hundred years.

It was a consolation to the Indian intelligentsia for its perceived inability to counter the technical superiority of the west, a superiority viewed as having enabled Europe to colonize Asia and other parts of the world. At the height of anti-colonial nationalism it acted as a salve for having been made a colony of Britain.

Sociologists working in the Chicago School tradition have focused on how rapid or dramatic social change causes increases in crime. Just as Durkheim, Marx, Toennies, and other European sociologists thought that the rapid changes produced by industrialization and urbanization produced crime and disorder, so too did the Chicago School theorists. The location of the University of Chicago provided an excellent opportunity for Park, Burgess, and McKenzie to study the social ecology of the city. Shaw and McKay found . . . that areas of the city characterized by high levels of social disorganization had higher rates of crime and delinquency.

In the 1920s and 1930s Chicago, like many American cities, experienced considerable immigration. Rapid population growth is a disorganizing influence, but growth resulting from in-migration of very different people is particularly disruptive. Chicago's in-migrants were both native-born whites and blacks from rural areas and small towns, and foreign immigrants. The heavy industry of cities like Chicago, Detroit, and Pittsburgh drew those seeking opportunities and new lives. Farmers and villagers from America's hinterland, like their European cousins of whom Durkheim wrote, moved in large numbers into cities. At the start of the twentieth century, Americans were predominately a rural population, but by the century's mid-point most lived in urban areas. The social lives of these migrants, as well as those already living in the cities they moved to, were disrupted by the differences between urban and rural life. According to social disorganization theory, until the social ecology of the ''new place'' can adapt, this rapid change is a criminogenic influence. But most rural migrants, and even many of the foreign immigrants to the city, looked like and eventually spoke the same language as the natives of the cities into which they moved. These similarities allowed for more rapid social integration for these migrants than was the case for African Americans and most foreign immigrants.