The New Yorker: Karl Marx, Yesterday and Today

Still, Marx was also what Michel Foucault called the founder of a discourse. An enormous body of thought is named after him. “I am not a Marxist,” Marx is said to have said, and it’s appropriate to distinguish what he intended from the uses other people made of his writings. But a lot of the significance of the work lies in its downstream effects. However he managed it, and despite the fact that, as Sperber and Stedman Jones demonstrate, he can look, on some level, like just one more nineteenth-century system-builder who was convinced he knew how it was all going to turn out, Marx produced works that retained their intellectual firepower over time. Even today, “The Communist Manifesto” is like a bomb about to go off in your hands. [...]

One reason for Marx’s relative obscurity is that only toward the end of his life did movements to improve conditions for workers begin making gains in Europe and the United States. To the extent that those movements were reformist rather than revolutionary, they were not Marxist (although Marx did, in later years, speculate about the possibility of a peaceful transition to communism). With the growth of the labor movement came excitement about socialist thought and, with that, an interest in Marx. [...]

It’s true that Marx was highly doctrinaire, something that did not wear well with his compatriots in the nineteenth century, and that certainly does not wear well today, after the experience of the regimes conceived in his name. It therefore sounds perverse to say that Marx’s philosophy was dedicated to human freedom. But it was. Marx was an Enlightenment thinker: he wanted a world that is rational and transparent, and in which human beings have been liberated from the control of external forces. [...]

In 1980, the philosopher Peter Singer published a short book on Marx in which he listed some of Marx’s predictions: the income gap between workers and owners would increase, independent producers would be forced down into the ranks of the proletariat, wages would remain at subsistence levels, the rate of profit would fall, capitalism would collapse, and there would be revolutions in the advanced countries. Singer thought that most of these predictions were “so plainly mistaken” that it was difficult to understand how anyone sympathetic to Marx could defend them. In 2016, it is harder to be dismissive.

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Nautilus Magazine: Why Blind People Are Better at Math

And yet, Bernard Morin has plenty of company—some of our greatest mathematicians were blind. For example, Leonhard Euler, one of the most prolific mathematicians in history, was blind during the last 17 years of his life, and produced nearly half of his work during this time. English mathematician Nicholas Saunderson went blind not long after he was born, but managed to become the Lucasian professor of mathematics at Cambridge University, a position earlier held by Newton and now occupied by theoretical astrophysicist Stephen Hawking.

Is there something that allows the blind to excel? The leading theory is that because they cannot rely on visual cues or written materials to remember things, they develop stronger working memory than the sighted, which is critical to doing well at math. Another potential explanation is that because blind children spend a lot of time touching and manipulating objects, they learn to interpret numerical information with multiple senses, giving them an advantage. [...]

Scientists are still puzzling out what that compensatory mechanism is and how it works. Earlier this year, Olivier Collignon, a psychologist who studies blind cognition at the Université Catholique de Louvain and the University of Trento, in Italy, and his colleagues, published findings that suggest sighted individuals and people who were born blind or became blind early in life perform equally well on simple math problems. There was one key difference—the blind participants actually outperformed their sighted counterparts on more difficult math problems, like addition and subtraction that require carrying over a number (like 45 + 8 or 85 –9); these are considered more difficult than those that don’t (like 12 + 31 or 45 + 14). According to Collignon, the more a task relies on the ability to manipulate numbers in the abstract, like carrying over a number, the more blind individuals’ compensatory mechanisms are engaged.

Collignon and his colleagues had previously found that blind and sighted people experience numbers in completely different ways, in a physical sense. In a 2013 study, the researchers created a clever manipulation of a task typically used to test a perceptual bias called Spatial Numerical Association of Response Codes, or SNARC. [...]

Collignon and his colleagues go so far as to suggest that vision may actually hinder the sighted from reaching full mathematical potential. This is thought to be particularly true in the realm of geometry. Sighted people sometimes misapprehend three-dimensional space because the retina projects it onto just two dimensions. Many optical illusions arise out of these misapprehensions. The blind person, by comparison, has a relatively unspoiled intuition of three-dimensional space.

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Quartz: An American artist is moving Rosa Parks’s house from Detroit to Berlin to save it from demolition

American civil-rights icon Rosa Parks moved from Alabama to Detroit in 1957. Her first home in the city, on South Deacon Street, was demolished last week.

Well, not all of it. American artist Ryan Mendoza stepped in to preserve the façade of the house, shipping it to Germany in two 40-foot containers, at his own expense, in order to turn it into a piece of art.

Mendoza, a 44-year-old from New York who now splits his time between Berlin and Naples, will spend the next few months reconstructing what’s left of the two-story house in his studio in the German capital, with a view to taking it on a tour of European museums. [...]

“What I would like to do is hold the house hostage,” Mendoza told people at the house’s farewell ceremony in Detroit, before taking it away to Berlin. “America, you lost this house… you gotta get it back. And it’s going to cost you. And I want that money to go to the Rosa Parks foundation.”

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Independent: Homophobic attacks rose 147 per cent after the Brexit vote

Homophobic attacks rose by 147 per cent in the three months following the Brexit vote, according to figures compiled by an LGBT anti-violence charity.

Galop, which supports victims of homophobic attacks, said the number of hate crime incidents in the July, August and September following the June EU referendum vote was up 147 per cent on the corresponding three months of 2015.

The figures add to concerns that the hatred seen after the Brexit vote – which led to an immediate 57 per cent rise in hate crime incidents reported to the police – was not restricted to racial or religious hostility. [...]

The report found that four out of five (80 per cent) of the 467 of the LGBT people surveyed by the charity had experienced hate crime in their lifetime, and one in four (25 per cent) had been physically assaulted.

The report also noted that when it came to the last hate crime the respondents had experienced, half of those who reported it to the police felt dissatisfied with the outcome.

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The Conversation: Can great apes read your mind?

One of the things that defines humans most is our ability to read others’ minds – that is, to make inferences about what others are thinking. To build or maintain relationships, we offer gifts and services – not arbitrarily, but with the recipient’s desires in mind. When we communicate, we do our best to take into account what our partners already know and to provide information we know will be new and comprehensible. And sometimes we deceive others by making them believe something that is not true, or we help them by correcting such false beliefs.

All these very human behaviors rely on an ability psychologists call theory of mind: We are able to think about others’ thoughts and emotions. We form ideas about what beliefs and feelings are held in the minds of others – and recognize that they can be different from our own. Theory of mind is at the heart of everything social that makes us human. Without it, we’d have a much harder time interpreting – and probably predicting – others’ behavior. [...]

Decades of research with our closest relatives – chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas and orangutans – have revealed that great apes do possess many aspects of theory of mind. For one, they can identify the goals and intentions behind others’ actions. They’re also able to recognize which features of the environment others can see or know about. [...]

Our findings challenge previous research, and assumptions, about apes’ theory of mind abilities. Although we have more studies planned to determine whether great apes can really understand others’ false beliefs by imagining their perspectives, like humans do, the current results suggest they may have a richer appreciation of others’ minds than we previously thought.

Great apes didn’t just develop these skills this year, of course, but the use of novel eye-tracking techniques allowed us to probe the question in a new way. By using methods that for the first time assessed apes’ spontaneous predictions in a classic false belief scenario – with minimal demands on their other cognitive abilities – we were able to show that apes knew what was going to happen.

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Motherboard: A New Study Suggests Cannabis Could Treat Cervical Cancer

Through in vitro, or test tube/petri dish, analysis, researchers from the biochemistry department at North-West University in Potchefstroom, South Africa found that the non-psychotropic cannabinoid, or chemical compound, CBD (cannabidiol), taken from a Cannabis sativa extract, could hold anticarcinogenic properties. They pointed out that cannabis acted on the cancerous cells through apoptosis, or a process of cell death, causing only the cancerous cells to kill themselves, and inhibiting their growth.

Cervical cancer is no longer a leading cause of death as much as it used to be in the United States, thanks in large part to the widespread use of pap smears, but it's still a widespread threat. And in Sub-Saharan Africa, it kills 250,000 women every year. "This makes it the most lethal cancer amongst black women and calls for urgent therapeutic strategies," the study's authors wrote in the BMC Complementary and Alternative Medicine journal. "In this study we compare the anti-proliferative effects of crude extract of Cannabis sativa and its main compound cannabidiol on different cervical cancer cell lines." [...]

At the same time, there could also be carcinogenic effects of cannabis smoke, especially for cancer patients. One study in France found that "increased risks of lung or colorectal cancer due to marijuana smoking were not observed, but increased risks of prostate and cervical cancers among non-tobacco smokers...were observed."

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Al Jazeera: 1984 anti-Sikh riots: Calls for justice in India

On October 31, 1984, Indira Gandhi, then India's prime minister, was assassinated by two of her Sikh bodyguards, Satwant Singh and Beant Singh, in apparent retaliation for the Indian army's action in June that year to flush out an armed separatist group led by Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale from the Golden Temple, the holiest place of worship for the world's Sikhs.

The military operation, code-named Blue Star, claimed up to 700 lives, according to some estimates.

Following Gandhi's assassination, attacks on Sikhs erupted across several Indian cities, including Delhi, Kolkata, Bokaro and Kanpur. At least 2,733 Sikhs were killed in Delhi alone in the carnage.

Nearly three decades later, as victims continue their battle for justice, the Indian government's Special Investigation Team (SIT) has decided to reopen and examine 75 closed cases related to the riots in Delhi. [...]

According to the Indian law, the government can appoint an inquiry commission consisting of one or more members for the purpose of making an inquiry into a matter of public importance within a stipulated time period.

At least 10 such inquiry commissions and committees were formed to examine various aspects of the 1984 massacre, including the role of police officers, to recommend measures for compensation and rehabilitation, and to determine the number of deaths.

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​​​​​​​CityLab: Why Some People Find Crowded Cities Relaxing—And Others Don't

However, a recent paper published in The Society for Consumer Psychology suggests that the restorative qualities of nature might be overblown, and that certain people might find lush trees, chirping birds, and blue skies anything but zen-like. Kevin P. Newman, an assistant professor of marketing at Providence College, and his co-author Merrie Brucks, a marketing professor at the University of Arizona, teamed up to explore whether people who tend to be more neurotic might actually find relief from the very source of their racing thoughts and buzzing brain.

To figure this out, Newman and Brucks asked participants to complete a widely recognized 12-item survey—the Eysenck Peronality Questionnaire—to evaluate neurotic traits, such as anxiety, a tendency to overanalyze, perpetual feelings of fear and threat, envy, and loneliness. Then, participants solved puzzles after being primed with images of either a cityscape or a rural landscape. The puzzles—some of which were unsolvable—were meant to measure self-control and see if one particular environment induced stressful behavior over another.

The researchers discovered that neurotic people found “high-anxiety” situations to be more calming for their minds. In another experiment, Newman and Brucks ran a soothing ocean wave soundtrack followed by a tape of honking horns. Surprise: neurotics didn’t find the blare of taxi cab horns annoying. Actually, they found it rather satisfying.

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Independent: Muslim and Christian make new Quran translation to show the two religions' similarities

A Muslim and a Christian have made a new translation of the Quran to underline the similarities between their two religions.

The authors, who are also friends, said they hoped the text would provide “a tool of reconciliation” between Christians and Muslims.

Some 3,000 parallels between the Bible and Quran are demonstrated in the book, which has a split-page format. [...]

Mr Kaskas started the project with Dr David Hungerford, a Christian, 10 years ago. The book is part of a project by Bridges to Common Ground, an organisation that aims to reduce Islamophobic attitudes among Christians.

Dr Hungerford said: “We hope this translation will lead people to understand that while there are differences between Islam and Christianity, there is also a tremendous bridge between Muslims and Christians."

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