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GOATReads: Science

India can't wish away coal - but can it be made cleaner?

India has always taken a hard position on coal, arguing that it is crucial for its energy security and developmental needs. But energy experts and environment campaigners are increasingly saying it should at least try to decarbonise or curtail emissions from coal-fired power plants, if it can't be phased out altogether. "You can't wish away coal," Ashok Lavasa, a former secretary of union ministries of finance, and environment, forest and climate change, said at an event on 1 July. "The question is, if coal is king, then can it be a benevolent king?" This signals to the fact that, realistically speaking, coal - albeit cleaner coal - may remain the primary power source of energy in India, despite years of international climate talks asking for the highly polluting fossil fuel to be phased out entirely. But why has India - the world's third largest carbon emitter - decided to stick to coal in the first place? After all, the country has international obligations to significantly cut its carbon emissions, along with its own target to bring down the levels to net zero by 2070. A part of the answer lies in the rising power demands of the country. India's electricity demand has grown by more than 9% between 2021 and 2025, surpassing a previous prediction of 6.6% - and it is now forecasted to double by 2030. Coal-fired power plants have generated more than 70% of the total electricity supply every year since the early 2000s - a figure that remains unchanged. But the environmental cost of this reliance on coal is huge. Estimates suggest that India's electricity generation alone accounts for more than 40% of the annual carbon emissions – and nearly three-quarters of that electricity comes from coal-burning. The country has made progress in meeting its renewable energy targets - it contributes 46% of India's total installed capacity - but renewable sources have limitations. They generate electricity when the sun is up and the wind is blowing. Even at daytime, experts say, supply from renewables can fluctuate, whereas thermal plants remain a constant source of electricity and are able to cater to peak demand in the evenings and at nighttime. What's more, India's energy storage capacity - or the ability to store excess electricity from renewables at daytime - has not been able to keep pace with the expansion of resources. "This means that there is no other option [other than thermal energy for constant supply] unless and until we have large-scale storage quantities in the system," said Rajiv Porwal, director with Grid India, the grid controller of India under the ministry of power, speaking at the 1July event, organised by the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE). Experts say constant supply from thermal plants is crucial for the stability of the grid, or the network of towers and transmission lines that carries electricity from power plants to consumers. "Any large mismatch of demand and supply will destabilise the grid and that can mean power-cuts and blackouts, similar to what we recently saw in Spain," says Anjan Kumar Sinha, an independent power sector expert. With all these factors at play, India is looking to reduce emissions from coal-fired power plants, instead of phasing out coal completely. A recent report by the CSE said that decarbonisation from coal-based thermal plants alone can cut down the country's greenhouse gas emissions by 30%. This is particularly significant given the country's commitment to reduce emissions intensity (carbon emissions produced per unit of a country's economic output) by 45% by 2030 under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. But there are challenges. The common problem thermal plants face is that they must keep running at least at 55% capacity even at daytime, despite having alternate renewable sources like wind and solar power to rely on. That's because operators cannot ramp up capacity to the fullest at short notice, particularly during the peak hours of evening when supply from renewables is down. Experts say there is an urgent need to make thermal plants more efficient so they can run at a lower capacity. "How low can we go [to bring down the minimum running level threshold] is the question," said Ramesh Veeravalli, a member with India's Central Electricity Regulatory Commission, speaking at the event. "Technically it is possible." Another way to improve efficiency of plants is to adapt technologies that capture carbon dioxide emissions to keep them from escaping into the atmosphere But some say this has produced limited results, with one estimate by the World Resources Institute saying the technology at present captures only about 0.1% of the global emissions. A third suggestion is to burn agricultural residue in the place of coal in thermal plants. "This idea has led to a substantial reduction in coal usage in thermal power plants in Delhi and surrounding cities," said Parth Kumar, a programme manager with CSE that has suggested methods of reducing emissions in its recent report. "But other parts of the country are yet to adopt this seriously, even though regulation requires them to," he added. Experts say that reducing emissions from coal-fired power plants would need larger systemic changes, involving huge costs. But how much that cost would come down to - and who would bear it - are tough questions with no immediate answers. Source of the article

GOATReads: Psychology

The fascinating science of pain – and why everyone feels it differently

Do you scream when you stub your toe? Could you play a grand final with a shattered jaw, or work all day as your belly fills with blood? When it comes to suffering, perspective is everything Some say it was John Sattler’s own fault. The lead-up to the 1970 rugby league grand final had been tense; the team he led, the South Sydney Rabbitohs, had lost the 1969 final. Here was an opportunity for redemption. The Rabbitohs were not about to let glory slip through their fingers again. Soon after the starting whistle, Sattler went in for a tackle. As he untangled – in a move not uncommon in the sport at the time – he gave the Manly Sea Eagles’ John Bucknall a clip on the ear. Seconds later – just three minutes into the game – the towering second rower returned favour with force: Bucknall’s mighty right arm bore down on Sattler, breaking his jaw in three places and tearing his skin; he would later need eight stitches. When his teammate Bob McCarthy turned to check on him, he saw his captain spurting blood, his jaw hanging low. Forty years later Sattler would recall that moment. One thought raged in his shattered head: “I have never felt pain like this in my life.” But he played on. Tackling heaving muscular players as they advanced. Being tackled in turn, around the head, as he pushed forward. All the while he could feel his jaw in pieces. At half-time the Rabbitohs were leading. In the locker room, Sattler warned his teammates, “Don’t play me out of this grand final.” McCarthy told him, “Mate, you’ve got to go off.” He refused. “I’m staying.” Sattler played the whole game. The remaining 77 minutes. At the end, he gave a speech and ran a lap of honour. The Rabbitohs had won. The back page of the next day’s Sunday Mirror screamed “BROKEN JAW HERO”. A photograph of Sattler, his heavy green and red jersey rolled up to the elbows, the neck grubby with blood, his mangled swollen jaw, carried on the shoulders of teammates, has become one of Australian sport’s most well-known images. His grand final performance has been hailed as “the most famous show of playing through pain in Australian sporting history”. Sattler, inextricably linked to the jaw he ultimately had to have wired back together, for decades hence was lauded for his courage, celebrated as one of the toughest men to have played the game. Because John Sattler could withstand the pain. How can a person bitten by a shark calmly paddle their surfboard to safety, then later liken the sensation of the predator clamping down on their limb to the feeling of someone giving their arm “a shake”? How is it that a woman can have a cyst on her ovary burst, her abdomen steadily fill with blood, but continue working at her desk for six hours? Or that a soldier can have his legs blown off then direct his own emergency treatment? Each one of us feels pain. We all stub our toes, burn our fingers, knock our knees. And worse. The problem with living in just one mind and body is that we can never know whether our six out of 10 on the pain scale is the same as the patient in the chair next to us. About one in five adults experience chronic pain; it can be debilitating and patients have been historically dismissed, disrespected and under-treated. Acute pain is different; it’s short periods of pain usually associated with an injury, illness or tissue damage. Because all humans experience acute injury or illness, we each have a sense of our pain response. Many of us wonder, “Do I have a high pain threshold?” And we have each at some point been asked – by a doctor, by a nurse, by a teammate – “What’s your pain on a scale of one to 10?” The ability of some people to experience serious injury without appearing to feel serious pain has been fodder for legend and research for centuries. Withstanding pain has been heralded as heroism or a freakish anomaly. But what is happening in the body and mind of a person who does not seem to feel the pain they “should” be feeling. Do we all have the capacity to be one of these heroic freaks? And how did John Sattler play those 77 minutes? Questions like these rattled around the mind of Lorimer Moseley when he showed up at Sydney’s Royal North Shore hospital years ago as an undergraduate physiotherapy student. He wanted to interrogate a quip made by a neurology professor as he left the lecture theatre one day, that the worst injuries are often the least painful. So Moseley sat in the emergency room and watched people come in, recording their injuries and asking them how much they hurt. “And this guy came in with a hammer stuck in his neck – the curly bit had got in the back and was coming out the front and blood was pouring all down,” Moseley recalls. “But he was relaxed. He just walked in holding the hammer, relaxed. Totally fine.” Then the man turned around, hit his knee on a low table and began jumping up and down at the pain of the small knock. “And I think, ‘Whoa, what is happening there?’” The curious student ruled out drugs, alcohol, shock. He realised that the reason the man did not feel pain from his hammer injury was due to the very point of pain itself. “Pain is a feeling that motivates us to protect ourselves,” says Moseley, now the chair in physiotherapy and a professor of clinical neurosciences at the University of South Australia. “One of the beautiful things about pain is that it will motivate us to protect the body part that’s in danger, really anatomically specific – it can narrow it right down to a tiny little spot.” It is an evolutionary self-protection response that meant the man with the hammer in his neck did not appear to feel pain. To feel pain would not have aided his survival in that moment, Moseley says. Instead, fear is probably what impelled him to race to the emergency ward. “So these people on the battlefield, their arm gets ripped off, they look for their arm, they pick it up, they walk to safety, no arm pain. Perfect. That is an extraordinarily bold and sophisticated protective system.” Prof Michael Nicholas is used to stories like these. “You can see it in probably every hospital ward. If you stay around long enough you’ll hear comments like ‘this person has more pain than they should have’ or ‘you might be surprised that they’re not in pain’,” he says. “What that highlights to me is the general tendency for all of us to think there should be a close relationship between a stimulus like an injury or a noxious event and the degree of pain the person feels. “In fact, that’s generally wrong. But it doesn’t stop us believing it.” The reason we get it wrong, Nicholas says, “is that we have a sort of mind-body problem”. Eastern medicine and philosophy has long recognised the interconnectedness of body and mind, and so too did the west in early civilisations. In ancient Greece the Algea, the gods of physical pain, were also gods associated with psychic pain – with grief and distress. But in the 1600s the French philosopher René Descartes set western thinking on a different course, asserting that the mind and body were separate entities. “In a lot of countries we tend to want to downplay any possible psychological influences and we want to say it’s all physical,” says Nicholas, a director at the University of Sydney’s Pain Management Research Institute. Being told that pain has a psychological component can be distressing, particularly for those who experience chronic pain. It can feel dismissive, a suggestion that the pain is not real. “When people come to see me, they’re often worried they’re being told it’s all in their head,” Nicholas says. “Of course pain is in your head. It’s in your brain. You know, it’s the brain that is where you get that experience … It’s never all physical.” This is true of people who tolerate acute pain. It’s never all physical. And it has little to do with heroism or freakishness. Sometime between 11am and 11.30am on 22 May 2024, as I sat at a big white conference table, before a screen of colleagues zooming into a meeting, a cyst on my right ovary exploded. I felt pain right away. With my right hand, I pressed hard into my lower stomach and breathed in and out slowly to ride through the feeling. Jesus, I thought. I shouldn’t have eaten so many Jols. I returned to my desk but still felt sore so went for a walk around the block to shake it off. I felt a little better, returned to my computer, popped in and out of smaller meetings, answered emails, edited articles, finished work at 5.30pm, then walked half an hour to my sister’s apartment and lay on her couch. While the pain was fairly strong I was still convinced an overconsumption of sugar-free sweets was responsible. Only when my sister called a helpline two hours later and a nurse told me to go to hospital did I relent. We arrived at emergency about 9pm, 10 hours after that first sharp twinge. Later in the night, as I climbed on to an examination bed, I froze. Pain sloshing around my abdomen violently halted my movement. As I stopped there silent, halfway to lying down, I saw the serious look on the doctor’s face. I realised that perhaps my report of my pain was an unreliable guide. She was looking for other clues. (I would later learn that medical staff use self-reported pain as only one of a few measures to assess a patient, others include observations of movement, the ability to talk, facial expressions and guarding.) It was the middle of the night before an MRI returned the findings that I had spent the day with what the doctor called “a belly full of blood”. The next day I had surgery. At my bedside an obstetric surgeon shook his head as he explained what was going on in my body. A burst cyst has a reputation for being very painful, he said. Why had I rated my pain as a six or seven? Didn’t it make more sense to give it a 10? I shrugged. I’d wanted to give myself some wriggle room. So why was my experience and report of pain so out of whack with the tissue damage my body experienced? “It actually starts with our judgments,” says Associate Prof Melissa Day, from the University of Queensland. “So it’s not what happens to us. It’s how we judge what happens to us.” In other words, if we give ourselves a convincing explanation for what we feel, an explanation that does not include danger or damage to our body – if we think it’s the Jols and it will pass – we are less likely to feel pain severely. We have a tendency to valorise those who do not complain of pain when they confront an acute injury. To say this is a tough person, a stoic person. But individual toughness or weakness is not what’s at play in pain responses, and the same person can have two entirely different reactions to pain-inducing events in different contexts. When Lorimer Moseley tried a heat pad pain test on himself, increasing the temperature on the pad on his hand and noting his rising pain levels, it took removing the pad from his skin to realise he had given himself a two-and-a-half-degree burn. “This happens to people who do a lot of pain research because you just get exposed and your brain doesn’t think it’s worth protecting you as much as it should,” he says. “But I put my hand in hot water to do the dishes – I’m hopeless.” Just five years ago the International Association for the Study of Pain revised its definition of pain. The new definition follows what is called a bio-psychosocial model, which recognises not just the biological causes of pain but the role of psychology and social context in creating, amplifying – or dulling – it. While this is the contemporary thinking about pain, says Nicholas: “Most people don’t use it. Most clinicians, unfortunately, even.” The biological causes are clearest. Pain tolerance, researchers speaking to Guardian Australia say, has some genetic component. Red-haired people, for example, Moseley says, have on average a different threshold at which their nerves are triggered by a change in temperature in a heat-based pain threshold test. Complex social factors play a substantial role: multiple studies have found that people from a lower socioeconomic status experience both more chronic pain and, in experimental pain tests, demonstrate lower acute pain thresholds. For all people, injury or tissue damage activates the brain’s warning system that creates pain. The associated stress can trigger a psycho-biological response that helps the hurt person get through it without being immobilised. “Short-term stress actually motivates us,” Day says. “Gets adrenaline pumping through our bodies, allows us to have natural endorphins to push through. There’s also endogenous opioids that our brain releases to have that short-term relief of pain.” The psychological elements are becoming more widely understood. “One thing we know is perhaps the strongest predictor of pain tolerance is how people think about pain,” Day says. “If we think ‘this is terrible, this is awful, it’s going to do me serious damage’ – those types of people will have lower tolerance.” This includes people who tend to be anxious or who catastrophise pain. The perception of the damage being done can have a substantial role. A violinist is more likely to report higher levels of pain when a pain stimulus is applied to their dominant playing hand than when their other hand is subjected to the same stimulus, Moseley says – because an injury to their dominant hand could end their career. Farmers are known to delay seeking treatment , he adds. “It might be that farmers expect that a part of being a farmer is to have pain. So [their brain] doesn’t urge them to do anything about it. Their expectation is: you have pain.” Our past experience of pain also plays a substantial role. Should I have another cyst explode, Moseley suggests I might feel more pain – I will have learned that this sensation signals serious damage and should not be ignored. Research suggests men generally have higher pain thresholds than women. Pain fluctuates for women at periods of hormonal change. Moseley says differences in sensitivity in immune systems and response to hormones plays a part. But so does “the way that they’re related to from birth”. “Nature versus nurture – you can’t really separate them,” Day says. “There’s a range of factors there in terms of learning histories about pain and how from a young age responses to pain are very much linked to gender as well – how parents respond to a son versus a daughter.” As psychologists working in pain, Day and Nicholas are interested in what behaviours might help people in pain tolerate or reduce the amount of pain they are experiencing. “The best coping techniques will be different for different individuals and will be different across different contexts” Day says. Nevertheless, for acute pain suppression – “I’m not thinking about this because I’ve got this goal I need to achieve” – can work well in the short term, says Day. (“Longer term, it rebounds.”) Emotional regulation strategies, meditation and learning how to calm the body can be effective. Working on beliefs about the pain and shifting attention away from it, says Nicholas, fall under individual control. “If you can control those factors you will have a better response to pain,” Day says. An individual’s sensitivity to reward and punishment plays a role in acute pain thresholds too, Day says. People who are more sensitive to punishment tend more often to retract at the appearance of pain, whereas those more oriented towards rewards are more likely to push through it to achieve a goal, she says. Elite athletes are known to have higher pain thresholds as they are habituated to pain in their training regimes. Which is to say, if you are in a grand final and you think you’ve got a shot at winning, and you know the national team selectors are watching, your fixation on your goal might increase your ability to ignore the pain radiating from your jaw. Is that what made John Sattler play on? I will never know. He died in 2023. But we know he had all the predispositions for withstanding acute injury: he was habituated to pain as an athlete in a game famed for its big hits, he was reward-oriented in a moment when the stakes were high, he was a male socialised to value withstanding pain as a badge of toughness, and saw toughness valued as a social virtue. The clash would have got his endogenous opioids pumping. His attention was redirected away from his injury. Pain is a protective mechanism but, from all we know about that day, Sattler judged protecting his jaw as less important than claiming the premiership. “People who think they have a higher pain threshold – we will never know,” Moseley says. “It’s the same human that makes the pain and that tolerates it.” And so the experience of acute pain is caught in the realm of mystery and mythology; where we can understand much of what is happening in a body and part of what is happening in a brain but never actually know what another person feels. The legend of John Sattler goes that after that fateful right hook from Bucknall, the bloodied captain turned to his teammate Matthew Cleary. That no one knew, perhaps not even himself, the damage that had been done to him became his mythological power. “Hold me up,” he said. “So they don’t know I’m hurt.” Source of the article

16 Ways People Find Purpose Around the World

A new study suggests that even across cultures, there is a lot of similarity in where humans find purpose in life and how it brings us fulfillment. Having a purpose in life has been found to have many benefits for people, including better health and emotion management, less stress during stressful times, and even economic success. And it is considered a key to happiness and well-being. But does it matter where your sense of purpose comes from? Do different sources of purpose affect our well-being in different ways? Answers to these questions are hard to come by, because most research on purpose doesn’t look that granularly at the concept. Instead, it’s often measured by asking people how much they agree with general statements, like “I have aims and objectives for living” or “My life is meaningful”—not specifically what those meaningful aims are. But, in a new study, researchers Michael Mask and Steven Heine of the University of British Columbia and their colleagues aimed to get more detail about people’s purposeful pursuits across cultures and to see their effect on “the good life.” Ultimately, they found that our purposes around the world have a lot in common. Cultural similarities around purpose In the first part of their study, Mask and his colleagues asked 200 American participants to write about seven things that gave them a sense of purpose in life. Then, they analyzed over 2,000 responses to come up with 16 general categories of purpose that encompassed everyone’s answers: Self-improvement: Becoming the best you can be Family: Supporting and providing for your family and caretaking Relationships: Searching for, finding, or maintaining close relationships Religion/spirituality: Living in accordance with and meeting the standards of your religious or spiritual beliefs Recognition: Being respected and having high status Happiness: Being happy, enjoying life, and feeling good Self-sufficiency: Being able to take care of yourself physically and financially, and having the freedom to do as you wish Material wealth: Getting rich, owning nice things, and buying whatever you want Internal standards: Knowing who you are and what you stand for and living your life according to these principles Positive impact: Making the world a better place Mattering: Inspiring others and leaving a legacy; making an impact Occupational fulfillment: Finding your calling through work; doing your job well and working hard Persevering: Handling what life throws at you—not giving up and dealing with the struggles inherent in life Physical health: Taking care of your body and being healthy Inner peace: Being grateful for what you have and accepting what you can’t change Service: Serving your country or community After testing out these categories with a different group of 100 American participants, their team surveyed over 1,000 people from Japan, India, Poland, and the United States to find out how much these categories reflected their own purpose in life. Specifically, participants reported how much each source of purpose influenced the decisions they made and guided their behavior, as well as how happy, meaningful, and psychologically rich their lives were—all aspects of “the good life.” (Psychological richness involves experiencing diverse, challenging, and interesting activities that evoke complex emotions and change your perspective.) Analyzing the results, the researchers found that people in each of these unique cultures had very similar sources of purpose and prioritized each category similarly, too. “Happiness,” “self-sufficiency,” and “family” were in the top five for each country, while “religion” and “recognition” were in the bottom five for each country. Also, there was a lot of agreement on what sources of purpose went along with more meaning, happiness, or psychological richness in life. This finding surprised Heine, who, as a cultural psychologist, is used to seeing more variability among people of different cultures. “What stands out from our finding is just how much agreement there was within these four quite different countries about what kinds of purposes are associated with a good life,” he says. “They’re not identical, but there is a striking amount of similarity.” Different purposes for different ends So how did different types of purposes relate to different ways of living well? The researchers found that people whose purpose came from “mattering” were the most likely to have a more meaningful life, overall, with “perseverance” and “service” also tied to meaning. This fits in with past research explaining how meaning in life involves a sense of purpose, coherence, and mattering, says Heine. “It makes sense that ‘mattering’ is especially linked with meaning, as it [suggests people] want to make a difference in the world,” he says. “And ‘service’ means you are guided by contributing to others—another source of meaning.” People felt happier depending on how much they pursued “inner peace,” with the pursuit of “positive impact,” “physical health,” and “happiness” also tied to happiness more than other sources of purpose. While it may seem obvious that aligning your decisions with inner peace, happiness, and good health would make you personally happier, it’s less obvious that making a positive impact would lead to happiness. However, Heine points to research that suggests that those who benefit others are happier—for example, his colleague Elizabeth Dunn’s work finding that spending money on others makes you happier than spending it on yourself. “What you are doing is making the world a better place, and that should be especially rewarding,” he says. For the psychologically rich life, pursuing “service” was the top contender for people across cultures. This seems counterintuitive, because service isn’t necessarily associated with novelty, complexity, or challenge. But it’s possible, says Mask, that serving others opens us to new perspectives and a range of emotions—for example, happiness at connecting with people in less fortunate circumstances, but also sadness about their misfortune—that could be relevant to a psychologically rich life. “These aspects of service (emotional complexity, perspective-changing experiences) may be what link it to psychological richness,” says Mask. Interestingly, pursuing material wealth was the lowest predictor of every form of the good life in this study. Heine suggest that the reason may be that pursuing wealth takes you away from more reliable sources of purpose associated with the good life—like relationships, a sense of community, work, or connection to a cause or spiritual practice. “Chasing material wealth is not associated with the kinds of connections that underlie a good life,” he says. Variations in purpose and well-being While the overall results suggest an almost universal experience of purpose, there were some cultural variations in the findings, too. For example, for Japanese people, finding purpose through their occupation mattered a lot more to their quality of life (in every sense) than it did in the other cultures studied. Heine, who’s familiar with Japanese culture through his research, says that finding rings true, as he has witnessed how central work life is to people’s well-being and personal identity in Japan. On the other hand, he and Mask couldn’t explain why seeking purpose through family did not predict meaning in life much, except in Poland, where it ranked second. Given research on how close relationships bring us a sense of meaning, they’d expected it to pop up at the top of the list for all countries. According to Heine, it’s possible that in countries where people feel strong obligations and expectations around their family (like in Japan and India), other areas of fulfillment may have felt more novel and relevant to them. Mask wonders if it could be due to how different cultures think about family as a source of purpose, which their general survey couldn’t detect. “It could be the case that how people conceive of family in these different societies might look very different,” he says. But, he adds, they can’t say more without getting more granular detail in future studies. Aiming for the good life yourself Knowing that certain elements of a good life may be supported by sources of purpose like mattering, inner peace, or service could be useful to know, especially if we’re aiming for a happier, more meaningful, or psychologically rich life. But Heine is not sure that there can be a “purpose prescription” based on their findings alone. “Purpose and meaning in life have an important subjective element. It wouldn’t be good for an individual to share the same purpose just because others endorse it,” he says. On the other hand, he and Mask both hope their research will encourage more people to consider focusing on what brings purpose to their lives, to help achieve greater overall well-being. “Though the goal of our paper was to highlight many sources of purpose, our take-home message is that having any kind of purpose is key to having a good life,” says Heine. Source of the article

GOATReads: Science

Why it’s a (very) bad idea to filter microplastics from your blood

Sorry, Orlando The actor Orlando Bloom recently made headlines when he reportedly paid the exorbitant price of £10,000 ($13,600) to have his blood removed, separated and filtered for microplastics. His rather drastic treatment highlights growing worry over an unsettling truth: there’s simply no avoiding these minuscule particles. They’re everywhere, from the top of Mount Everest to the inside of our brains, according to some studies. They’re also all over the media, and understandably, the safety of having microscopic flakes of plastic floating around in our bodies has raised public and scientific concern. Once considered a benign material, microplastics are now being linked to disease. But with the testing at such an early stage and no scientific consensus reached, should we be worried about what it’s doing to our bodies? And should we be queuing up to get our blood ‘cleaned’? Plastic proof The term ‘microplastic’ describes any plastic particle or fibre measuring less than 5mm (0.19 inches) in size. Typically, these particles are so small that we need a microscope to see them. Scientists also use the term ‘nanoplastic’ to describe even smaller particles, which measure below 0.001mm (39.4 microinches). These are challenging to see even with advanced microscopes, but evidence suggests they could be released from plastic materials and into their surrounding environment. A part of my research group’s work has been to measure the levels of plastic and other particles in the air that we breathe, both outside and indoors. In London, we’ve seen microplastics in the air pollution small enough to travel deep into our lungs. To test whether microplastics are in the body, pieces of whole tissue or blood are processed and then filtered to concentrate any microplastic amounts. Then analysis can take place, either through a chemistry technique, which quantifies the amount of plastic in a sample, or a microscope-based physical chemistry technique – i.e. counting the number of plastic particles (and their size and shape) in a sample. Each method has its merits, but they all share the same drawbacks. The modern laboratory is a hotbed for microplastic contamination, full of plasticware, plastic consumables and, of course, people. Because of this, the actual process of extracting and testing samples for microplastics can be a source of pollution itself. Often in samples, we see microplastic particles that we’d previously thought were too big to be absorbed and distributed throughout the body. Generally speaking, particles smaller than 0.001mm (39.4 microinches) in size can cross through your lungs and enter into the bloodstream at the air-blood barrier – a thin layer of tissue in the lungs separating air in the air sacs (alveoli) from blood in the surrounding tiny blood vessels (capillaries). In the gut, particles smaller than 0.001mm (39.4 microinches) can cross into the lymphatic system – the body’s waste removal structure. From here, the smallest particles enter the bloodstream, and larger particles become trapped in the gut lining. Contamination from the lab could therefore explain the biggest pieces of plastic found in the body. Another issue is that some of the biological components in samples generate similar signals to plastics. Specifically, fats interfere with the signals of polyethene and polyvinylchloride, which can lead to an overestimation of how present these plastics are if a sample is not adequately processed.  With all this in mind, the high amounts of microplastics reported to be in our bodies are likely overestimated. Amounts vary significantly from nanograms to milligrams depending on the study, location, tissue type, and analytical method followed. In a recent rigorous study, a conservative estimate was made that there’s around 0.15ug – or 0.00000015g – of plastic per millilitre in our blood. To put that into perspective, that’s less than the weight of a single human hair. Still, it’s also worth noting that this study only looked at polystyrene, as it’s the only type of microplastic that’s easy to test for. Plastic people Based on these levels, it’s probably more important to focus on where the microplastics end up in our bodies, instead of how much is actually there. But again, it’s difficult to measure how much microplastics are gathering in different parts of our bodies. One recent study, for example, suggested the brain is a hotspot for plastic, claiming that it accumulates, on average, 4.5 bottle caps worth. Not only are these levels relatively high, but the detected plastic is mostly comprised of polyethene – one of the plastics which is difficult to measure around fat.   Polythene is the main plastic in production globally – around 120 million tonnes is made annually, accounting for 25 per cent of all plastic. It makes sense that we’d see more of this type in the body, generally speaking. The brain is a fatty tissue, however, and false positives can’t be ruled out here. What’s more, this study suggests there’s more plastic in the brain than in the liver, the organ responsible for cleaning the blood. If there’s a large amount of plastic anywhere in the body, we’d expect it to be there. Most published studies on microplastics in human tissue have also looked specifically at samples of whole tissue. This means we’re missing important context about whether the microplastics are embedded within cells, or are simply ‘passing through’. Plastic pure Whether we can measure them or not, there’s a high level of public anxiety around microplastics. Around two-thirds of 30,000 survey respondents across 31 countries were concerned about microplastics in their bodies. If you feel like you want to minimise your exposure to microplastic pollution, there are several lifestyle changes you can make. These include opting for natural fibre-based textiles in your home and clothing, avoiding plastic packaging wherever possible (especially where heating is involved) and travelling via quiet streets to avoid tyre wear particles from traffic. But with microplastic release predicted to increase 1.5 to 2.5 times by 2040, it’s inevitable that tech claiming to remove microplastic invaders from the body will start to appear. Therapeutic apheresis – a medical procedure which separates blood and selectively removes harmful substances before returning blood to the patient – has recently been commercialised to rid your blood of microplastics. While there’s no published work on this microplastic removal method, German researchers carrying out the procedure detected ‘microplastic-like’ particles in the plasma of patients. Without information on their lab controls and the sizes of the particles detected, it’s difficult to interpret how meaningful the data is, though. What’s more, we don’t know how microplastics act in blood specifically. We don’t know whether they’re freely moving around the body and circulating in our plasma, or sticking to our red blood cells, or being engulfed by our immune cells in the bloodstream. Without concrete evidence on the types of microplastics in our bodies, their journeys or their interactions within the body, it’s almost impossible to interpret the health benefits of these ‘blood cleaning’ ventures. Plus, you might end up adding more by accident during the procedure. In one piece of research, for example, 558 microplastics were recorded being released from a cannula over a 72-hour period. With all this in mind, until there’s been more research assessing the impact of microplastics on our bodies, until we can say where they are and what they are doing, I plan on leaving the sci-fi blood cleaning services to Hollywood. Source of the article

GOATReads: Psychology

How to Thrive in an AI World

The AI revolution has been swift and powerful. You’re using it whether you realize it or not, and those who embrace it often don’t look back. At the same time, there’s fear of job loss, the environmental toll, and the sense that many qualities that define humans will never be the same. Insights from psychology can help us adapt to this massive paradigm shift. 5 Ways to Optimize Your Brain in an AI-Dominated World By Cornelia C. Walther, Ph.D. In the age of AI, it’s natural to feel overwhelmed—especially if you’re unsure how to use emerging tools or worry you’re behind the curve. Take heart: While AI can process vast amounts of data and streamline tasks at mind-boggling speeds, it remains a fraction of our entire intelligence and being. AI can handle the tedious, brute-force parts of work—finding correlations, generating initial drafts, or calculating numbers—so that people can focus on what humans excel at: creative problem-solving, empathetic leadership, and meaningful social interactions. This is the essence of hybrid intelligence, where human curiosity, compassion, creativity, and emotional depth complement AI’s computational power. Get Acquainted With Your Cognitive Landscape The brain’s default-mode network plays a central role in self-reflection, daydreaming, and understanding the self in relation to others. When we spend time reflecting or being mindful, we activate this network, which enhances our ability to process information, make decisions, and understand emotions. Conversely, AI does not have self-awareness or a concept of “self”; it processes inputs based on programmed algorithms without internal reflection. Practical Tool: Keep a Daily “Mindfulness Journal” → Reflect on times when you were distracted or overwhelmed by digital inputs. → Note how the interaction with AI-powered tools (e.g., ChatGPT, social media) influenced your focus or decisions. → Synergy value: Use AI to become more aware of your own thought process. How This Helps You Stay Competitive Mindfulness practices enhance neuroplasticity, the brain’s ability to reorganize and form new neural connections, improving long-term mental flexibility. It anchors you in your own thoughts, so AI doesn’t dictate your workflow. By consistently pausing to reflect, you ensure that AI supports—not replaces—your cognitive processes. Reflect Regularly on Your Aspirations Human brains are wired for purpose and meaning, thanks to the prefrontal cortex, which governs complex cognitive functions like planning, decision-making, and setting long-term goals. Unlike AI, which optimizes decisions based on logic or data, the human brain is motivated by intrinsic factors, like purpose and fulfillment, which drive us to pursue meaningful goals. Practical Tool: Weekly “Goals Audit” → Use an AI planner or a to-do app to list your weekly goals. Tools like Notion or Trello can be augmented with AI plug-ins that suggest action steps. → Reflect offline: Are the tasks that take up your time aligned with what truly matters to you—your values and your long-term ambitions? → Synergy value: AI’s efficiency helps track tasks, but introspection determines whether they hold real meaning. How This Helps You Stay Competitive: Individuals who set clear, meaningful goals exhibit stronger activation in the dopaminergic reward system. This leads to greater motivation and productivity, particularly in times of ever-accelerating demands and the stress that results from them. Activate Emotional Intelligence The brain’s limbic system, which includes structures like the amygdala and hippocampus, is integral to emotional regulation and memory formation. Emotional intelligence—our ability to understand, manage, and react to emotions—revolves around this system. AI can mimic empathy through natural language processing but does not experience or understand emotions as we do. Practical Tool: Daily “Emotions Stretching” → Consider using AI chat tools (e.g., Claude or others) to role-play sensitive conversations or conflict scenarios. Ask the AI for multiple perspectives or possible responses. → Reflect on how you feel about the scenarios. Which responses feel authentic to you? → Synergy value: AI can help you adopt various perspectives, allowing you to expand the menu of emotional responses. How This Helps You Stay Competitive: Individuals who practice emotional regulation and mindfulness demonstrate greater amygdala resilience, which lowers stress and enhances social interactions. AI can simulate empathy, but only humans an experience the full spectrum of emotions and develop resilience. Putting situations and your role in them into perspective allows you to expand your emotional agility. Rather than reacting on auto-pilot, it enables you to choose your reaction. Invest in Intellectual Curiosity The brain’s hippocampus plays a vital role in learning and memory. Curiosity activates brain regions, such as the ventral tegmental area, and is associated with reward and enhancing learning. By learning something new, we curate our intellectual hardware while enjoying the journey of exploration. While AI can store and retrieve vast amounts of information, it lacks curiosity—the human drive to explore, learn, and innovate is the result of our biological evolution and the reason for our species’ survival. Practical Tool: Implement a “Curiosity Hour” → Use AI as a launchpad: Ask ChatGPT or another large language model to provide an overview of a new concept you’re curious about. → Next, pick one point from the AI-generated summary and explore it independently—read a research article, watch a documentary, or experiment with a hands-on project. → Synergy value: AI can help you to move beyond passive consumption to challenge your mind so you’re actively learning. How This Helps You Stay Competitive: Intellectual curiosity enhances memory retention and increases synaptic plasticity—the ability of synapses to strengthen over time with repeated learning. AI can offer information but doesn’t “learn” in the same exploratory, imaginative way we do. Constantly exploring novel ideas keeps your brain agile and inventive. Rather than letting AI do all the heavy lifting, challenge yourself to dive into uncharted topics—this fuels your unique perspective. Nurture Social Connections Human brains are hardwired for social interaction. The mirror neuron system, which was initially discovered by looking at monkeys, shows how our brains are designed to resonate with the emotional states of others. Social bonds are essential for mental well-being, cognitive development, and emotional resilience. While AI-driven apps can facilitate conversations, genuine connection—a handshake, a shared laugh—sparks oxytocin release, strengthening social ties in a way machines can’t replicate. Practical Tool: Establish a “Connection Ritual” → If you manage a team, use AI to schedule and structure meetings, but devote at least a few minutes daily to unstructured conversations—no agenda, just genuine interaction. → Coordinate gatherings or game nights using AI planning tools in your personal life, then disconnect from digital devices to focus on face-to-face interactions. → Synergy value: The deliberate use of AI tools can free up time and mental space to allocate quality time to curate meaningful relationships. As a bonus, these can buffer stress and spark collaboration. How This Helps You Stay Competitive Regular social interactions release oxytocin, a hormone that promotes bonding and reduces stress—among other functions. AI-driven social platforms may facilitate connection, but face-to-face or voice-to-voice interactions release brain chemicals that promote empathy, trust, and cooperation. AI can only mimic these elements; it simulates emotions. Your network is your net worth. As AI handles logistics, you will have more mental bandwidth to deepen your human connections—a resource no algorithm can fully replicate. Fears of being left behind by AI are valid. Yet, what sets you apart—and always will—is your quirky, kind, and purposeful human self. AI can automate repetitive tasks and generate data-driven insights. It cannot replace the essence that makes you a unique human being. By focusing on these five elements—building awareness, reflecting on aspirations, activating emotional intelligence, investing in curiosity, and nurturing social connections—you keep your mind curious and creative, and your heart compassionate and courageous to face the uncertainties that life in a hybrid world entails. Source of the article

GOATReads:Politics

The Nuclear Club Might Soon Double

As American power recedes, South Korea, Japan, and a host of other countries may pursue the bomb. Keiko Ogura was just 8 years old when the atoms in the Hiroshima bomb started splitting. When we met in January, some 300 feet from where the bomb struck, Ogura was 87. She stands about five feet tall in heels, and although she has slowed down some in her old age, she moves confidently, in tiny, shuffling steps. She twice waved away my offered arm as we walked the uneven surfaces of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park, first neutrally and then with some irritation. Ogura can still remember that terrible morning in August, 80 years ago. Her older brother, who later died of cancer from radiation, was on a hilltop north of the city when the Enola Gay made its approach. He saw it shining small and silver in the clear blue sky. Ogura was playing on a road near her house; her father had kept her home from school. “He had a sense of foreboding,” she told me. She remembers the intensity of the bomb’s white flash, the “demon light,” in the words of one survivor. The shock wave that followed had the force of a typhoon, Ogura said. It threw her to the ground and she lost consciousness—for how long, she still doesn’t know. Like many people who felt the bomb’s power that day, Ogura assumed that it must have been dropped directly on top of her. In fact, she was a mile and a half away from the explosion’s center. Tens of thousands of people were closer. The great waves of heat and infrared light that roared outward killed hundreds of Ogura’s classmates immediately. More than 20,000 children were killed by the bomb. Ogura told me that after the initial explosion, fires had raged through the city for many hours. Survivors compared the flame-filled streets to medieval Buddhist scroll paintings of hell. When Ogura awoke on the road, the smoke overhead was so thick that she thought night had fallen. She stumbled back to her house and found it half-destroyed, but still standing. People with skin peeling off their bodies were limping toward her from the city center. Ogura’s family well was still functional, and so she began handing out glasses of water. Two people died while drinking it, right in front of her. A black rain began to fall. Each of its droplets was shot through with radiation, having traveled down through the mushroom cloud’s remnants. It stained Ogura’s skin charcoal gray. In the days following the bombing, Ogura’s father cremated hundreds of people at a nearby park. The city itself seemed to have disappeared, she said. In aerial shots, downtown Hiroshima’s grid was reduced to a pale outline. More than 60,000 structures had been destroyed. One of the few that remained upright was a domed building made of stone. It still stands today, not far from where Ogura and I met. The government has reinforced its skeletal structure, in a bid to preserve it forever. Circling the building, I could see in through the bomb-blasted walls, to piles of rubble inside. Ogura and I walked to a monumental arch at the center of the Peace Memorial Park, where a stone chest holds a register of every person who is known to have been killed by the Hiroshima bomb. To date, it contains more than 340,000 names. Only a portion of them died in the blast’s immediate aftermath. Tens of thousands of others perished from radiation sickness in the following months, or from rare cancers years later. Every generation alive at the time was affected, even the newest: Babies who were still in their mothers’ wombs when the bomb hit developed microcephaly. For decades, whenever one of Ogura’s relatives took ill, she worried that a radiation-related disease had finally come for them, and often, one had. As time passed, news that more countries had built nuclear arsenals reached Japan. Meanwhile, the hibakusha—the Japanese term for survivors of the nuclear attacks—were stigmatized as mutants. Ogura told me that girls in her summer camp looked for burn scars on her body in the shower. Some of her friends’ weddings were called off by prospective grooms who feared that birth defects would affect their future children. Ogura worried that her own wedding would be canceled right up until the ceremony. Since the Hiroshima attack, Ogura and her fellow hibakusha have told and retold their stories of the bombing and its long aftermath. But even the youngest of them are now in their 80s, and soon they’ll all be gone. The horrific reality of an atomic attack is fading out of living memory—even as a new turn toward rapid nuclear armament makes the possibility of a full-blown nuclear war more likely. For all the recent focus on Iran, in a cruel irony, East Asia is where the world’s fastest buildups are unfolding, in China and North Korea. A dangerous proliferation cascade may be about to break out, right in the shadow of Hiroshima. It would likely start in South Korea, and spread first to Japan. It might not stop there. The decades-long effort to keep nuclear weapons from spreading across the planet may be about to collapse. One cold, windy morning in Seoul, a week before I met Ogura, I surrendered my phone at the gates of the Korea Institute for Defense Analyses, a government brain trust that advises South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff. Inside the gray brutalist building, the nuclear strategist Heo Tae-keun was waiting for me. Heo had recently served as South Korea’s deputy defense minister for policy. In that role, he had led the country’s delegations in nuclear talks with the United States. He is a former brigadier general with a rugby player’s build, a sturdy presence in every sense. And yet, that morning, he seemed deeply troubled. President Donald Trump had just begun his second term, but already he was showing less restraint than in his first. Almost immediately, he had threatened Denmark with military force, and he seemed content—delighted, even—to let Russia decide Ukraine’s fate. His disdain for old alliances unsettled Heo. “I am not sure what will happen in Trump 2.0,” he told me. In Korea, he said, in the cautious way of a diplomat, “he is perceived as more unstable in his decision making” than previous U.S. presidents. Stability is prized by nuclear strategists, who by dint of their profession have had to envision, with disturbing vividness, what instability looks like in the nuclear realm. As America’s dependability as an ally comes into question, Heo, like many other South Koreans, is looking around nervously at the dangerous neighborhood where his country is located. South Korea hangs like an earlobe off the eastern edge of Eurasia. Not even a tiny moat like the Taiwan Strait separates it from the three nuclear-armed autocracies immediately to its north. The first of them, North Korea, is still technically at war with South Korea, and Seoul’s 9 million residents are attuned to its closeness. From the city center, where skyscrapers stand alongside old palaces preserved since the Joseon dynasty, it takes just 40 minutes to reach the thin strip of land-mine-riddled wilderness that separates the two countries. When North Koreans came pouring over the border at the start of the Korean War, in 1950, both peoples were poor, and still suffering the aftereffects of Japan’s brutal 35-year occupation. Then, for three years, that war raged up and down the peninsula, from snowy ridge to snowy ridge, killing more than 2 million people. Heo told me, laconically, that South Koreans have no desire to repeat that experience. He gestured toward the sleek, gleaming city outside his window. “We overcame the Korean War, and built an economy and way of life,” he said. North Korea has less to lose. Kim Jong Un has ruled as dictator in Pyongyang for 13 years, during which he has often threatened the South with reunification by force, and, more recently, outright annexation, just as Vladimir Putin has attempted in Ukraine. Kim is quickly expanding his nuclear arsenal. He already has dozens of warheads, and has threatened to use them not only as defensive weapons of last resort, but in a first strike that would turn Seoul into a “sea of flames.” For decades, the threat of intense U.S. retaliation helped keep Kim’s father and grandfather from invading the South. But Kim rules at a time when Pax Americana looks to be winding down. Under Trump, the United States is now reported to be considering pulling troops out of South Korea, though administration officials have denied that. “The Korean people do not know if the U.S. commitment to them is real,” Heo told me. They may soon decide that to deter Kim, they need nuclear weapons of their own. For the better part of a century, the U.S. has sought to limit nuclear proliferation, with considerable success. American presidents have deployed diplomats, saboteurs, and brute military force to stamp out nascent nuclear-weapons programs in Latin America, Europe, Africa, and Asia. They have done so because nuclear weapons are dangerous, and because each new nuclear nation further dilutes the awesome power that America had when it was the only one. Just once has the U.S. helped an ally start a nuclear-weapons program, by sharing technical research with the United Kingdom, its junior partner on the Manhattan Project. In 1946, Congress outlawed all such sharing, and in the decades since, U.S. presidents have worked to keep West Germany, Australia, Libya, Brazil, Sweden, and others from building arsenals—and even helped persuade South Africa to dismantle an arsenal that it had already built. Today, of the world’s 193 countries, only nine have nuclear weapons. Left to its own devices, South Korea could easily have been the tenth. The country is wealthy and technologically adept, and with North Korea next door, it has sufficient motive. The reason the South Koreans don’t yet have an arsenal on hand is that both times they started to build one, an American president found out and persuaded them to stop. The military junta that ruled South Korea in the 1970s launched the country’s first covert nuclear program after the U.S. signaled a pullback from Asia that would culminate in the fall of Saigon. The nervous generals were secretly negotiating with France to purchase a reprocessing plant. When Gerald Ford found out, his administration threatened to terminate the U.S.-Korean military alliance, and pushed to cancel the sale. In the end, South Korea ratified the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty instead, in 1975. Only six years later, after North Korea broke ground on a plutonium reactor, Ronald Reagan’s administration intervened to halt another such program. It was less serious than the first, but Reagan still wanted it canceled: He assured Chun Doo-hwan, South Korea’s president at the time, that U.S. ground troops would remain on the Korean peninsula indefinitely, and Chun agreed to shut weapons research down for good. North Korea has not seen fit to restrain its nuclear ambitions in the same way. During the heady years after the Cold War, George H. W. Bush removed the American warheads that had long been stationed at bases in South Korea, then pressured its president to sign a joint pledge with North Korea to keep the peninsula forever free of nuclear weapons. That pledge proved to be a sham; North Korea tested its first crude nuclear device just 14 years later, during George W. Bush’s presidency. Barack Obama, an optimist on all matters nuclear, believed that he could persuade China to lean on North Korea until it gave up its nuclear program. This didn’t work either. Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s first priority regarding North Korea was and is the stability of Kim’s regime: If Kim’s rule collapses, refugees will flood into China and Xi will lose the buffer state that separates it from South Korea, America’s longtime ally. Xi’s willingness to press was limited, and so Kim kept on building warheads. Xi may feel, in any case, that he is in no position to lecture Kim about proliferation. He himself is engaged in the fastest warhead buildup undertaken by any country since the Cold War’s peak. For decades, China was fine with having a few hundred warheads on hand as a deterrent. But Xi is now adding about 100 a year. He wants an arsenal as large as the ones that the U.S. and Russia have, if not larger. It’s part of his Chinese Dream, the great rejuvenation that he has imagined for his country. And so, in some sense, a destabilizing proliferation cascade has already begun in East Asia, and proliferation often begets proliferation. Julian Gewirtz, who served as the senior director for China and Taiwan affairs on the National Security Council during the Biden administration, told me that China’s astonishingly fast and ambitious nuclear buildup has unsettled countries all across Asia. In both South Korea and Japan, he said, these concerns, combined with uncertainties about the Trump administration, “may lead them to consider ideas that were once unthinkable.” Kim is already estimated to have about 50 warheads, and the material needed to build as many as 90 more. His nuclear ambitions have grown along with China’s. He doesn’t want to be a nuclear peer of India and Pakistan, who have contented themselves with about 170 warheads each. Kim wants to have about 300, like the United Kingdom and France, sources told me. Heo said that nuclear strategists have developed some notions about how Kim might use an arsenal of 300 warheads if nuclear war were to ever break out on the peninsula. The first 100 of them would likely be reserved for Kim’s short-range missiles. They would be able to reach targets in South Korea—military bases, airfields, ports, and perhaps even Seoul itself—in less than two minutes. The radius of the attack could then move beyond South Korea, with another 100 warheads available to strike the country’s regional allies, Japan in particular. Kim is trying to build reliable intercontinental ballistic missiles, onto which the remaining 100 warheads would be fastened. They could be launched all the way to the United States, in waves, to overwhelm missile defenses. North Korea’s first ICBM test, in 2017, was a “threshold breaker,” Jake Sullivan, who served as national security adviser under Joe Biden, told me. It showed that Kim’s effort to build missiles that could reach the U.S. mainland was further along than previously thought. He may now be getting help from Russia, in exchange for the 14,000 troops and millions of rounds of ammunition that he has sent to Ukraine. If Kim could plausibly put Washington, D.C., or Los Angeles in existential jeopardy, would the U.S. really protect Busan and Seoul? This is the question that haunts Heo. He knows that American presidents have a lot of wiggle room when it comes to protecting South Korea. The mutual-defense treaty between the two countries is vague. When President Dwight Eisenhower negotiated it, South Korea’s leaders were still eager to restart the Korean War, to defeat the North once and for all. Eisenhower was willing to station nuclear weapons in South Korea to reassure them, but he refused to promise American military support in every case of conflict between the two countries, because he feared that the South would deliberately provoke a war. The U.S. has always been cagey about its nuclear contingency plans for the region. Even after North Korea acquired nuclear weapons, when Americans conducted tabletop exercises with South Korea, they would often end them just after North Korea launches its first missile, which is right when things get interesting, from the South Korean point of view. The United States Strategic Command, which operates America’s nuclear-weapons systems, doesn’t like to divulge its contingency plans. The South Koreans tend to “leak like a sieve, and their systems have been penetrated by the Chinese,” a former senior Pentagon official told me. STRATCOM officials have professed not to understand why South Korea should even require reassurance; their attitude was Our word has been good for decades, and it’s still good—just take it. As Trump first rose to power, South Koreans found it more difficult to just take America at its word. In 2016, they watched in horror as he riled up rally crowds by denigrating America’s Asian allies as freeloaders. Trump said that South Korea and Japan were ripping off the U.S. in trade and sending only “peanuts” in exchange for an American military presence in the region. He seemed to take special pleasure in threatening to draw down, or perhaps even wholly remove, the nearly 30,000 troops stationed in South Korea. During his first presidency, Trump flattered Kim, and flew to meet the North Korean dictator at summits in Hanoi and Singapore. In exchange for this sheen of legitimacy, Kim paused his missile tests, but only for a couple of years, during which he reportedly kept adding to his nuclear stockpile. A reminder of Trump’s failed policy can still be glimpsed from a border lookout point north of Seoul. When I visited it in January, I could see a pale-gray building a mile or so into the demilitarized zone, beyond wild bush and barbed wire. Trump and Kim met there in 2019, but since then, it has stood mostly vacant, a potent symbol of America’s newly unpredictable foreign policy. According to opinion polls conducted in recent years, 70 percent of the South Korean public wants the country to have its own nuclear arsenal. In 2022, voters elected the conservative Yoon Suk-yeol, a hawk’s hawk on North Korea, to the presidency. Mira Rapp-Hooper, who served as the senior director for East Asia and Oceania on Biden’s National Security Council, told me that she and other officials grew concerned during Yoon’s campaign when he called for the return of tactical U.S. weapons to the Korean peninsula. After Yoon assumed power, the Biden administration tried to reassure him that no such arsenal was necessary. Biden’s staff proposed a grand gesture, a declaration that would serve as an addendum to the two countries’ vague mutual-defense treaty. The Washington Declaration was announced during Yoon’s visit to the White House in April 2023. That night, at a state dinner held in Yoon’s honor, he and Biden clinked glasses to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the alliance. Yoon, who is not otherwise known for his personal charm, rose to the occasion, singing a few bars of “American Pie,” by Don McLean, in English, to loud cheers from the assembled guests. A few months later, an American Ohio-class nuclear submarine docked in Busan, as a show of strength. But by then, Biden’s presidency, and its policy of reassurance, was close to an end. Over the course of the following year, it became clearer that Trump would be his successor. For the second time in less than a decade, Americans would elect as their leader a chaotic and untrustworthy man who seemed hostile to the very concept of alliances. When Heo and I discussed the possibility that South Korea may need to go nuclear, he emphasized that he wouldn’t want an arsenal just for its own sake. Members of the defense intelligentsia would prefer to keep the American alliance the way it is. But they have to prepare, in case South Korea is left to deal with Kim on its own. Like almost everyone I talked with in Seoul, Heo eventually mentioned Ukraine. When the Soviet Union fell, Ukraine had a nuclear arsenal on its soil, but Bill Clinton helped persuade the Ukrainians to give it up. Not to worry, he said. The U.S. will have your back. Near the end of my time in Seoul, I sat down to lunch with Park Jin, who served as foreign minister under Yoon. We met at a café downtown, just as the morning’s snowfall was letting up. Park, 68, has the elegant manners that you might expect of a former top diplomat, and he was stylishly dressed in a black blazer and turtleneck, set off by a gray cashmere scarf. Just a few days earlier, in the hours following Trump’s inauguration, the new president had offhandedly referred to North Korea as a “nuclear power” in response to a reporter’s question about foreign threats. Park was focused on that remark. He told me he had initially hoped that it was a simple mistake, but those hopes were dashed when Trump’s incoming defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, used the same language in a written statement to the U.S. Senate. This characterization may sound innocuous, given that everyone already knows that North Korea has a nuclear arsenal. But official recognition of a rogue nuclear power is usually a prize to be bargained for in geopolitics. It was not one that any previous American president had been willing to grant Kim, and certainly not for free. Park believes that Trump was using it as a concession to lure Kim to another meeting, one that could hasten his country’s abandonment by America. “The North Korea issue is the unfinished business from his first administration,” Park said. “And he’s a businessman.” Having already conceded North Korea’s legitimacy as a nuclear power, Trump won’t have many cards to play if he does attempt another renegotiation with Kim. Now that Kim’s nuclear arsenal is larger and Russia is his ally, he has more leverage, and may not even wish to meet. In search of a deal, Trump might try to secure a commitment from Kim to stop building ICBMs that threaten the U.S., and then declare victory—leaving North Korea’s ability to nuke Seoul entirely intact. Several South Korean security elites told me that a deal like that would be tantamount to abandonment, especially if it were paired with a troop withdrawal. During his first term, Trump asked his staff to set a troop withdrawal from South Korea in motion. James Mattis, his secretary of defense, reportedly slow-walked the request. Now, according to The Wall Street Journal, the Defense Department is reviewing its Korea policy, and a reduction in troops is being considered, although a Pentagon spokesperson denied that there was any “immediate” plan to draw down forces. If Trump does try again to withdraw troops from South Korea, it’s not clear what would stop him. When Jimmy Carter attempted something similar, he was foiled by intelligence assessments that counseled strongly against it. But Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s director of national intelligence, is an isolationist, and—like the rest of his Cabinet members—a loyalist above all else. She has already fired agents for an inconvenient intelligence assessment. She could make sure that no one stands in Trump’s way. It can sometimes be helpful to think of there being two South Koreas. The country is highly, and maybe even dangerously, polarized. The month before I arrived in Seoul, Yoon had declared martial law on false pretenses. Shortly after I landed there, he was charged with insurrection. Walking the streets, I heard dueling mass protests, for and against him. A megaphone call-and-response boomed through the downtown high-rises. In early June, Lee Jae-myung, a liberal candidate, won the snap election to replace Yoon. Normally, the election of a liberal president would quell talk of a South Korean nuclear-weapons program for a while, but now even some of the country’s liberals are nuclear-curious. In March, two foreign-policy-establishment figures from the new president’s party said that it is time to consider nuclear armament. Months before Trump’s reelection, Victor Cha, the Korea chair and president of geopolitics at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, sent a survey to hundreds of South Korea’s national-security elites. Of the 175 that responded, 34 percent said that they were in favor of South Korea acquiring its own nuclear weapons. But that poll is already out-of-date. The nuclear conversation among South Koreans has only grown louder since Inauguration Day, and Cha expects the volume to rise even more in the coming years. If a pro-nuclear consensus took hold among elites, it could all move quickly, because public support is already there, Cha told me. I heard something similar when I visited Yang Uk, a nuclear strategist at the Asan Institute for Policy Studies, in Seoul. After giving me a tour of his office—a charmingly boyish space packed with model fighter jets and combat knives in glass cases—Yang told me that he, too, has been hearing more nuclear talk among South Korean strategists, and not only within the small clique that has long supported a homegrown nuclear program. It’s happening among lots of mainstream people, he said. If South Korea were to launch a nuclear program, it would probably do so in secret. Its leaders would want to avoid suffering through an American-led sanctions regime, as India did after detonating nuclear devices in 1998. South Korea’s export economy would shrink rapidly if Hyundai and Samsung suddenly couldn’t sell their cars, smartphones, and chips abroad. “We would be fucked,” Yang told me. He may have been speaking personally: The Asan Institute is funded by an heir to the Hyundai fortune. South Korea might secretly seek America’s blessing. Cha imagined South Korea putting a feeler out to the White House: You don’t have to support our nuclear program. Just don’t oppose it. Some people in the current Trump administration wouldn’t be inclined to oppose it at all. During his 2016 campaign, Trump himself suggested that South Korea and Japan should consider getting their own nuclear weapons. Elbridge Colby, now his undersecretary of defense for policy at the Pentagon, has said that the U.S. shouldn’t use sanctions to deter Seoul from developing them. Colby has just been put in charge of formulating America’s National Defense Strategy. I called Scott Kemp to ask him how quickly South Korea could spin up a plutonium weapon. Kemp, a professor at MIT, is an expert on the industrial mechanics of proliferation who previously counseled the U.S. government on questions of this sort. He told me that in a mad-dash scenario, South Korea would probably need only a year to reprocess enough nuclear waste from its power plants to make a weapon. “There are plutonium-bomb designs floating around,” he said. “It would astonish me if South Korea had not acquired some of them.” To build out an entire arsenal that would present a clear deterrent to North Korea would take longer, perhaps 10 years. “Those would be 10 very dangerous years,” Cha told me. Many of the riskiest scenarios introduced by nuclear weapons arise during these unstable “breakout periods,” especially when adversaries are operating with limited information. If Kim learned of the program, he might use force to try to prevent its success, as Israel has in Iran. Even if he did not use nuclear weapons, he might try to invade, especially if there were fewer U.S. troops in his way. South Korea would be able to marshal a much more capable military response than Iran, and if a war did break out, it could last years and possibly draw in the neighborhood nuclear powers. Russia would probably back Kim, and China might pitch in too. In 2016, Xi Jinping levied harsh sanctions on South Korea just for installing a single missile-defense system. Xi would be aghast to learn that a new nuclear arsenal was materializing just 250 miles from the Chinese mainland. News of a South Korean arsenal would be consequential throughout East Asia. It would almost certainly spur further proliferation in North Korea and China, but also quite possibly in Japan. Late one night after arriving in Tokyo, I met Cha for a drink on the top floor of the Okura Hotel. Beneath us, the city’s elevated freeways curved through a dense matrix of glass towers, giving the Akasaka district its layered and futuristic feel. Cha was in town for a security summit; in a ballroom on a lower floor, he and I had just attended a private speech by Shigeru Ishiba, Japan’s prime minister. Less than a minute into the speech, Ishiba had mentioned the threat from North Korea. Cha noted that for all of this public North Korea talk, in private, it was the prospect of South Korea going nuclear that seemed to spook Japanese security experts the most. Japan and South Korea have mutual-defense commitments, but they are not friends. Koreans have not yet forgiven Japan for devoting an entire bureaucracy to the sexual enslavement of Korean women during its violent colonization of the peninsula. Japanese elites will tell you that their leaders have apologized many times for these crimes, and even paid compensation. Korean elites will tell you that the compensation was paltry, and the apologies heavy on the passive voice. They note that Japan’s history textbooks still take quite a sympathetic view of its imperial adventures in Korea. Both countries depend on America for their national security, and neither wants to be the junior partner in the region. South Koreans do not like that the U.S. allowed Japan to reprocess uranium into plutonium, starting in 1987, while they still cannot. Japan’s conservatives wonder why it was South Korea that received a special Washington Declaration and not their country. You can imagine how tempers in Tokyo would flare if South Korea were to leapfrog plutonium-rich Japan and develop nuclear weapons first. I asked Ken Jimbo, one of Japan’s most respected nuclear strategists, what his country would do in that instance. We met in a conference room at the International House of Japan, overlooking the institute’s famous garden. Originally owned by a samurai clan, it had, unlike most local Edo-style gardens, survived the Allied firebombing of the city. The red-and-white Tokyo Tower loomed behind it in the eastern sky. Jimbo told me that if South Korea built its own nuclear arsenal, the desire to possess such weapons would surely spill over to Japan. “We would have to be very serious about what to do next,” he said. Japan has been rearming itself with impressive speed already. As the country’s war crimes have receded in historical memory and China has grown stronger, many Japanese have come to feel that the country’s pacifist constitution is outmoded. Jimbo told me that he was personally embarrassed when the troops that Japan sent to Afghanistan in 2001 weren’t allowed to join combat missions. During the decade following the outbreak of that war, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe led a movement to loosen the constitution. The country’s militarization has recently accelerated: By 2027, its defense budget will have surged by 60 percent in just five years. There isn’t yet a loud, open conversation about going nuclear in Japan, as there is in South Korea. As the lone people on Earth to have suffered nuclear attacks, the Japanese have so far remained committed to three “non-nuclear principles,” which require the country not to produce nuclear weapons, possess them, or host others’ on Japanese soil. A generation ago, belief in these principles was so strong in Japan that it was hard to imagine the country ever building an arsenal. But antinuclear sentiment has lost potency during the past 20 years, according to Masashi Murano, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute. China’s rapid nuclear buildup has unnerved the public, Murano said, and so has North Korea’s. Japanese media once covered Kim’s family as an eccentric sideshow. Now every smartphone in the country gets a push alert when Kim lobs a missile into the Sea of Japan, or over the Japanese archipelago and into the Pacific. I asked Narushige Michishita, a strategist and professor at the National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies, in Tokyo, if he could imagine the circumstances that would push Japan to go nuclear. He told me that he would pay close attention to what America’s president did. I asked what kinds of things he would watch for. A map of East Asia sat unfurled between us. Michishita touched his finger to South Korea and Taiwan. If the U.S. abandoned either of them during a crisis, Japan would probably need to go nuclear, he said. Scott Kemp, the MIT professor, told me that Japan has almost certainly already done the preparatory work. In 1969, Prime Minister Eisaku Sato is said to have signed a secret memo, instructing the government to make sure that Japan would be ready to build a nuclear arsenal should the need arise. That same year, Sato’s administration began to put an enormous amount of money into its centrifuge program, which now reprocesses nuclear waste into plutonium. I asked Kemp how long Japan would need to make a single warhead. His answer: Only a month, if speed were of the essence. Nuclear weapons can be thought of as a kind of cancer that started metastasizing through human civilization in 1945. A few times during the Cold War, this cancer threatened to kill off much of humanity, but a partial remission followed the fall of the Berlin Wall. The U.S. and the Soviet Union agreed on a limit of 6,000 deployed warheads each—still enough to destroy most of the world’s major cities many times over, but down from the tens of thousands that they’d previously stockpiled. The high-water mark for the disarmament movement came in 2009, when President Obama called for a world without nuclear weapons. For this address, Obama chose Prague, the site of the Velvet Revolution. He cast his eyes over a crowd of thousands that morning, and then over the whole continent. Peace had come to Europe, he said. Now it was time to go further, and negotiate a new arms-control treaty with Russia. The very next year, the two countries committed to cap themselves at 1,550 deployed warheads. At the time, China still had fewer than 300. Disarmament wasn’t on the near horizon, but the trajectory was favorable. How long ago that moment now seems. The world’s great-power rivalries have once again become fully inflamed. A year after invading Ukraine in 2022, Putin suspended his participation in the capping agreement with the United States. He has begun to make explicit nuclear threats, breaking a long-standing taboo. Meanwhile, the Chinese have slotted more than 100 ICBMs in deep desert silos near Mongolia. The military believes that the U.S. has to target these silos, and Russia’s silos, to deter both countries, and doing so eats up “a big chunk of our capped force,” the former senior official at the Pentagon told me. Nuclear strategists in both of America’s major parties are now pushing for a larger arsenal that could survive a simultaneous attack from Russia and China. Those two countries will likely respond by building still more weapons, and on the cycle goes. The writer Kenzaburo Oe has argued that it is the Japanese—and not the American scientists at Los Alamos—who have most had to reckon with the possibility that all of these nuclear weapons could bring about our extinction, or something close to it. This national reckoning has a geography, and Hiroshima and Nagasaki are its sacred sites. The day before I met Keiko Ogura in the Peace Memorial Park, I rode the bullet train southwest from Tokyo past the snow-tipped cone of Mount Fuji, then Old Kyoto and Osaka’s outer sprawl. In the early afternoon, I arrived at Hiroshima station and made my way to prefecture headquarters to meet Hidehiko Yuzaki, governor of the Hiroshima prefecture. Yuzaki’s warm cherrywood office is the size of a small apartment. He has been governor for more than 15 years, and in that time, he has become the global face of Hiroshima. He played a large part in the G7 meeting that the city hosted in 2023, and Obama’s official visit in 2016—the first by a sitting U.S. president. Yuzaki is sometimes criticized for what local rivals say is an excessive focus on international affairs, but he sees his work with foreign leaders as continuing a great tradition in Hiroshima, dating back to the second anniversary of the atomic attack on the city. The mayor at the time, Shinzo Hamai, organized a peace festival, and in a speech that afternoon, he argued that Hiroshima should take on a new role in global culture as a mecca for the contemplation of disarmament. Since then, the city has been rebuilt into a wholly modern metropolis, but also an open-air museum that forces the mind out of the abstract realm of grand strategy and into the concrete reality of nuclear war. I asked Yuzaki if he has become disillusioned as the world has again tipped toward nuclear proliferation. Was he troubled that the fastest buildups are occurring in East Asia, in Hiroshima’s backyard? He told me that he was frustrated. It was disheartening to him that people hadn’t yet grasped the real meaning of nuclear weapons. So long as anyone has them, there is always a risk of proliferation cascades, and no one knows where this new local one may end. The desire for these weapons is contagious, and could spread well beyond nervous national-security types in Seoul and Tokyo. Indeed, the entire Non-Proliferation Treaty regime could unravel altogether. When Israel, India, and Pakistan went nuclear, they were not part of the Non-Proliferation Treaty (nor are they today), but South Korea is a member in good standing and Japan is, in some sense, the treaty’s soul. If those two countries flout the agreement, it will have effectively dissolved. Jake Sullivan, the former U.S. national security adviser, told me that the risk of a global proliferation cascade would rise “considerably.” The initial regional cascades are easy to imagine. The American pullback in Ukraine has already made Poland and Germany a lot more interested in going nuclear. If the Iranian nuclear program survives Israel’s attacks and develops a weapon successfully, Saudi Arabia and Turkey will likely want arsenals as well. The number of countries that have nuclear arms could quickly double. We have some muscle memory for how to manage nuclear rivalries among a few great powers, Sullivan told me. But a strategic landscape of 15 or 20 nuclear powers could be risky in ways that we cannot anticipate. The odds of a nuclear exchange occurring would rise. The most potent current warheads are more than 80 times as destructive as the bomb that leveled Hiroshima’s urban core, and they now fly on missiles that can reach their targets in mere minutes. It would take only one of them to all but erase Tokyo, Seoul, Beijing, or New York City. The total damage that even a limited exchange of these more powerful weapons would cause is mercifully unknown to us, but it may be vain to hope for a limited exchange. The most elaborate and significant war game in the literature suggests that the cycle of nuclear vengeance would continue until the arsenals of all involved parties are spent. If a nuclear conflict does someday break out, death and destruction might very quickly unfold on a planetary scale. Every moment that humanity spends with these weapons spread across the Earth, pointed at one another, is a foolish gamble with the highest-possible stakes. We are betting every chip that our nuclear-weapons technology and alert systems will not malfunction in existentially dangerous ways, even though they already have, several times. We are betting that no head of state who has red-button access will descend into madness and start a nuclear war, even though we know that leaders run the whole gamut from Marcus Aurelius to Caligula. Before I left the Hiroshima-prefecture headquarters, I asked Governor Yuzaki what people usually overlook when they come to his city. Yuzaki paused for a moment to consider the question. He has personally hosted heads of state who control these arsenals. He said that most people are moved. He has watched foreign dignitaries weep in Hiroshima’s museums. He has seen them sitting in stunned silence before the memorials in the Peace Park. People feel horrible about what happened here, he told me. But they don’t seem to understand that humanity is now risking something even more terrible. They think that Hiroshima is the past, Yuzaki said. It’s not. It’s the present. Source of the article

GOATReads: Psychology

The Myth of the Human Brain

You might be thinking of your brain all wrong. Key points The cerebrum, especially the cerebral cortex, has long been thought to be the important part of our brain. However, the cerbrum contains less than 20 percent of the neurons in our brain. Eighty percent of our brain cells are in the cerebellum, which performs functions linked to the unconscious Your mental image of your brain probably looks something like what's pictured here. The cerebrum, shown here, is where all the really important stuff is supposed to happen in humans: consciousness, executive function, perception, motor control, a lot of memory, and, of course, the infamous amygdala where “fear” reputedly lives. The large size of the cerebrum—especially the cerebral cortex—relative to the rest of the brain, is a uniquely human trait that conventional wisdom says makes us smarter than animals. Indeed, in most conversations, you could substitute "cerebrum" for "brain" and no one would quibble with your choice of words. And "cerebral" is synonymous with "smart" in common parlance. There’s just one problem with all of this: the human cerebrum contains less than 20 percent of the brain’s roughly 100 billion neurons. [1,2] If, as Yale neuroscientists Robert Williams and Karl Herrup assert [3], the number of neurons in a brain region is a measure of the importance of that region for behavior, shouldn’t we pay more attention to a single brain region that contains over 80 percent of the neurons in the human brain? And what is that region anyhow? An Overlooked Brain Structure The answers to the above questions are "yes" and "the cerebellum": the small, football-shaped structure tucked in behind the cerebrum, almost as an afterthought. You can see it in the image here. The cerebellum is so inconspicuous that if one omitted it from an image of the brain, most people wouldn’t notice. Indeed, cerebellum is Latin for “little brain,” implying that the structure has correspondingly minor importance. When I learned neuroanatomy—and later taught it in a medical school—neuroscientists used to tell students that people born without a cerebellum (a rare condition called cerebellar agenesis) can lead relatively normal lives, as evidenced by case studies [11]. But according to neuroanatomist Dr. Herculano-Houzel, the human cerebellum contains 80.2 percent of the neurons in the human brain, compared to a meager 18.6 percent in the cerebrum (with 1.2 percent residing in the brainstem, midbrain, and other subcortical structures such as the hypothalamus). [1,2]. So what are all those cerebellar cells doing? Traditionally, the cerebellum was thought of primarily as a motor structure, critical to fine movements, balance, and eye movement. [4] More recently, the importance of the cerebellum for speech (especially the incredibly complex coordination of tongue, lips, jaw, and throat muscles of speech), emotional regulation, memory, cognitive function, and prediction and planning has come to light. [5-10]. Cerebellar cognitive affective syndrome (CCAS), a condition which results from cerebellar stroke, tumor, or trauma, underscores the importance of the cerebellum for non-motor functions, by highlighting deficits in executive function (e.g. planning), language (grammar deficiencies, word choicem atonal speech), spatial abilities (orientation vs disorientation) and mood (flat affect). [6] The Cerebellum and Our Unconscious One reason the cerebellum may get so little respect is that much of what it does occurs quickly, automatically, and without conscious thought. When we speak, we don’t consciously plan where we’ll place our tongue with each upcoming syllable. For that matter, most of us don’t know which word we will utter next until we hear ourselves say it. Nor do we notice the incredible precision with which we predict how much the image of the world will move on our retinas when our gaze is about to shift, so that we can “zero out” that retinal movement to keep the world from seeming to jump around when we move our eyes. The reason is that the cerebellum is built for speed and precision, not considered thought. The majority of cerebellar cells, called granule cells, are small, densely packed neurons with relatively few synapses per neuron (<10), which collectively act as blindingly fast parallel processors. In contrast, the mainstay of the cerebral cortex, more loosely packed pyramidal cells, typically have tens of thousands of synapses per neuron, operate more deliberately, and are associated with conscious experience (perception, memory, thought). Although many unconscious processes also occur in the cerebral cortex [11] and in subcortical and brainstem areas (heart rate regulation, blood pressure, hunger, thermoregulation) [12-16], a significant portion of what we think of as “the unconscious” takes place in the 80 percent of our brain cells that get no respect. Your cerebellum already knew that; now your cerebrum does too. Source of the article

GOATReads: Literature

“The Door’s Still Locked”: Fiction after Fascism

What unites Jordan Peele’s Us, Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite, R. F. Kuang’s Yellowface, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (remade into a Hulu series), and the most recently viral Severance? We might call this a new genre: Labor-as-Horror, given rise, perhaps, by how much “labor” has been in the headlines. There are varying interpretations: It can be a horrible thing (i.e. migrant or child labor); it can be a necessary thing under horrible attack (i.e. Trump’s labor cuts; AI’s replacement of humans); or it can itself be “horror” (i.e. Severance as an indictment of American work culture). “Labor” forces us to ask: Who has power? “Horror” forces us to ask: Who is the monster? And the combination of the two, “Labor-as-Horror,” tells us to beware the uncomfortable fractures in our otherwise ordinary work. What if, in fact, labor is a horror? Might the uncomfortable be a euphemism for the horrific? And might the fractures be bellwethers of actual collapse—of society, or safety, or everything we think we know? Or, perhaps, are we already living in that collapse? In 2024, shortly before the US collapsed into its own panic of federal layoffs, job cuts, and halted funding—what CNN called a labor “bloodbath”—two novels were translated into English. Alia Trabucco Zerán’s Clean and Michele Mari’s Verdigris offer Chilean and Italian examples of Labor-as-Horror. And no wonder, set as they are in modern-day Santiago and 1969’s Nasca, respectively. More specifically, Clean and Verdigris are set in the states of Chile and Italy after the collapse of their fascist governments. As their characters move through their everyday work, this history of fascism is simply fact, air, breath. Clean centers around the testimony of the housemaid Estela, assumed to be a murderer, while Verdigris is about the declining memory of the old groundskeeper “Felice: a true monster.” It is within the details of Estela and Felice’s work—as domestic workers—that the horror emerges: “Stiff, forced smile[s] which are really ‘grimace[s] of terror,’” a laundry of “shirts with bloodstains,” the “mass slaughter” of slugs in the garden, and lettuce heads with “voices chattering in French.” The novels move toward revelations of death, destruction, and injustices obscured. In this way, the features of their work become structural and emotional fractures, and these fractures become horrific reflections of the persisting “social fissures” of the Pinochet and Mussolini regimes. For Estela and Felice—as for Chile and Italy—fascism is in the past. And yet its horrors endure. Clean is narrated by a housemaid, Estela; throughout the novel, she is being interrogated for the death of her employer’s daughter. It’s written in choppy, beguiling prose, akin to Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace and mirroring Scheherazade’s storytelling in Arabian Nights. Estela’s narration is filled with macabre reflections on life and death, imbued with visceral descriptions of bodily or emotional violation and, always, dread. One gets the feeling that Estela’s life is on the line: She wants to tell a good story; she wants to say something meaningful about death, society, and the family that employed her; she wants to be listened to; and she keeps asking, “Can you hear me?” Estela states at the beginning of the novel, “I’m going to tell you a story, and when I get to the end, when I stop talking, you’re going to let me out of here.” But this promise, by the novel’s end, collapses. “Hello?” Estela asks after she has finished her story. “I’m in here. The door’s still locked.” The entire project of Clean is, in fact, a rumination on collapse. The novel begins with an epigraph from Albert Camus’s The Fall, and Estela’s recounting ends with a rock being thrown into the air. She laments, “I didn’t hear it fall.” For the entirety of the novel, readers are likewise waiting for the moment to “drop”—for the little girl, Julia, to die. Although written like a mystery, Clean holds no surprises, only the anxious and uncomfortable fractures that crop up in Estela’s daily, monotonous work: the hiding of a stray dog, who Estela is later forced to kill; Julia’s father’s strange confession one night, which Estela is forced to listen to; Julia’s mother, toasting “cheers” to her guests immediately after mistreating Estela. These events don’t serve a specific plot, as much as they build malaise and the terrifying realization that we are all trapped, alongside Estela, in the story, the interrogation room, and the social system of labor. Indeed, if there is any surprise in Clean at all, it is that neither the “how” nor the “why” of Julia’s death—the entire reason for Estela’s confession—are ever fully revealed. “What did the cause matter?” Estela asks. The point is the collapse. (Of safety, the promise of freedom, and the previous conviction that we might “get used to life there.”) “The damage was already done,” Estela says, “It’s important you understand. Spilled blood can’t return to its source. Just as a lifeless body will eventually sink underwater. Just as the crack that opened up that day would be impossible to mend.” This impossibility might have been top of mind for Trabucco Zerán, who belongs to “a generation of writers who were children during the Pinochet era but largely came of age after the democratic transition,” explains Caroline A. Miranda. “Even as they have tasted political freedom, the legacy of the dictatorship has followed them into adulthood: the missing who never returned, as well as an economic system and a constitution molded by the military regime that is still used to govern the country.” How, then, could one not connect Estela’s warning to Chile’s fascist past? It is a distinctive and perhaps incriminating time, then, for Trabucco Zerán’s Clean to come to English-speaking audiences, and especially to the United States, where fascism is on the rise. There are obvious resonances between Pinochet and Trump: their carefully constructed legal immunity; their use of propaganda and conspiracy; their refusal to accept any election results not in their favor. Most blatantly, Trump is now echoing Pinochet’s “disappearings”: the one-thousand-plus people who Pinochet’s dictatorship kidnapped and killed, leaving no record of their fate. Now, only two years after Chile began uncovering what it could of these disappeared people, the US government kidnapped and disappeared a green-card holder, pro-Palestinian organizer and Columbia student Mahmoud Khalil. Khalil’s case was the first out of a series of many attempts to deport, detain, and disappear not only pro-Palestinian activists but also migrants, dissenters, and people of color. The use of the word “disappear” as a verb with a passive object is vital: not just “Khalil disappeared” but “the Trump administration disappeared Khalil,” or “Khalil was disappeared (by the government).” Khalil is turned into the passive object that is disappeared, rather than the sentence’s subject. He is stripped of grammatical agency, just as he is stripped of his political agency and legal rights. The horror, of course, is that what happens merely grammatically is, then, what happens in real life. This use of “disappear” is often credited to Pinochet and threatens not just death or detainment but the literal quashing of one’s existence, voice, and memory. It is consequential and oppressive: an act of terror. In Chile (and in Spanish) it identifies victims of the Pinochet regime, known as “Los Desaparecidos” (The Disappeared). And in Clean, it is the apparatus upon which the novel’s thriller/horror element depends. Estela is afraid of disappearing. “Can you hear me?” she asks in the second sentence of the novel. “Can you hear me?” she asks again in the second-to-last sentence. Estela is constantly concerned with disappearance: She is haunted by the concept of being forgotten, erased, and, indeed, “disappeared” in the passive form. When she is ordered to wash a dress, Estela notes that it “was so soft that at any moment it seemed it might disappear, and I with it.” When asked to clean the fallen figs from the yard, Estela remarks, “I cleaned until every last trace of death had disappeared. The tree would never recover, it had found its cause. After a few months they cut it down.” When Estela muses about the child Julia’s death, she says, “Of course the girl wouldn’t remember me. But maybe, had she lived, she’d have remembered my hands.” And when she thinks of herself and her past, Estela confesses, “It’s a strange coincidence, because it’s like my childhood memories all mounted up until my seventh birthday and then, poof, disappeared.” Estela’s fear of disappearance is the reason she is invested in her storytelling, the reason she is haunted by Julia’s death, and the reason she cannot forget her own mother. The mundanities of her work threaten violence. She notices bloodstains in her employers’ dental guards, laundered shirts, and chewed fingernails. She sees death in the trees, the box of rat poison, the dustbin. She shoots a dog between its eyes. How is it that something can suddenly, “poof, [be] disappeared,” even oneself? Clean ends with three questions: “Hello? Can you hear me? Is anybody there?” The following white space, marking the end of the novel, marks also Estela’s final disappearance. This move is foreshadowed in all the preceding chapters, themselves split up into small written chunks and divided by tense, white space. These breaks are themselves disappearances—time jumps, words unspoken, unvoiced grievances—over and over again. That is, until the very last one, in which Estela is vanished. Such disappearances are “places like the hidden storage room behind the dismantled bed at the side of the hayloft, places like the rich earth that lay under the lawn,” explains Michele Mari in his gothic horror novel Verdigris. “In both cases,” he writes, “these places and memories housed bodies: was it possible that this was all the past granted us, dead people or ghosts? The executed or the disappeared?” Mari’s characters—much like Trabucco Zerán’s—live in the ruins of a collapse they have yet to recognize, or, perhaps, even remember. Indeed, disappearance in Verdigris is directly tied to memory, and in particular the deteriorating memory of Felice, the delirious groundskeeper of a northern Italian estate. In the summer of 1969, Felice strikes an unlikely friendship with his employer’s grandson, the 13-year-old Michelino. Michelino is entranced by Felice’s Otherness: his “lumpy and spongelike nose,” his rural dialect (which itself “seems to present a break from reality,” as Brian Robert Moore writes in his translator’s note), and, most of all, the fact that Felice’s memories are “disappearing at a devastating rate, because for every erasure that he noticed there must have been many others that, by the very virtue of the memory having vanished, left no sign and inspired no suspicion.” Michelino and Felice’s friendship is precarious, and readers are unsure who might hurt the other. Felice is older, menacing, physically grotesque, with a mysterious history; but Michelino is smart and a member of the social elite, indeed the grandson of Felice’s employer. Their friendship is not only unlikely but laden itself with the unease of the horror genre. It is also reminiscent of Victor Frankenstein’s relationship to his monster. Throughout the novel, indeed, Michelino refers to Felice as his “monster,” and he extracts a frightening glee from this relationship. “While I felt disheartened by the impossibility of helping [Felice] to put his unsettled mind back in order,” Michelino confesses, “there now crept in the joy of being able to confirm that my monster truly was a monster.” Michelino makes it his mission to recover the memory of “ugly,” “monstrous,” “poor” Felice. He quizzes his grandfather’s groundskeeper on facts, interviews him about his past, and devises a game of mnemonic devices (“fleece” for “Felice,” “NASCAR” for the town “Nasca,” et cetera). But what begins as an assumption of a biological disorder—“senile dementia,” Michelino suspects—has more sinister roots. In fact, Felice is traumatized by his past, and in particular, the historical violences brought on by a fascist state. He was abandoned as a child and a witness to murder. He does not have a last name. The historical records do not account for his employment at the summer estate: “The local officials at the time made a clean sweep of the preexisting documentation.” And Felice’s memory, Verdigris insinuates, is overwritten by further trauma, such that he is constantly “in contact with something frightening and unhuman … with the dead, essentially.” In this way, the novel draws direct conclusions between oppressive political systems and the act of disappearing memories, histories, and people. “And what about no one knowing who owned this house before the Fascist era? Do things like that happen too?” Michelino asks his grandfather. “They can happen,” his grandfather responds. “And a Fascist prefect randomly making up a new name for a municipality, that can happen too, and with not a single inhabitant remembering the previous name?” “That’s life, tout passe…” Michelino is horrified by his grandfather’s shrugging acceptance of historical revisionism: “The same old crap they teach you in school to get the better of you,” he exclaims. “Everything flows and nothing stays, you convinced yourself that things were a certain way when, upsy-daisy, they’ve changed.” This collapse is the horror in Verdigris, just as it is in Clean. Michelino goes on to discover wine bottles filled with blood, hidden barrels of meat-eating slugs, and the skeletal remains of Nazi soldiers: all hidden in his grandparents’ otherwise beautiful estate. “Why did the people who knew keep quiet?” Michelino asks. And why did Felice continue to “liv[e] permanently among the house’s mysteries … sleep[ing] in his little room, work[ing] in our garden and orchard”? The question is similar to the ones Estela poses: By now you’re probably wondering why I stayed. … Why do you stay in your jobs? In your poky offices, in the factories, in the shops on the other side of this wall? I never stopped believing I would leave that house, but routine is treacherous; the repetition of the same rituals—open your eyes, close them, chew, swallow, brush your hair, brush your teeth—each one an attempt to gain mastery over time. A month, a week, the length and breadth of a life. Both Clean and Verdigris ask us what we would do in the face of collapse. What we would do if we lived in “a place where we city dwellers … slowly yet meticulously progressed toward its own destruction”? In both novels, labor is laden with horror precisely because its mundanities so easily mask inequality, structural oppression, and even the tyrannies of fascism. The ease with which we can continue in our respective daily tasks is one of the most obvious and horrendous ways we surrender our own freedom, agency, and remembrance. What would we do in the face of an active disappearance—of people, memory, history? Would we keep quiet? Would we allow the mechanical repetition of labor, silence, or routine to pacify us? What would we do, if we were to be in that place? As Anna Aslanyan writes, Verdigris can be read as a “a commentary on collective amnesia, a condition affecting not just contemporary Italy, where fascism is becoming a real threat again, but also societies all over the globe”—especially in the United States, which just welcomed the novel’s English translation. The same concern with amnesia, of course, can be found in Clean. “From now on you can no longer say that you didn’t know,” Estela tells us, before she disappears forever. “That you didn’t hear or see. That you were oblivious to the truth, to reality.” This is the double horror of both novels. We live in that place now.  Source of the article

GOATReads:Politics

See Me like a State

The “world’s most advanced surveillance technologies,” explains political scientist Minxin Pei, are to be found today in China. These domestic spying initiatives boast powerful data-collection capabilities, as well as ostentatious, science fiction–inflected names: Skynet, Sharp Eyes, Golden Shield. What’s important to Pei’s The Sentinel State: Surveillance and the Survival of Dictatorship in China, though, is that none of this technology turns out to work particularly well. True, Skynet may collect license plates and facial-recognition matches and camera feeds from all across the country; but videos must be watched, images cross-checked, and automated decisions second-guessed. In Wuhan, as Skynet’s output increased, the city was forced to hire over 2,700 employees to comb through the videos it produced; in Shenzhen, Skynet’s demands for 24-hour coverage required a district-level public security bureau to set up more than 170 new surveillance centers employing some 760 full-time police staff. The pitfalls of individual programs vary somewhat, but the broader story remains largely the same: again and again, Pei details the vast human infrastructure needed to support widespread technological surveillance at the scale of a country as large as China. This ballooning of personnel to support technological surveillance programs mirrors the growth of a decades-old and millions-strong human informant network that has embedded itself deep into Chinese civil society. In The Sentinel State’s telling, many Chinese civic organizations are infiltrated to the hilt and heavily monitored by a panoply of state security forces. In just a single city, informants successfully sabotage more than one hundred potential protests in a year; security agents attempt to ply a civil-society activist with gifts for her child; a lawyer in Beijing is tailed by uniformed police officers during politically sensitive anniversaries. Chinese academia, too, is rife with informants. Less elite schools, Pei observes, can sometimes get by with only a single tipster stationed in each department—not so at the prestigious Beijing Foreign Studies University, where the rate jumps to as high as one per classroom. This resemblance between the ubiquity of the camera operator and the ubiquity of the informant demonstrates that the atmosphere of paranoia and restraint that sustains China’s dictatorship needs little in the way of advanced technology. “Simply knowing that secret police and their informants may be watching can lead one to curtail one’s anti-regime activities,” Pei laments. “Herein lies the true power of the Chinese surveillance state, [made] possible [by] millions of ordinary citizens watching and listening in the course of their daily lives.” Only one part of this story typically gets told. In recent years, coverage of China has settled on describing a sort of mythical authoritarianism without authoritarians—the Chinese regime, we are told, endures and will endure because of unprecedented advances in technology that allow for never-before-seen forms of intrusion into citizens’ lives. Josh Chin and Liza Lin’s book Surveillance State alternates between descriptions of “digital utopia” and a “dystopian police state … armed with AI.” Elsewhere, Kai Strittmatter’s We Have Been Harmonized paints a picture of “digital totalitarianism,” according to the publisher’s description, where “facial and voice recognition, GPS tracking, supercomputer databases, and millions of high-resolution security cameras make it nearly impossible for a Chinese citizen to hide anything from authorities.” It is against this discourse that Pei’s The Sentinel State positions itself. Pei’s argument is quite digestible: He contends that the endurance of autocracy in China is less a function of technology than it is of human labor in the form of informant networks, labor-intensive domestic spying, and heavy policing. Pei is not a denialist when it comes to Chinese authoritarianism, nor is he interested in downplaying the extent of China’s surveillance state. But he is keenly aware of the ways in which today’s Chinese autocracy looks more like the past than not, and he is wary of the extent to which this story of technological tyranny obscures important realities of the situation on the ground in China. Though Pei does not make this case forcefully in his book—instead choosing to focus on the empirical details of China’s surveillance apparatus—The Sentinel State helps shine a light on how the idea of techno-authoritarianism serves as a kind of totalizing narrative: one which has pernicious effects on our ability to understand the political situation in China. As stories about flashy new technologies eclipse more measured coverage, it becomes easy for foreign audiences, particularly those in America, to lose track of the actual harms inflicted by China’s surveillance state. Put more simply, this narrative of techno-authoritarianism takes a difficult-to-summarize situation filled with diverging interests and mundane realities and flattens it into the language of the American cultural imagination, inflected with lurid Cold War fantasy and as contemptuous of complexity as it can be. Why has it taken so long for a book like The Sentinel State to emerge? If human surveillance explains the persistence of dictatorship in China, what explains the persistence of the techno-dystopian canard which keeps us from seeing this? For starters, the myth of a techno-authoritarian China is deeply rooted in America’s cultural discourse. And this isn’t helped by the fact that the lines between futurist prediction and science fiction have become increasingly blurred. For example: Taiwanese computer scientist Kai-Fu Lee has sounded the alarm about an AI arms race between the United States and China in his 2018 book AI Superpowers. But he has also coauthored a 2021 English-language short story collection called AI 2041 with the science fiction author Chen Qiufan, another veteran of the Chinese tech industry. Like Chen’s 2013 novel Waste Tide—which features a high-tech Chinese system called Compound Eyes keeping watch over “every street, every corner, [and] every expression on every person”—AI 2041 gives us a flashy and entertaining view of a future digital dystopia. Unsurprisingly, AI 2041 was a bestseller in the United States, with rave reviews in the Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and the New York Times. This is not to fault Lee and Chen for writing a quite compelling work of literature. But it is worth noting that quasi-fantastic narratives of this type have found an eager audience in Americans, whose view of the reality of Chinese surveillance differs little from the fiction they read. After all, “the world consumes much of its imagery of East Asia”—including China—“through pop cultural forms [in which] the region is largely depicted as a collection of high-tech, productive societies” with a “natural proclivity to master technologies of the West, from sedans to silicon chips,” according to historian Andrew Liu (leaning on the work of literary critic Colleen Lye). It is this imagined proclivity that “is precisely what makes Asia so dangerous” in the minds of Americans. And it is this idea—that China has taken the technologies of the West, and turned them authoritarian and malignant—that animates much of the narrative of digital dictatorship, which The Sentinel State works so hard to complicate. This fascination with the role of technology in Chinese politics is continuous, in Liu’s view, with a broader cultural tendency in which “East Asia is either a hypermodern civilization that reflects the degradation of [the] US … or, conversely, [a] threat that will one day overtake Euro-America, subsuming it within itself.” Liu and other scholars dub this tendency “techno-Orientalism,” a trend that runs most obviously through the ubiquity of Asian megacorporations in genre-defining science fiction works like Blade Runner (1982) and Neuromancer (1984), and appears more subtly in The Matrix (1999), Ex Machina (2014), and other cultural products set in and around imaginary East Asias. But techno-Orientalism is not just a problem of media representation, or even just of putative racism. Rather, it serves to obscure the true stakes of the debate over Chinese surveillance: subjecting the complexities of Chinese oppression to a sort of homogenizing American anxiety. In the techno-Orientalist frame, the problem is less about the danger the Chinese regime poses to its own people and more about the danger it poses to the West. For the techno-Orientalists, Liu observes, “decades of industrialization and accumulation in the Asia-Pacific region have brought to life [new] fantasies of an exceptionally dominant China [as] dystopian threat.” This story also serves convenient political purposes. Putting technology at the center of the narrative about Chinese unfreedom allows American security hawks to frame China as a high-tech threat to the entire “free world.” And this, in turn, allows them to fold seemingly humanitarian concerns about surveillance into their broader project: China containment. The logic of the so-called US-China tech war shifts the conversation away from questions of human rights and toward questions of national-security policy, lumping the problem of the surveillance state in with debates about sanctions, semiconductor export controls, trade protectionism against Chinese electric cars, and the forced divestment of Chinese investors from apps like TikTok. It doesn’t hurt, either, that this narrative places American commentators on the same footing as Chinese dissidents and activists, for whom the PRC’s surveillance state is a genuine threat. As China’s access to technology becomes the object of focus, it becomes easy to conflate the danger posed by specific technologies to victims of the Chinese regime with a vague notion of a tech-enabled global China threat, creating a narrative that both inflames nationalist paranoia in Americans and flatters the self-importance of America’s China hawks. China threatens me just as China threatens you, the story goes—so what’s good for me, an American defense analyst, must also be good for you, an exiled Chinese human-rights lawyer. One of the most important observations in The Sentinel State comes near the middle of the book, when Pei remarks that “a society shot through with informants will be riven by distrust, eroding the foundations of democracy [and] social trust.” Pei is a political scientist and his book a recognizably social-scientific work of scholarship. Still, this observation about the long-term social effects of surveillance connects The Sentinel State to a long history of writing in the Chinese humanities, one which runs through the history of the People’s Republic, and perhaps even extends backward into imperial China. Such a history can be seen in the Nobel Prize–nominated Chinese writer Can Xue, whose writing often returns to the subject of how Chinese society is structured by pervasive surveillance.2 Can Xue’s writing is deeply interested in how the basic form of Chinese social life begins to resemble the state’s apparatuses of supervision and control as trust erodes and suspicion proliferates. Can Xue’s characters live in a world of perpetual monitoring from which no one can escape, literary critic Jianguo Chen points out, but this monitoring comes not just from the “dictatorial party [but] the hateful masses as well.” Take Can Xue’s novella Old Floating Cloud. Here, the line is blurred between state and social surveillance, between being watched by an informant and being watched by an inquisitive neighbor, or between watching someone and being watched. This blurring occurs as a character flits between observing and avoiding observation, gripped by a fear that his thoughts and feelings are as visible to his coworkers’ prying eyes as his neighbor’s actions are to his.   At home after work, he pretended to trim his beard. … With the mirror in his hand, he observed his neighbor’s movements behind him. He felt a little relaxed after assuring himself nothing suspicious was going on. Maybe his erratic heartbeat gave him away? … He thought everyone could hear the noise. That was why everyone at the office stared at him. … To prevent people from hearing his heartbeat, he sneaked into [the] office and looked out the window for hours [but] today, stretching his head out the window, he noticed heads at the other two windows [and] realized they were colleagues in the same room. Conversely, in Can Xue’s Five Spice Street, we see echoes of The Sentinel State’s overwhelmed Skynet staff. Here, members of a neighborhood voluntarily, and with minimal coordination, create an atmosphere of “extensive surveillance,” in an incompetent attempt to catch what they believe to be sexual transgression. These neighbors thoroughly ruin the quality of life on their street. Yet, in the end, these self-appointed watchers cannot even agree on the appearance or age—let alone the behavior—of their target. It is not by coincidence that one of the most incisive depictions of state and society in China comes from a literary figure. As noted by the critic and social theorist Nan Z. Da, close reading and other techniques of linguistic and literary analysis have long been key tools of Chinese surveillance. Such techniques date back to at least the Hundred Flowers Campaign, in which Mao invited intellectuals to candidly express their views of his regime before subjecting their writings to careful inspection for signs of punishable dissent. Chinese writers, Da observes, therefore have an understanding that surveillance can often take the form of “technical hairsplitting” or the “combing [of] text for minor, semantic transgressions.” Coverage of Chinese civil society often applauds clever efforts to evade censorship using technological countermeasures, usually by way of coded phrases that censors cannot detect or encrypted messaging apps and video filters that allow Chinese netizens to avoid the attention of social media monitors. But if coded phrases and secure apps exist to evade digital censors, then an entire infrastructure of textual and cultural analysis—powered by humans and trained on a tradition of politically motivated close reading—exists as a sort of backstop for Chinese censorship. And, as Da notes, it has done so for at least decades. In Hong Kong, for example, Chinese national-security authorities clamped down on protests since 2020. Consequently, cultural products—from novels to songs to children’s picture books—were scrutinized for signs of prodemocracy sympathies, in what the Hong Kong legislator Dennis Kwok decried as a “literary inquisition.” This is all to say that—as both Chinese literature and The Sentinel State can tell us—there are specific harms perpetuated by China’s society of surveillance that cannot be seen clearly if we take something like “digital totalitarianism” as our lens of analysis. In a country where informants permeate every layer of social interaction, the solution is not as simple as outsmarting an algorithm or evading capture on a video feed. Rather, the threat of being watched by both state and stranger—of your writings and thoughts being turned over for dissent—shapes intellectual life in ways that technological surveillance by itself cannot. Techno-authoritarianism may pit the dissident against the security camera. But an informant society pits the dissident against everyone, at least in their mind. These are somewhat counterintuitive observations for many China watchers, but such insights about surveillance and social trust are by no means unique to Minxin Pei nor the writers and critics who can see them from the world of Chinese-language letters. They are simply reflections of the ugly realities of Chinese authoritarianism that a story of technological dystopia elides. Attempts to frame China’s surveillance state as a product of dastardly Oriental adaptation or a downstream effect of the wrong side winning the tech war obscure the true difficulty of the situation faced by Chinese citizens and human-rights advocates–—that the surveillance state cannot be sanctioned into nonexistence or tricked into irrelevance, because it lives in the heart of the country’s civil society and is inextricably tied to the form of its social relations. The Sentinel State goes a long way to pointing us toward the above argument, because it recognizes that Chinese authoritarianism is fundamentally not a technical problem. And the book is useful because it not only reveals that the system does not rely on technology, but also that the harms it creates cannot be avoided by technical means. Pei’s ability to articulate this remains the strongest quality of his latest book: The Sentinel State returns us to the premise that politics is a human affair, and surveillance a human phenomenon. Early in The Sentinel State’s description of the popular myth of Chinese techno-authoritarianism, Pei references George Orwell’s 1984, perhaps to lightly mock the most tired of all dystopian clichés. But whatever his intentions, Pei’s invocation of Orwell remains worth examining. Though 1984 gave us many of the images that still define tyranny for Western audiences—TVs watching their viewers chief among them—it ultimately isn’t these technological tricks that undo Orwell’s protagonist. Instead, it’s Winston’s misplaced faith in individuals who turn out to be part of a carefully oriented network of informants and secret police, the reveal of which undercuts his belief in the basic premises of social trust and destroys the last meaningful relationships in his life. Even the most cited-to-death work of literary dystopia knows that technology can only do so much. At the end of the day, dictatorships are made up of people, their harms human-sized and their fortunes rising and falling with the currents of social life. Source of the article

GOATReads:Sociology

The Art We Do Together: “Art Worlds” 40th Anniversary

In the latest installment of our partnership with the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Fernando Domínguez Rubio revisits Howard Becker’s “Art Worlds” on the occasion of the book’s 40th anniversary. One way to think about intellectual life is as a musical composition where each new book adds to the chorus by bringing in the rhythms, tonalities, and hooks that give shape to the overall melody. Every now and then, however, a book comes that changes the tune altogether. Howard Becker’s Art Worlds, which now celebrates its 40th birthday, is one of those books. It is hardly an overstatement to say that the publication of Art Worlds in 1982 changed forever how sociologists study art. Art Worlds created a seismic change. It demonstrated that the sociological study of art need not be engulfed in trying to solve highfalutin aesthetic questions (e.g., What is art? How do we distinguish it from non-art? What is an author?) and could instead focus on studying the collective practices through which artworks are realized. Art Worlds offered a sharp contrast to the scholarship that had dominated the study of art up to that point. The two decades before its publication had been characterized by an all-out assault on the central ideas of modern aesthetics. In France, for example, the idea of the author had been demolished by poststructuralist authors like Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault (there’s an irony somewhere there). Meanwhile, in Italy, Umberto Eco celebrated the iconoclastic emergence of popular culture and how it upended the old hierarchies that thinkers of an earlier generation, most notably Theodor Adorno, had sought to defend. In England, Stuart Hall and Raymond Williams, along with the rest of the Birmingham School, laid bare the inner workings of cultural hegemony, while John Berger introduced British public television’s mass audiences to a new way of seeing art as an apparatus of symbolic domination. Even the heavily fortified citadels of art history and aesthetics were not immune; schools of thought such as the institutional theory of art, feminist art history, and Marxist aesthetics mounted internal rebellions against long-held ideals about the purity and universality of art. Meanwhile, art itself was going through similar convulsions, with movements like pop art, land art, performance art, Fluxus, feminist art, and institutional criticism, not to mention the myriad of art collectives in Latin American and Eastern Europe, defying the modern canon and institutions that had defined art up to that point. Sociology, Becker’s intellectual home, was “all in” in the mutiny against modern aesthetics. The 1960s and ’70s were a time in which trenchant critique, bordering on philistinism, dominated the sociology of art. Text after text adopted what we might call a Scooby-Doo research model: taking a seemingly good character (art) and proceeding to unmask it as the bad guy (ideology). Thus, while authors such as Arnold Hauser and Pierre Francastel sought to expose seemingly inert, formal elements of artworks as projections propelled by “real social forces,” others like Raymonde Moulin revealed that art was not a pure and autonomous field of activity but an activity guided by market forces. Still others, like Pierre Bourdieu, revealed that love for art was little more than a bourgeois conceit for social reproduction. In a time in which doing a sociology of art seemed to require deploying sociology against art, the genius of Art Worlds was radically simple: it just studied art as something that people do together. In so doing, Becker took a potentially controversial idea—that art is a form of collective action—and presented it in a disarmingly common-sense way. If we study how art is produced, Becker argued, we soon realize that this process is rarely, if ever, an individual one. Artists always depend on others to obtain materials to produce their works, as well as to exhibit, play, publish, and distribute them. Art, it follows, is a process that requires collaboration and coordination among different people. In this sense, it is no different from any other social activity, which means that we need to study it as we do any other type of social process: by focusing on what people do. This meant studying not only artists but also critics, curators, editors, art materials suppliers, administrators, and audiences, to name just a few, along with the standards, conventions, and technologies that allowed them to coordinate their actions and produce an artwork. Becker opened an entirely different empirical research program in the sociological study of art, one that moved the attention from ontological and epistemological questions that had dominated traditional aesthetics, such as “What is art?” and “How do we know and experience art?”, to the pragmatic question “How is art done?” Thus, facing a painting like, say, Picasso’s Guernica, Becker invited us not simply to focus on decoding its symbolism and formal composition or on trying to decipher Picasso’s artistic intent and reveal its underlying meaning, but to ask ourselves how such an artwork could be done. This approach employed a new arsenal of empirical queries, such as: What were the networks of collaboration and cooperation that helped Picasso paint this work? What materials did he use, where did he get them, who provided them? What conventions did he follow (or break)? What institutions supported him? In short, what kind of “world” and collective effort had to be in place so that Picasso could create and display this masterpiece? As I was preparing this short essay, I was curious to see what contemporary readers make of this now 40-year-old book. So I indulged in that most peculiar ritual of our age: reading online reviews. The overwhelming majority were positive, effusively praising the clarity and richness of Becker’s descriptions. The negative were almost unanimous in their criticism: Art Worlds lacks any “real” theory and is filled with trivially obvious observations about how the art world works. Such criticisms did not surprise me, as they mirror those I have heard leveled in graduate seminars over the years. Students in search of a “theory fix” typically fault Art Worlds for being a perfect example of why sociology has a bad press as a “science of the obvious.” These types of critiques forget that the obvious is often what is most easily missed—and dismissed. If Art Worlds was and remains important, it is precisely because it reminds us of the obvious: that art is a collective practice. Somehow, this seemingly platitudinous observation had been missing from most art analysis, thereby reducing art history to a narrative about individuals and their heroic feats of creativity. By inviting us to remember that art is always a form of collective action, Art Worlds widened our attention to include all those agents, practices, and technologies that had typically remained invisible and barely made it into the hegemonic narratives of art, but without which art would be simply impossible. In so doing, Art Worlds reminded those studying art to be humble in their descriptions and pay attention to the perfectly banal, yet crucial facts that compose the social worlds we inhabit. Photography needs film, digital files, and cameras; consequently, you really cannot understand the transformation of photography without understanding the corporations that produce photographic material that shapes what artists can and cannot do. Sometimes the absence of an artist’s work in a museum is not necessarily for ideological or aesthetic reasons, but simply because the artworks were “too big to go through the museum’s doors and too heavy for its floors to support.” But unlike the mad king in Borges’s “On Exactitude in Science” story, who sought to create a map that was a perfect representation of his empire, Becker offered in Art Worlds an incomplete map. This inconclusiveness was not a bug but a carefully designed feature of the sociological tradition he had inherited from his mentor, Everett Hughes. The tradition was firmly anchored in the belief that any attempt at providing a definitive account, let alone a conclusive theoretical model, of any social world is fated to fail because these worlds are continually changing. This is why Art Worlds, to the desperation of some, does not offer any theoretical model. It is also why Art Worlds contains no pretensions to having provided a final account of what art worlds are or how they work. Instead, the book is constructed around carefully curated, open-ended, and inconclusive lists. Paragraph after paragraph, we are told that “sometimes” artists do this, while “other times” they do that, and yet “other times” they do something else. The result is a book that reads not as a closed treatise or model but as a compendium of researchable empirical questions that invite the reader to continue exploring them. If there is something that defines Art Worlds, it is this dogmatic antidogmatism—a complete refusal to have the last word. This antidogmatism and open-endedness are precisely what make Art Worlds a fresh and necessary read even today. Unlike classics now sunk by the weight of their theoretical models, Art Worlds still reads as an object lesson for anyone writing in academesque for a living. At a moment in which oppositional and antagonistic writing seems to dominate the conversation, Art Worlds never tries to convince, demonstrate, or conclude, just to invite us to a conversation. The book does not require anything from the reader, such as prior knowledge of controversies in some subfield or being well-versed in concepts, theories, or debates. Art Worlds offers a leveled playing field on which the author never imposes himself upon the reader, because there is no battle to be won, just a conversation to be had. This is, for me, the indelible value of this book as a perennial reminder that writing can take the form of an open-ended invitation to think together. Source of the article