Book reviews
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On college, chance, and Elif Batuman’s ‘The Idiot.’
In Batuman’s ‘The Idiot’ — as in all our lives — seemingly inconsequential moments shape the future.
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On photographs not taken.
Most likely, you are being watched. If you spend any time in urban areas, you surely pass by numerous surveillance cameras each day. Recent advances in computational image analysis allow the movements of every person in a crowd to be tracked. Big Brother has hungry, hungry eyes. Worse, you’re probably collaborating with the invasion of…
4th Amendment, Barry Friedman, big brother, cell phones, cops, data mining, evidence, exclusionary rule, fire hydrants, Fourth Amendment, government search, GPS, incarceration, internet service providers, ISP, mass incarceration, photography, police, policing, Policing Without Permission, privacy, reasonable suspicion, search and seizure, smartphones, snooping, unreasonable search, Unwarranted
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On isolation.
When a government tortures people on *your* behalf, do you share the blame? If so, what should you do?
addiction, ADX, Bruce Alexander, cetacean communication, confinement, constitutional rights, deprivation tank, dolphin, dolphin communication, dolphin hand job, drug abuse, false confessions, Harry Harlow, Hell is a Very Small Place, innocent until proven guilty, isolation tank, Jeanne Theoharis, Jesse Wilson, John C. Lilly, Juan Mendez, laboratory animals, LSD, Margaret Howe, memory, morphine, opiates, Rat Park, Ray McGovern, Richard Feynman, sensory deprivation, social isolation, solitary, solitary confinement, solitary watch, stimulus deprivation, sunlight, supermax, Syed Fahad Hashmi, teaching dolphins to talk, terrorism, torture, Torture of a Student, Voices from Solitary Confinement
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On the Bush years, from the perspective of the 45th.
The great thing about the horrific Bush years is that now we know what to expect.
45, Ashcroft, ass-hat, Bush, Bush Chronicles, Donald Trump, Dubya, electoral college, Eliot Weinberger, George W. Bush, Ghostbusters II, Mark Danner, politics, Republicans, stealing representation, stealing votes, terrorism, Trump, U.S., United States, W, war on terror, What Could He Do, What Happened Here
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On perception and learning.
We adults can’t fix the world until we learn from children that it’s okay to be wrong.
analytical philosophy, animal cognition, automated image analysis, Brendan Wenzel, Bring me a slab, childhood development, children’s books, chimpanzee learning, computer learning to find cats, computer science, data clustering, David Lancy, falsifiable theories, Google, human development, identification, language acquisition, learning, Liu Cixin, Ludwig Wittgenstein, mental filters, neural networks, New York Times, parenting, perception, personhood, Philosophical Investigations, principal component analysis, Quoc Le, science, scientific method, Slab!, Stanford, teaching, The Anthropology of Childhood, The Three-Body Problem, They All Saw a Cat, unsupervised learning, Upshot, what is a cat, what is red, Youtube cat videos
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On the history of time travel.
Sometimes we have to prove ourselves wrong.
Back to the Future, best time travel movies, Chronocriminales, closed timelike curve, free will, Godel, James Gleick, John Hospers, Kurt Godel, Looper, Nacho Vigalondo, Oedipus, paradox, philosophy, Stephen Hawkins, Terminator, time travel, time travel films, time travel paradox, Time Travel: A History, Timecrimes, Trump, who built the pyramids
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On the future of sex (& Emily Witt’s ‘Future Sex’).
Do-it-yourself, artistic, activist, maker culture … or sexual experimentation & psychedelic drugs? I know which future I’d prefer.
Breakfast of Champions, Burning Man, desensitization, Emily Witt, erotic art, extramarital daliance with consent, feminism, future sex, Gerewol, human evolution, human planet, hyperbolic optimism, James Joyce, Kilgore Trout, Kurt Vonnegut, Lydia Cacho, penis bone, polyamory, porn culture, pornography, responsible hedonism, Rodin, sexuality, Slavery Inc, Ulysses
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On literature as a weapon for social change.
Reading Sergio De La Pava’s “A Naked Singularity” will make you want to change the world. If enough of us do, maybe we’ll succeed.
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On fish (and their similarities to us).
We so often denigrate the capacities of presumed others. It’s much harder to exploit those whom you know feel.
animal cognition, animal learning, animal models of human psychiatric disorders, Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are, brain science, Descartes was wrong, differences between life in water and on land, dogs, fish, fish feel pain, Frans de Waal, Jonathan Balcombe, leopard gecko, mistreatment of animals, neural plasticity, Project Prakash, racism, Sean Carroll, The Big Picture, the evolution of intelligence, the suffering of others, What a Fish Knows
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On Poetry: Reginald Dwayne Betts’s “Bastards of the Reagan Era.”
Betts’s stark poetry documents our nation failing to offer sincere “correction” at its correctional facilities.
Frank Brown Cloud 