The New York Times: The Taming of Italy’s Most Popular Museum

Last year, the Uffizi, Pitti Palace and Boboli Gardens merged into one entity, and 3.4 million people visited, resulting in 17.3 million euros, or about $19.2 million, in ticket revenue for the state, making it the most profitable museum in Italy. Mr. Schmidt’s goal is to improve the museum’s flow; oversee a building renovation; reorganize the administration; rationalize a haphazard exhibition schedule; foster serious scholarship; rewrite wall labels; and find innovative ways to showcase a collection that has more than 12,000 paintings, 3,500 ancient sculptures, and 180,000 prints and drawings, including works from Latin America collected over the centuries but rarely shown.

Overseeing the Uffizi, with its world-class holdings and public-sector staffing, is a bit like running the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority at the same time. [...]

In what was perceived as a bold move, the Ministry opened directorships, for the first time, to an international search, eventually hiring seven non-Italians. Mr. Schmidt, a scholar of the Medici collection that formed the basis of the Uffizi, had lived in Florence in the past. [...]

Italy has pledged €58 million, or $65 million, to double the Uffizi’s exhibition space by converting offices into galleries, and to build a new exit for better flow. Mr. Schmidt hopes to move the paintings to a space in the Uffizi with climate control and to display Greek and Roman inscriptions that are less sensitive in the corridor, allowing visitors to cross from one museum to the other.

But with change comes resistance. Private tour groups don’t want to lose revenue. Marco Agnoletti, a spokesman for Florence’s mayor, said the director’s plan to open the corridor to the public “has created some perplexity.” In July, a prominent Italian architect who serves on the Uffizi’s advisory committee, Stefano Boeri, said in the press that he didn’t want to remove portraits from the corridor for aesthetic reasons.

read the article 

Political Critique: The Science We Are Losing

“I am planning to quit. With a salary of 2,300 hryvnias ($92.50) a young man cannot survive in Kyiv,” says Pasha, a welder from one of the most famous Ukrainian science institutions, the Paton Electric Welding Institute. “I am thinking of leaving for another field of work. And it is not so much about money as about the lack of development. The regression.” This is not a unique case, although even in these circumstances most of the employees of the National Academy of Science of Ukraine do not leave scientific work of their own accord. Public funding cuts and a cap on pensions for working pensioners has caused the number of the Academy’s employees to fall by 2,830 people in 2015, including 94 doctors and 480 candidates[1]. 2016 has thrown scientists into another wave of “optimization,” which has led them into the streets to protest. [...]

In these circumstances, Ukrainian science is often accused of inefficiency and unwillingness to reform. The critics emphasize that before demanding money from the government, the scientists should change the system itself. Of course, nobody denies that internal problems exist. Researchers themselves complain about the Soviet hierarchy which academics and associate members have turned into a separate sacred caste with a special status and considerable (by academic rates) additional stipends — UAH 4000 ($160) for an associate member and UAH 7000 ($280) for an academic. For example, although science received UAH 700 million less in 2016, the NAS Presidium received UAH 8 million, which is more than last year. Every so often some politician receives an academic rank to “heat up” the  low interest in science — let me remind you of “proffesor” Yanukovych. In addition, the number of research institutions, despite the constant research funding cuts, demonstrates an opposite tendency: this number increased from 90 to 169 between 1991 and 2011. [...]

Ukrainian science, which survived with great losses following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the period of primitive capital accumulation and systematic underfunding, yet which preserved its ability to produce scientific results, has turned out to be unprepared for the challenge of neoliberal reform with its total austerity. Although it is too early to mourn science yet, the situation already looks critical. So, instead of realizing the country’s “unique scientific potential,” what most probably awaits us in the global world system is a  reputation as a provider of raw materials and cheap labour which our president is so proud of.

read the article 

SciShow: Babies With Three Parents

The New Yorker‎: The Very Strange Writings of Putin's New Chief of Staff

Back in 2012, Vayno published an article in a Russian academic journal, and in the past few days hundreds if not thousands of Russians have struggled to deduce meaning from its twenty-nine pages. The article is called “The Capitalization of the Future”; the pages that follow do little to shed light on the meaning of the title or, really, much else. The text seems to propose a new term for the time-space continuum. The term is “protocol.” Vayno’s first job in Putin’s administration, between 2002 and 2007, happens to have been in the protocol service. One suspects that this was where he got one of the ideas for this article, expressed in a complicated table called “A Model Protocol for Shaping the Time-Space Relationship.” The table, which resembles a maze, contains a number of dead ends and a few circular paths that proceed from “Concept of the World” through “Thought and Expectations” to “The Future.” (“Knowledge” and “Uncertainty” appear to be optional.) The article also contains a dense description of a device called the Nooscope, which Vayno has apparently patented. The Nooscope, which “consists of a network of space scanners,” scopes out the noosphere. Or, as the article puts it, “The nooscope’s sensor network gives clear readings of co-occurrences in time and space, beginning with latest-generation bank cards and ending with smartest.” [...]

Though fewer than a hundred and forty pages, the book appears to offer nothing less than a recipe for global domination. Written as a theory of everything, the book covers all of history and all of human nature, which makes it difficult to summarize. The basic idea, though, seems to be absolute triumph through the use of tactics from sambo—Soviet martial arts—in everything, especially in economics. That is, if one assumes that there is a basic idea in the book. The text spans centuries of history and leaps across disciplines. This, for example, is how the book analyzes the Russian Army’s battle against Napoleon, in 1812: “If you are at Point A and you need to strike at Point B, then you will be forced to make a one-two strike, from A to B by way of Zero. That is too long a strike. But if you place yourself at Point Zero, then your strike will be short and merciless.” Sambo happens to be the sport in which the young Putin excelled before he took up judo and excelled in that. The sambo principle that Vayno seems to like is striking when the opponent least expects it. [...]

Why, then, does Putin need to reshuffle his men at all, and why does his doing so unfailingly attract attention? As with more and more aspects of contemporary Russia, the best explanation was offered more than half a century ago by Hannah Arendt, when she defined the true role of Stalin’s party purges: they were “an instrument of permanent instability.” The state of permanent instability, in turn, was the ultimate instrument of control, which sapped the energies and attention of all. The best way to insure being able to strike when it is least expected is to scramble all expectations. Perhaps that’s why Vayno’s “Protocol” turns the time-space continuum into a maze. Then again, maybe that’s what the nooscope is for.

read the article 

Slate: Can Islam and Liberalism Coexist?

No, no. I’m not saying Islam is incompatible with democratic politics; I’m saying that Islam is in tension with liberalism, and this is why I think it’s important for us to distinguish between liberalism and democracy. Let’s say an Islamist party comes to power through a democratic election. Islamism is by definition illiberal, and they would promote things that are contrary to classical liberalism, in the sense of non-negotiable personal rights and freedoms, gender equality, protection of minorities.

Fareed Zakaria was the first one to really popularize the idea of illiberal democracy. I feel like the Americans I’ve talked to have struggled to really grasp the idea because we don’t really have much experience with that directly. With the rise of Trump it makes things easier because we can see quite clearly that, Hey, this is a guy who might be democratically elected but his commitment to classical liberalism is quite questionable, even antagonistic. [...]

I think Islam is more capable of contributing to social order and the cohesion of a society in a place where the vast majority of citizens share that basic Islamic identity. Maybe Islam is also useful for people who want to get into heaven. That might sound like a weird thing to say, but also the way we think about rationality is problematic. I mean we’re always looking for nonreligious reasons to explain why people do what they do: So, there are economic and material factors, and people are poor and angry, whatever. Sometimes the goal of an individual can be pretty straightforward; they just want to mind their own business and get into heaven. I think Islam can be useful for people who believe that. [...]

I do think that social peace is possible, and Malaysia and Indonesia—which rarely get talked about in Washington—are really interesting cases because Indonesia is certainly more democratic but has also more implementation of Sharia ordinances on the local level than Egypt, Jordan, Turkey, Algeria, Morocco, you name it. In some sense democratization does not necessarily go hand in hand with secularism; it might actually go hand in hand with more Islam in politics, if that’s what voters want. How would you answer that question by the way: Why do you think liberalism is necessarily better for X society in the Middle East or Southeast Asia?

read the article 

Quartz: To avoid another Brexit let’s stop treating citizenship as a birthright

One immediate casualty of Brexit has been the notion of lifelong citizenship, most easily observed by a dramatic surge in applications for advantageous passports from countries like Ireland—part of the British Isles but not the UK, therefore remaining in the European Union. Facing an unprecedented run on applications forms, the Irish government asked aspiring passport-swappers hoping to take advantage of Irish ancestry to maintain a European foothold to take a breath. Many young British students and professionals who have staked their bet on remaining part of, and taking advantage of, the EU as a political, social, and economic project. For these British citizens, the Brexit vote was devastating.

Likewise, there is a rising apprehension among immigrants that they may also be booted from the UK. This led to an increase in the number of EU citizens applying for British passports in the run up to the June 23rd referendum, helping to fuel a 29% increase in applicants from 2014 to 2015. UK immigration lawyers also reported seeing a rush of new clients in the weeks following the shocking result. [...]

Here’s a quick thought experiment: Could a country offer you a range of citizenship subscription options, and bill your taxes based on “membership” and services used? If countries like Germany, Italy, and Estonia are willing to reconsider what constitutes citizenship just to keep up with broader global pressures of economic competitiveness and migration, what package of benefits and protections might a forward-thinking country offer economic migrants, or extend to refugees seeking assistance while residing in another country? What if tapping the benefits of a third country wasn’t only the privilege of the wealthy, but something as easy as signing up for Netflix?

read the article 

Jacobin Magazine: The AKP’s Hegemonic Crisis

It is difficult to say whether the president and prime minister really didn’t know about the coup in advance. It is also possible that the government, or other state institutions such as the MIT, convinced some factions of the putschist bloc to step back and support the government. Even if many generals did not give up immediately, this might have weakened the attempt fatally.

This may also partly explain why the vast majority of high-ranking generals and commanders remained silent for at least a couple hours after the plotters sprung into action, and why they acted very slowly even after they declared loyalty to the elected government. Alternatively, perhaps Erdoğan, the MIT, and/or the prime minister allowed the coup attempt to be carried out, confident it would fail and could then be used to deal a comprehensive blow to the Gülenist and other intra-state opposition. [...]

With France in a state of emergency, it may well be that Austria accepted the role of bad cop and German chancellor Angela Merkel that of good cop, insisting on upholding more or less good relations and the refugee deal while at the same time increasing pressure on Ankara through other channels. Following the comments from Austria, the president of the European Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker, declared that halting membership talks would be a political mistake, and German officials later made similar statements. [...]

Attempts to build a broad democratic front of Kurds, leftists, Alevis, feminists, LGBTQ people and other oppressed people, and left forces in the CHP had been pursued before the coup, and some left organizations have been the driving forces. Yet the coup attempt showed that the Left was incapable of effectively building such a front. In the days after the coup, the Left was paralyzed, unable to put its position of “neither coup nor countercoup, but a people’s democratic alternative” into practice. This allowed the CHP to take charge and hold the aforementioned rally in Taksim, among other things.

read the article 

CityLab: The Historic Link Between Cities and Innovation

Cities, with their dense mixtures of people and economic activity, have long been fonts of innovation. To start, density spurs innovation by pushing people and ideas together, enabling them to combine and recombine in new ways. And advances in transportation—from railroads and subways to automobiles, planes, and high-speed rail—increase the circulation not only of goods and people, but of ideas as well. [...]

To get at the connection between cities, transportation, and innovation, Perlman’s study combines several unique data sets. She begins with detailed data on more than 700,000 patents—which she uses as a proxy for innovation—for all U.S. counties from 1790 to 1900. (Patents are the most accessible written records of innovative activity: Even though they are imperfect, economists and social scientists have long used them to study the dynamics of technological change and innovation.) Perlman then compares this to data on the accessibility of canals, railroads, and other forms of transportation; distance to major ports; and the key terms used in patent descriptions, which enable her to examine the effects of local transportation on the speed of innovative activity. [...]

Overall, Perlman finds transportation to be a key determinant of innovation in rapidly industrializing and urbanizing America. But the mechanism by which this occurs is even more interesting—and more important—to our understanding of innovation. Her analysis shows that, though both matter, innovation is not just spurred by population, nor is it merely a function of access to larger markets brought on by transportation. Instead, it has subtler effects. As Perlman explains in an email, “If transportation simply runs through a place, it doesn't do any good unless it also forms a nexus around which agglomerations occur. This is shown in the different effects estimated in the North and the South.”

read the article 

Business Insider: The latest report of the 'alien megastructure' star might be the weirdest yet

In an exciting new report, astronomers discuss more mysterious behavior from the infamous star KIC 8462852.

watch the clip