My favorite magician, by far.

This is what Brown does best: he takes an effect from the mentalism repertoire and generates from it an escalating series of climaxes that forces you to rethink everything you’ve just seen. Rather than diminish the mystery, Brown’s revelation of his ostensible methods reasserts and deepens it. He has always maintained that he neither has nor believes in any kind of psychic power, and his emphasis on manipulating people with techniques from the outer frontiers of psychology gives an audience too sophisticated to believe in the paranormal something scientific-seeming to hold on to. Often, the explanations end up being even more perplexing than the feat itself. Whether one believes that he’s actually doing what he claims or that he’s simply cloaking sleight of hand and the like in brilliant theatrics, he seems to be drawing back the curtain and offering a glimpse into some uncanny realm. As Brown once told me, “People feel that they understand something about what I’m up to but not everything, which satisfies their rational side but leaves room for something more playful and subterranean.”

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/10/07/how-derren-brown-remade-mind-reading-for-skeptics

How well do you understand Republicans’ beliefs on various issues? How about Democrats’ beliefs? This short quiz is a good way to find out!

Do you have a yawning Perception Gap, or are you in sync with the American public? Our study explores how Americans tend to have a distorted understanding of people on the other side of the aisle, what causes it, and why it matters.

https://perceptiongap.us/the-perception-gap-quiz/

A theory for how to win the 2020 presidential election has quickly become conventional wisdom among Democratic campaign strategists and many prominent pundits. It goes like this: The country has become so polarized that swing voters barely exist anymore. Elections are now decided by which side better manages to mobilize its base. So Democrats need to stop worrying about winning over moderates—and confidently move to the left.

Proponents of this “progressive mobilization theory” can point to a few important pieces of evidence. Plenty of liberal policies, for instance, are popular with voters across the political spectrum. As I’ve argued in the past, this makes it possible for Democratic presidential candidates to develop an ambitious agenda on issues from health care to gun control without jeopardizing their chances of ousting Donald Trump.

But the theory is nonetheless wrong in three crucial respects. A significant number of swing voters do exist, and in close-run elections, they matter. While Democrats do need to mobilize their base to win in 2020, it is far from obvious that moving to the left will help them do so. And to cure America of Trumpism, they need to persuade voters who aren’t already consistent progressives to turn their back on his brand of politics.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/10/problem-mobilization-theory/599236/

Review of James C Scott’s Against the Grain (Scott is the author of Seeing Like a State):

Sumer just before the dawn of civilization was in many ways an idyllic place. Forget your vision of stark Middle Eastern deserts; in the Paleolithic the area where the first cities would one day arise was a great swamp. Foragers roamed the landscape, eating everything from fishes to gazelles to shellfish to wild plants. There was more than enough for everyone; “as Jack Harlan famously showed, one could gather enough [wild] grain with a flint sickle in three weeks to feed a family for a year”. Foragers alternated short periods of frenetic activity (eg catching as many gazelles as possible during their weeklong migration through the area) with longer periods of rest and recreation.

Intensive cereal cultivation is miserable work requiring constant toil with little guarantee of a good harvest. Why would anyone leave this wilderness Eden for a 100% wheat diet?

https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/10/14/book-review-against-the-grain/

Many of the recent articles in the popular media on hunter-gatherer societies have failed to represent these societies accurately. The picture you get from reading articles in publications like the New Yorker and the Guardian, or from anthropologists like Douglas Fry and James Suzman, is often quite different from what a deep dive into the ethnographic record reveals. The excessive reliance on a single paper published 50 years ago has contributed to some severe misconceptions about hunter-gatherer ‘affluence,’ and their relative freedom from scarcity and disease. There is a tendency to downplay the benefits of modern medicine, institutions, and infrastructure – as well as the very real costs of not having access to them – in these discussions. And, despite what some may wish to believe, the hunter-gatherer way of life is not a solution to the social problems found in modern nation states.

https://quillette.com/2017/12/16/romanticizing-hunter-gatherer/

The danger of such extreme right-wing partisanship is its endless capacity to turn standard political grudges—against Democrats’ hypocrisy on executive overreach, for example, or the media’s liberal bias—into an apologia for more egregious rule-breaking. Partisan Republicans accuse their opponents of doing the same thing, and offer examples to prove it. But just as the right has played an outsized role in driving partisanship generally (a dynamic termed “asymmetric polarisation”), so its rule-breaking is more conspicuous and arguably worse. The Democrats’ record on gerrymandering is dire; Republican attempts to suppress non-white voter turnout are a terrible stain. They also hint at a gloomily defensive apprehension, which has no counterpart on the ascendant left, that a Republican Party backed by a shrinking minority of mostly white voters cannot win power by fair means.

It seems many Republican voters have already settled on that conclusion—though they would put it slightly differently. Shortly after Mr Trump’s election, two in three agreed with the statement that America needed a leader “willing to break some rules if that’s what it takes to set things right.” Mr Trump’s current standing with his party suggests even more would agree with it now. When articles of impeachment against Mr Trump are presented to them, Republican senators will essentially be asked whether they do, too. Their answer will decide more than the president’s fate. It will determine whether theirs is now the party of rule-breaking.

https://www.economist.com/united-states/2019/10/10/institutional-conservatives-would-condemn-donald-trump

This is pretty cool to read! I may make a practice of going through this once a year. “A number of significant scientific events occurred in 2018…”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_in_science

I desperately wish more people would realize how sensitive we all are to noise. It’s hard to imagine that anyone who thought about the impact of noise on themselves and others would choose to use a leaf-blower, for example.

Experts say your body does not adapt to noise. Large-scale studies show that if the din keeps up—over days, months, years—noise exposure increases your risk of high blood pressure, coronary heart disease, and heart attacks, as well as strokes, diabetes, dementia, and depression. Children suffer not only physically—18 months after a new airport opened in Munich, the blood pressure and stress-hormone levels of neighboring children soared—but also behaviorally and cognitively. A landmark study published in 1975 found that the reading scores of sixth graders whose classroom faced a clattering subway track lagged nearly a year behind those of students in quieter classrooms—a difference that disappeared once soundproofing materials were installed. Noise might also make us mean: A 1969 study suggested that test subjects exposed to noise, even the gentle fuzz of white noise, become more aggressive and more eager to zap fellow subjects with electric shocks.

Even when not intentionally deployed for harm, the sound of drilling, barking, building, crying, singing, clomping, dancing, piano practicing, lawn mowing, and generator running becomes, to those exposed, a source of severe anguish that is entirely at odds with our cavalier attitude toward noise. “It feels like it’s eating at your body,” a man plagued by a rattling boiler told a reporter. A woman who was being accosted on all sides by incessant honking told me, “The noise had literally pushed me to a level of feeling suicidal.” For those grappling with it, noise is “chaos,” “torture,” “unbearable,” “nauseating,” “depressing and nerve-racking,” “absolute hell,” and “an ice pick to the brain.” “If you didn’t know they were talking about noise, you might think they were describing some sort of assault,” Erica Walker, an environmental-health researcher at Boston University, has said. This has spurred scientists, physicians, activists, public officials, and, albeit less in the United States, lawmakers to join in the quest for quiet, which is far more elusive than it may seem. “Quiet places,” says the acoustic ecologist Gordon Hempton, “have been on the road to extinction at a rate that far exceeds the extinction of species.”

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/11/the-end-of-silence/598366/

There are broader lessons from this currency invention. Many policymakers regard the rise of online banking as a way to tackle illicit trade and money-laundering, because banking digitally leaves a trace. This should mean that digital economies are easier to police than cash-based ones. Some countries are even considering banning paper money entirely as a way to clean up their economies. Yet an understanding of how currency innovation works suggests these hopes are credulous: from remote islands to high-security prisons, money invention is informal, organic and – as Louisiana’s prisons show – can now be untraceable. The new digital “dot” currency is reportedly already being used to launder cash across national borders.

Despite the damage illicit prison markets can do, one ex-convict in his 30s defended the underground prison economy to me: “I’ve got friends inside. This is how they support their families.” He said most prisoners have limited chance to improve their lot. “So they sell drugs, they run tickets and they gamble; this is how they make their money.” Veterans who have spent decades in Louisiana’s prisons defend their economy too, insisting that underground exchanges are a way to keep life inside the prison calm.Simple trades – haircuts, pecans, books, shirt pressing and even tattoos – that were once made using tobacco have shifted to alternative currencies including coffee, packets of noodles and even tins of mackerel. They are a way to make the ultra-long Louisiana sentences a little easier to bear.

For those concerned about the future, the hidden economies of the Louisiana prison system offer a vital lesson. It stems from the power of the informal economy in enabling a society to recover from a shock, and the extraordinary levels of effort and innovation that people will use to establish a trading system if theirs is damaged or destroyed.

Louisiana’s prisons have parallel economies. There is the illicit drug economy that runs on its untraceable dot currency, and alongside it a more innocent marketplace where basic necessities are mediated with some agreed item – currently coffee – acting as a currency. Trades in both economies work because of the most basic law of prison economics – that a prison is a place defined by unsatisfied needs, tastes and demands. Both economies are self-built, organic and highly innovative. Both show that a currency, the provision of which can seem like the ultimate role of the state in an economy, can be established completely informally. Prisons show that the human urge to trade and exchange is impossible to repress, and that solutions to future challenges are as likely to come from informal markets as formal ones.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/aug/30/prison-economy-informal-markets-alternative-currencies