Today’s art post inspiration comes from an unlikely source: JAMA Opthamalogy. The article “Evidence That Leonardo da Vinci Had Strabismus” makes the case that the artist’s exceptional rendering of 3-D in 2-D was in part thanks to his eye condition sometimes referred to as wandering eye. The author, opthomologist Christopher Tyler of City, University of London, examined six pieces thought to be depicting Leonardo da Vinci: “David (Andrea del Verrocchio); Young Warrior (Andrea del Verrocchio); Salvator Mundi (da Vinci); Young John the Baptist (da Vinci); Vitruvian Man (da Vinci) and another possible da Vinci self-portrait.” (quoted from the university’s press release). Ars Technica’s coverage of the piece has helpful visuals. There seems to be disagreement in the art community about whether all of those art pieces depict Leonardo da Vinci, but this is a topic Tyler had already researched earlier. His argument seems convincing to me and is an interesting revelation about the condition under which some artists did that work. Apparently other famous artists also had strabismus (e.g., Rembrandt) or other vision impairments (e.g., Monet, O’Keeffe). I appreciate the angle the Washington Post’s coverage takes on this at the end noting that this should give people with eye-alignment disorders some boost in confidence to counter the discrimination they sometimes face both on the job market and in social situations.
This image (I snagged it from an FB group) is evidently from this book [Amazon]. Science For Work And Play (1954).
I think someone should write Philosophy For Work and Play. “Error is real.” We could keep the picture the same.
From this story, though it was the shortest and the most simple too of all those I have recorded in this book, I feel that I learned several things of some importance. First of all, how much of our speech, which we think freshly minted in our own mouths, consists of set locutions. The Ascian seemed to speak only in sentences he had learned by rote, though until he used each for the first time we had never heard them. Foila seemed to speak as women commonly do, and if I had been asked whether she employed such tags, I would have said that she did not – but how often one might have predicted the ends of her sentences from their beginnings.
I’ve been waiting for this paper to drop, ever since Suresh told me about it last year. It’s groundbreaking. What it does is to take Steve Teles’ qualitative work on the conservative legal movement, and then ask a simple question: if we start with the qualitative evidence about the program’s intentions, then FOIA the hell out of George Mason University to find out which judges attended the Manne seminars, and then apply cutting edge econometrics and natural language processing to their decisions, what are we going to find out?
Some selected quotes (as well as one quote that isn’t in the current version, but will likely be in the next) under the fold, for those who are interested in the headline findings. [click to continue…]
That’s the headline for my latest piece in The National Interest. (over the fold)The central point is brilliantly summed up in this clip from Utopia.
One fun aspect of public art is that you can stumble into it without any planning on your part to have an artistic experience. Such was the case when I found myself staring at columns of colanders and looking up at fruits and vegetables hanging from pots and pans in City Hall Park in New York. The exhibition is by B. Wurtz who likes to draw on everyday objects in his work. Since I am a huge fan of reusing objects, this appeals to me a great deal.
Another neat aspect of public art in such a location is that by taking a step, you can get an entirely different visual experience. With both trees and scyscrapers in the background, this is not an exaggeration. The pictures on the exhibition site were taken in daylight while mine (see album on Flickr) were taking during dusk so they offer different views from that perspective as well. The trees will be on display in this park through December 7, 2018.
According to a long-standing legal precedent known as the Flores settlement, which established guidelines for keeping children in immigration detention, Helen had a right to a bond hearing before a judge; that hearing would have likely hastened her release from government custody and her return to her family. At the time of her apprehension, in fact, Helen checked a box on a line that read, “I do request an immigration judge,” asserting her legal right to have her custody reviewed. But, in early August, an unknown official handed Helen a legal document, a “Request for a Flores Bond Hearing,” which described a set of legal proceedings and rights that would have been difficult for Helen to comprehend. (“In a Flores bond hearing, an immigration judge reviews your case to determine whether you pose a danger to the community,” the document began.) On Helen’s form, which was filled out with assistance from officials, there is a checked box next to a line that says, “I withdraw my previous request for a Flores bond hearing.” Beneath that line, the five-year-old signed her name in wobbly letters.
That time a ‘Constitution in Exile‘ borderline anarchist libertarian and a Catholic integralist wandered into a Twitter thread to discuss political legitimacy, and it crossed neither of their minds it might be a normative notion (rather than a descriptive synonym for power, give or take.) [click to continue…]
I’ve been absent here since over the last weeks all my time except for teaching and other non-postponable duties has gone into nation-wide activism to end the underfunding of universities in the Netherlands – about which another time, hopefully soon, more in another blogpost. But I wanted to briefly interrupt my absence to share with you the good news that Urgenda, has won the Appeal that the Dutch State made against the famous 2015 Climate Case that Urgenda won, on which I wrote here at the time. For some brief reports about today’s ruling, see the NYT, the Guardian, or in Dutch, NRC. [click to continue…]
One taken this morning:
I wrote a long Twitter thread on Kavanaugh a week ago, the first time that I thought he was going to get in. This piece by Matt Yglesias covers much of the same ground that I did, but better. This Boston Review article by Sam Moyn says what I wanted to say about courts and democracy, but is sharper. Still, there’s one idea in neither of them that I think is worth developing.
That is Kavanaugh’s role as a frame. The sociology and political science of social movements talks a lot about how movements on the street need frames – simple representations that provide a common focus for the very different people with different interests that make up a movement. Kavanaugh – angry, distorted, shouting face and all – provides the most concrete imaginable metaphor for what the Republican party has become, and for the white conservative elite that is trying to cripple American democracy. The ways in which conservative judges are undermining American democracy are apparently a-political, and hard for many people to focus on and understand. Kavanaugh represents and personifies this silent judicial revolution. And he does so in an especially visceral way for the women who are the backbone of the social and political movement that has to be at the heart of any hope for political change in the US. He can – and should be – hung like a rotting albatross around the neck of the Republican party.
Democratizing the Supreme Court is a long term project. It is going to require a fundamental reshaping of the American legal elite – focusing on the cosy relationship between top law schools and the judiciary, and the ways in which the Federalist Society has finessed the ambiguities between debating ideas, providing a pipeline for judges, and vetting Supreme Court justices. It will also require politics on the streets. The circumstances of Kavanaugh’s elevation have temporarily raised the costs of overly comfortable relationships in the legal world. Keeping them raised – and turning them into a broader democratic agenda – will require active and continued mobilization. Pressing for investigations (should the Democrats win in November) of the role that Whelan, Leonard Leo of the Federalist Society and others seem to have played behind the scenes in trying to discredit accusations. Framing the court and every rotten decision it makes as the Kavanaugh Court. And protesting in every way possible to raise the costs for the politicians who voted for Kavanaugh, and where possible to replace them.
None of this changes the fact that it is very, very bad that Kavanaugh has been confirmed. But it does mean that Kavanaugh can, despite himself, become a political engine for change, in ways that would have been impossible if he had been confirmed without controversy, as seemed likely to happen just a few weeks ago.
In a small town in the French-speaking part of Switzerland is a fantastic exhibit dedicated entirely to Star Wars. It showcases several artists using very different media to pay homage to the popular series. From digitally-edited photographs of classical sculptures to various creative 3D-renderings of well-known characters, from photos of lego scenes to drawings in countless styles, the exhibit offers lots of interesting visual stimuli. It’s hard to pick a favorite. I very much appreciated Kyle Hagey’s pieces and can’t believe I had never come across them before. Conveniently, you can view and buy copies of his work on Etsy. There is also a free-to-play Star Wars pinball machine on the top floor of the museum as well as an old-school video game. This is a must-see for any Star Wars fan. The show runs through Oct 14th. That doesn’t leave a lot of time to visit and as far as I can tell, sadly it is not a traveling exhibition. While not the same experience, I did upload some of my photos here for those who are interested, but can’t make it there in person.
I’ve been reading that the deliberations over Kavanaugh’s appointment in light of Blasey Ford’s allegations against him are firing up voters on the right in the sense that those voters, like Kavanaugh, find the mere investigation to be crazy, a moral outrage, incomprehensible. I’ve never felt so strongly like I’m living in a completely different reality than those who disagree with me politically. This makes me want to say why I think what I think as plainly as I can, because however wrong it might be, I’m almost certain it isn’t crazy or immoral or incomprehensible. Before the testimony, I thought only that further inquiry was in order. Now, in light of Kavanaugh’s testimony, and independent of Blasey Ford’s, I think Kavanaugh has shown himself to be unfit for appointment to the Supreme Court. Here’s why.
I don’t know much about “grievance studies”, but I do know quite a lot about fraud, having written a book on the subject and spent two years researching it (and now three months more researching some additional bits for the US edition, out in 2019). So just a further observation after Henry’s post on the subject – one thing that I think is underappreciated in a variety of contexts is that the susceptibility of a system to intentional deceit is not by any means a good indicator of the underlying health of that system. In fact, I would even go so far as to say that the equilibrium level of fraud is determined entirely separately from the equilibrium level of quality and output, and that therefore the ease with which X can be faked is irrelevant to your assessment of whether there are severe problems with X.
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