What Happened To Alienation? It Used To Be A Staple Of Literature

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

Land of the Lawless The deck: How power in America has turned the rule of law into a mere myth. Lapham’s Quarterly. Ralph Nader

Good news: tax gap down, tax take up

The Guardian

HMRC never settles disputes for any less than the amount of tax we believe is due under the law (Report, 27 March). We subject large businesses to an exceptional level of scrutiny, actively investigating more than half of the UK's largest businesses at any one time. Last year alone HMRC secured £8bn in additional funding ...

   

EXCLUSIVE: IT Dept probes 50 secret bank accounts of Nirav Modi ...

Business Today-28 Mar. 2018

The Income Tax (I-T) Department has traced nearly 50 secret bank accounts of Nirav Modi and Mehul Choksi, outside India. These bank accounts are located at London, Hong Kong, UAE, Morocco and few tax haven countries. Senior official of I-T department confirmed Indiatoday.in that around 50 secret bank accounts ...

Can behavioural economics really change habits?

INTHEBLACK

The Australian Taxation Office (ATO) is using insights from behavioural economics to encourage people to lodge paperwork on time, accurately report income and deductions, pay tax debts and move to paperless taxtransactions. “We ask how we can make it as easy as possible for people to do the thing we want them to do ...

States that are passing laws to govern “smart contracts” have no idea what they’re doing MIT Technology Review 

A Chinese space station is expected to crash on Earth around April 1. Where exactly, no one is quite sure.

↩︎ Vox

Can Anyone Actually Teach Creative Writing?

Maybe, but not this way: “Increasingly, English departments are assigning intro Creative Writing courses to grad students, who receive minimal training and may be required to use a standard syllabus. The standard syllabi are designed to be simple, so that anybody can be plugged in to the class at the last minute and run it smoothly. They’re designed by a well-intentioned person in the department who needs to endure several rounds of approvals from higher-ranking faculty, at least some of whom don’t believe Creative Writing is a serious academic pursuit. A system like this is bound to produce stale, myopic syllabi that offer as limited a view of what it means to be a writer as possible.”

Columbia Journalism Review: “Alleging “censorship,” Wall Street Journal staffers circulated a letter yesterday decrying the suppression of a story detailing uneven gains in the decade since the financial crisis. “This week a senior editor at the Wall Street Journal attempted to take a graphic offline because the facts it contained were not politically palatable,” the letter read. “When that failed, it was ‘de-surfaced,’ or, in other terms, taken off the front page and links were removed to it from as many places as possible. After an early flurry of traffic, views plummeted. This is censorship and it is beneath the standards of the Wall Street Journal. It isn’t the first time, either.” ProPublica reporter Jesse Eisinger tweeted that he heard the senior editor referenced was Journal EIC Gerard Baker, a detail that several staffers later supported. Baker has faced criticism in the past for taking a soft approach to coverage of the Trump administration, and Politico’s Michael Calderone and Jason Schwartz report that his problem with the story and its accompanying graphics was that they were “too liberal.” [h/t/ Pete Weiss]

Political arguments inside Google have gotten so bad that 100 employees formed a group to stop cyberbullying Business Insider 

Russian Embassy in UK files official explanation demand after Aeroflot plane search RT (Kevin W). They should figure out how to arm the planes with tear gas canisters going forward….

Russia expels more British diplomats over spy poisoning row Guardian

They want Corbyn dead! He is an obstacle to War. Defend Democracy. Not an exaggeration

The author is Cecilia Heyes, and the subtitle is The Cultural Evolution of Thinking, published by Harvard/Belknap.  It is not always a transparent read, but this is an important book and likely the most thoughtful of the year in the social sciences. 

Via  Amazon River  Czech out also  a Heyes lecture on related ideas, also click through to part II.

From the book’s home page:

…adult humans have impressive pieces of cognitive

 equipment. In her framing, however, these cognitive gadgets are not instincts programmed in the genes but are constructed in the course of childhood through social interaction. Cognitive gadgets are products of cultural evolution, rather than genetic evolution. At birth, the minds of human babies are only subtly different from the minds of newborn chimpanzees. We are friendlier, our attention is drawn to different things, and we have a capacity to learn and remember that outstrips the abilities of newborn chimpanzees. Yet when these subtle differences are exposed to culture-soaked human environments, they have enormous effects. They enable us to upload distinctively human ways of thinking from the social world around us.

Publishing: Adapt Or Die

Sharmaine Lovegrove, the woman who opened the first English-language bookstore in Berlin when she couldn’t get any hold in London, returned to Britain 20 years later – only to be met with a depressing reality. “It felt like we had gone backwards. The publishing industry has utterly failed to tell the stories of people across society, having told talented, diverse writers for decades that there was no space for them, and expecting a largely white, predominantly middle-class staff to be pardoned for not ‘being woke enough’ because of their ‘privilege,’ which only now seems to embarrass them.” So, of course, she’s doing something about it.

What Happened To Alienation? It Used To Be A Staple Of Literature

After the Second World War, alienation came to betoken a near-universal spiritual and psychological malaise. Existentialist philosophers such as Jean-Paul Sartre used it to describe a fundamental aspect of the human condition. Novelists such as Albert Camus, the author of The Stranger (1942), demonstrated its effects in the indifferent numbness of casual violence. By the time J D Salinger released his novel The Catcher in the Rye (1951), a chronicle of adolescent estrangement featuring the anti-hero Holden Caulfield, alienation was invoked to explain everything from juvenile delinquency and galloping divorce rates to voter apathy and substance abuse. The term was taken to define the fundamental pathology of modern life.

Can Writers Who Wrote Beautifully While Drunk And Who Stop Drinking Still Write Well?

Ask David Foster Wallace – or Leslie Jamison: “I’d been afraid that meetings were basically lobotomies served alongside coffee-flavored water and Chips Ahoy!; afraid that even if sobriety could offer stability and sincerity and maybe even salvation, it could never be a story. ButInfinite Jest knew better. It wasn’t that the novel’s brilliance survived the deadening force of sobriety. Its brilliance depended on what sobriety had wrought.”