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Stephen Walsh praises Brian Moynahan’s Leningrad, a book on how the siege of the city influenced the work of composer Dmitri Shostakovich:

Shostakovich, a native of Leningrad/St Petersburg, was in the city for the first few weeks of the siege, and by the time he was flown out in early October 1941 he had composed the bulk of three movements of his Seventh Symphony. He already saw it as a symbol of the city’s defiance, and in Moscow he told an interviewer: ‘In the finale, I want to describe a beautiful future time when the enemy will have been defeated.’

It had become a Leningrad Symphony in all but name. Its composer had been photographed on the roof of the Conservatoire in a fireman’s outfit hosing down a (non-existent) conflagration. Now, in his absence, Leningraders struggled to concerts played by emaciated, half-dead musicians in freezing halls. Music had become an emblem of that peculiar Russian ability, honed through centuries of repression and hardship and in the end disastrously underestimated by Hitler, to slow down their mental metabolism almost to a standstill and survive like aesthetically tuned cattle in conditions that would drive others to breakdown and insanity.

How else to explain the successful performance of the Seventh Symphony that following August? It was a full-blooded 70-minute work for an orchestra of more than 100, performed by a radio band reduced by death and infirmity to a mere handful of sickly regulars, augmented by military-band players from the battlefront and by whatever extra wind and string players could be drafted in from the city’s dilapidated musical substrata, and directed by a conductor — Karl Eliasberg — who could himself barely hold a baton or stand upright.

Gavin Plumley discusses the piece with Semyon Bychkov, a conductor born in Leningrad shortly after the siege who is now conducting the symphony:

The first image that comes to Bychkov’s mind while preparing is that of his mother, as a giddy school leaver on 22 June 1941, 11 years before he was born. “Throughout the country, graduation balls are taking place for those finishing high school. It’s a big celebration. In Leningrad, it’s the White Nights,” he says, referring to northern Russia’s famed twilit season, “so the city is bursting with young people, by the river, partying, celebrating. Some are dreaming of university or going to the conservatoire. The future is very beautiful and very mysterious.” It’s a scene described, in effect, in the lusty opening bars of the symphony. “That first stride has a real sense of energy and optimism,” Bychkov notes, “and when the second theme comes, it’s a dream put into sound.”

Update from a reader:

(Video: Shostakovich plays a fragment of his Seventh Symphony in 1941)

James Fallon, a neuroscientist diagnosed as a psychopath, discusses his idiosyncrasies:

I treat strangers pretty well—really well, and people tend to like me when they meet me—but I treat my family the same way, like they’re just somebody at a bar. I treat them well, but I don’t treat them in a special way. That’s the big problem.

I asked them this—it’s not something a person will tell you spontaneously—but they said, “I give you everything. I give you all this love and you really don’t give it back.” They all said it, and that sure bothered me. So I wanted to see if I could change. I don’t believe it, but I’m going to try.

In order to do that, every time I started to do something, I had to think about it, look at it, and go: No. Don’t do the selfish thing or the self-serving thing. Step-by-step, that’s what I’ve been doing for about a year and a half and they all like it. Their basic response is: We know you don’t really mean it, but we still like it.

I told them, “You’ve got to be kidding me. You accept this? It’s phony!” And they said, “No, it’s okay. If you treat people better it means you care enough to try.” It blew me away then and still blows me away now.

Previous Dish on non-violent psychopathy here, here, here, and here.

A study suggests so:

By drawing similarities between Facebook’s rapid adoption and the proliferation of an infectious disease, researchers at Princeton have devised a model that predicts Facebook will lose 80% of its users by 2017.

“Ideas, like diseases, have been shown to spread infectiously between people before eventually dying out, and have been successfully described with epidemiological models,” write authors John Cannarella and Joshua A. Spechler in an article recently posted to the preprint database arXiv. The basic premise is simple: epidemiological models, the researchers argue, can be used to explain user adoption and abandonment of online social networks, “where adoption is analogous to infection and abandonment is analogous to recovery.”

Mashable thinks this logic is fundamentally flawed:

It all starts with ideas — or rather, the notion that ideas are like diseases. Ideas “have been shown to spread infectiously between people before eventually dying out, and have been successfully described with epidemiological models,” the study says. That sounds rational until you consider all the ideas that have spread and stuck — such as democracy, electricity and the theory of evolution.

John Aziz criticizes the study for comparing Facebook to MySpace:

MySpace died as it became clogged up with spam, was neglected and misunderstood by its new corporate owner, and after its users migrated to other social networks, particularly Facebook.

Facebook doesn’t necessarily face any of these problems. While Facebook has introduced advertising and while spam is a problem, Facebook has done a reasonable job at fighting spam. It has thus been far less intrusive than the huge quantities of spam that infested MySpace in its dying years. Another big difference: At Facebook, founder Mark Zuckerberg remains in charge, and the company is making profits.

This week the 9th Circuit ruled that jurors cannot be excluded for being gay. Mark Joseph Stern analyzes the meaning:

In one sense, the court’s ruling was inevitable. In 1986, the Supreme Court found that attorneys couldn’t dismiss jurors based exclusively on race, holding that both defendants and jurors themselves have a right to a racism-free voir dire. Ten years later, the court extended that principle to female jurors, adding a new justification to the mix: Justice Harry Blackmun proclaimed that gender stereotypes are “rooted in and reflective of historical prejudice” and thus serve no valid purpose in jury selection. Anti-gay stereotypes are, of course, rooted in similar “historical prejudice”—a “deplorable tradition of treating gays and lesbians as undeserving of participation in our nation’s most cherished rites and rituals,” in the words of the 9th Circuit. The court, then, had no choice but to shield the jury box from these irrational prejudices.

Yet in another sense, Tuesday’s decision is a critical and novel development in the legal battle for gay rights. The Supreme Court protected blacks and women from prejudiced peremptory challenges because they’re both constitutionally protected classes; in other words, any law that discriminates against them is subject to heightened judicial scrutiny. But the court has never actually declared gays a protected class.

Why heightened scrutiny matters:

Judge Reinhardt called for “heightened scrutiny” in such discrimination cases – a move that shifts the burden of proof off of the plaintiffs, and potentially makes challenges to employment protection policies or state bans on same-sex marriage, for example, easier to win.

“The difference is night and day,” said James Esseks, director of the American Civil Liberties Union Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender & AIDS Project. Under heightened scrutiny, “any law that treats gay people differently is presumed unconstitutional; it no longer gets the benefit of the doubt.”

Noah Feldman thinks the court probably went too far:

Equality for gay people is a pressing imperative of civil liberties. But progress has been achieved so far without relying on a forced legal analogy to discrimination against blacks and women. Those forms of discrimination have structural economic roots that make them particularly persistent and pernicious. Homophobia, by contrast, is a nasty social attitude that can be eventually reduced to the point of this disappearance — and when it is gone, gay people will be truly equal. That day is coming, with the help of the courts and common sense. Heightened scrutiny can be reserved for those people who really need it.

Prompted by a new study predicting that as many as half of all American jobs might be lost to computers and robots in the next few decades, Derek Thompson stops to consider how our view of automation is changing:

We might be on the edge of a breakthrough moment in robotics and artificial intelligence. Although the past 30 years have hollowed out the middle, high- and low-skill jobs have actually increased, as if protected from the invading armies of robots by their own moats. Higher-skill workers have been protected by a kind of social-intelligence moat. Computers are historically good at executing routines, but they’re bad at finding patterns, communicating with people, and making decisions, which is what managers are paid to do. This is why some people think managers are, for the moment, one of the largest categories immune to the rushing wave of AI.

Meanwhile, lower-skill workers have been protected by the Moravec moat. Hans Moravec was a futurist who pointed out that machine technology mimicked a savant infant: Machines could do long math equations instantly and beat anybody in chess, but they can’t answer a simple question or walk up a flight of stairs. As a result, menial work done by people without much education (like home health care workers, or fast-food attendants) have been spared, too.

But perhaps we’ve hit an inflection point.

As Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee pointed out in their book Race Against the Machine (and in their new book The Second Machine Age), robots are finally crossing these moats by moving and thinking like people. Amazon has bought robots to work its warehouses. Narrative Science can write earnings summaries that are indistinguishable from wire reports. We can say to our phones I’m lost, help and our phones can tell us how to get home.

Kenneth Anderson is skeptical that the coming advances in AI will destroy human jobs without creating new ones:

The “this time is different” view seems to me overstated – as so often the case with AI, as Gary Marcus has noted. One should never rule out paradigm shifting advances, but so far as I can tell, the conceptual pathways as laid down for AI today are not going to lead – even over the long-run – to what sci-fi has already given us in imagination.  Siri is not “Her” – as even Siri herself noted in a recent Tweet.  For the future we can foresee, in the short-to-medium term, we’ll be more likely to have machines that (as ever) extend, but do not replace, human capabilities; in other cases, human capabilities will extend the machines.  The foreseeable future, I suspect, remains the process (long underway) of tag-teaming humans and machines.  Which is to say (mostly), same as it ever was.

The significant new job categories (I speculate) run toward skilled manual labor of a new kind. The “maker movement”; new US manufacturing trends toward highly automated, but still human-run and staffed factories; new high technology, but still human-controlled, energy exploitation such as fracking; complex and crucial robotic machines under the supervision of nurses whose whole new skill sets put them in a new job category we might call nursing technologist – these are the areas of work that point the way forward.

Drum zeroes in on why people would rather not think about the potential AI future:

Conservatives don’t like the idea that it almost inevitably will require a much more redistributive society. Liberals don’t like the idea that it might make a lot of standard lefty social programs obsolete. As a liberal believer, I’ll put myself in the latter camp. I’m not willing to give up on the standard liberal social program because (a) I might be wrong about AI, (b) if I’m not, we’re still going to need variations on these programs, and (c) we still have to deal with the transition period anyway. I assume conservative believers might feel roughly the same way.

In an 14-count indictment, prosecutors tell the tale of the bizarre, years-long relationship that former Virginia governor Bob McDonnell and his wife Maureen had with Jonnie Williams, the CEO of a pharmaceutical company peddling an anti-inflammatory diet supplement. The first couple accepted gifts from “JW”, as he’s referred to in the indictment, of everything from $15,000 for their daughter’s wedding to golf trips, vacations, and loans to prop up the couple’s rental properties. Perhaps one of the weirdest highlights of the indictment (and there’s plenty of weird there) is a proposal to test Williams’s cure-all supplement on Virginia civil servants:

In August 2011, following an email from Bob McDonnell to Virginia’s secretary of health, Maureen McDonnell met at the Executive Mansion with Williams and one of the secretary’s senior policy advisors. At that meeting, according to the indictment, Williams discussed the idea of having Virginia government employees use Anatabloc, Star Scientific’s anti-inflammatory dietary supplement, “as a control group for research studies.” This wasn’t the only time this kind of idea came up. In October 2011, according to the indictment, Maureen McDonnell accompanied Williams and a research scientist who consulted for Star Scientific to a company event in Grand Blanc, Mich. … The scientist later emailed Maureen McDonnell a summary of their discussions. In it, he suggested it might be useful “to perform a study of Virginia government employees… to determine the prevalences [sic] of autoimmune and inflammatory conditions.”

Byron York wonders why the hell McDonnell didn’t have the patience to wait for the perfectly legitimate corruption that awaited him after he left office:

A former governor can make a lot of money. He can cash in on the influence he still has after leaving the statehouse. But if the indictment is correct, the McDonnells, in debt and wanting to drive Ferraris and wear Rolexes and play golf at swanky courses, couldn’t wait, even four years, for the payoff. And that is the story of United States v. Robert F. McDonnell and Maureen G. McDonnell.

The petty sleaze is what does it for Amy Davidson:

Like the maddest sort of sex scandal, the greed is both unbounded and imaginatively constrained. A catering bill? Two golf bags? It’s like hearing about a politician sexting or seeing a prostitute and asking oneself, He gave it all up for that? … It’s the sort of scandal that, in all its tackiness, can be an indicator of a deeper mess—a gold Oscar de la Renta canary in the political coal mines.

The McDonnells’ reputations may be ruined, but making the charges stick will be much harder:

It’s all very distasteful. But Bob McDonnell has a strong argument when he says he didn’t do anything illegal. It’s acceptable under Virginia law for politicians to accept gifts, if they are properly reported. And while the McDonnells both did things aimed at helping Williams’ business (such as having a launch party at the mansion and endorsing the supplement), it’s very, very hard to prove there was a quid pro quo. McDonnell did not push legislation to help Williams or, according to the indictment, participate in some direct and obvious payback.

Needless to say, the Republican’s misdeeds contrast pretty strongly with his political positions:

Perhaps another lesson is that fiscal conservatism is a myth for many who spout it most vociferously. The man who campaigned on fiscal-minded sobriety, largely charmed the commonwealth with his soft-spoken political style, and achieved hugely popular reforms on kitchen-table issues—including mass-transit reform, pension reform, and education—was fundamentally incapable of walking the walk when it came to his own life: He successfully governed like a sober fiscal conservative while he opted to live like he was Lord Grantham.

Which Alec MacGillis thinks hurt the Republican brand:

[I]t’s precisely McDonnell’s remaking of himself into a pro-business conservative that makes his indictment on federal corruption charges so potentially damaging to the Republican Party. The party’s establishment leaders, and their associated boosters in the conservative press and think tankery, have tried hard to differentiate responsible, business-minded Republicans who care only about cutting taxes and blocking the expansion of Medicaid from Paleolithic social-issues conservatives like Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock who prattle on about “legitimate rape” and pregnancies from rape being “something that God intended to happen.”

Mark Kleiman believes the lesson here is about the American obsession with wealth and status:

One of the many problems that flows from increasing inequality of income and wealth is that the standards of the rich become the ruling standards. Mrs. McDonnell obviously felt that she would be disgraced if she appeared at her husband’s inaugural ball in the sort of dress an honest public servant’s wife could afford, when all the fundraisers’ wives – to say nothing of the female fundraisers – would be wearing a large fraction of the median annual household income. Does that excuse her committing extortion to get an Oscar de la Renta dress? Of course not. But it testifies to a corruption of manners that goes far deeper than corruption in office.

Update from a reader:

I am as appalled at the greed of former Gov. McDonnell and his wife as anyone, but Kleiman’s article about the couple has a real historical clunker in it: “But there’s one deeply, deeply twisted element to the story that ought to worry all of us. McDonnell was the Governor of Virginia, the successor of Jefferson. And he wanted a Rolex watch.” Thomas Jefferson was perpetually in debt, thanks in large part to his habit of living well beyond his means. This is even acknowledged on the official Monticello website.

Leonhardt summarizes a new study:

The odds of moving up — or down — the income ladder in the United States have not changed appreciably in the last 20 years, according to a large new academic study that contradicts politicians in both parties who have claimed that income mobility is falling. …

Raj Chetty, a professor of economics at Harvard and one of the authors, said in an interview that he and his colleagues still believed that a lack of mobility was a significant problem in the United States. Despite less discrimination of various kinds and a larger safety net than in previous decades, the odds of escaping the station of one’s birth are no higher today than they were decades ago.

Jared Bernstein yawns:

The conventional wisdom, as I’ve stressed in many places for many years, is that is has neither decreased nor increased.

In that regard, it’s surprising for this stability to be labeled a surprise, or, as the WSJ puts it, a finding that “muddles the debate” on mobility or inequality.  To be fair, researchers and politicians do sometimes lapse into claiming that the rate of mobility has decreased, and I know of one quality paper that finds a slight, though statistically significant, decline in the rate (here), but one paper doesn’t change the CW.  Most economists in this debate recognize that the rate of mobility has been relatively stable—nothing at all wrong, and a lot right, with a high quality new paper confirming this stable trend.  But it’s not new so I’m not sure why it’s news.

Heather Boushey’s analysis:

In terms of specific questions I’m left with after reading the paper, I’ll start with the tantalizing cliffhanger. The authors don’t yet have much income data for children born after 1986. As an interim measure, they look at college attendance rates. College attendance is correlated with later earnings, so this makes sense. But, of course, we don’t know yet what that relationship will look like for students who just graduated, especially for those starting their careers in the Great Recession.

Second, if Chetty and his co-authors are correct, the variation in intergenerational mobility is much greater within the United States than across time. In the United States, it matters more where you were born than when you were born. So, what are some places doing right (and what are others doing wrong)? What’s so special about Northern California or Salt Lake City?

Ezra passes along the map above (interactive version here), which shows that “geography is a massive predictor of future mobility.” J.D. Vance takes the debate in a different direction:

There’s a risk here of exaggerating the authors’ conclusions.  They didn’t find that opportunity for the poor is stable and robust, but that it’s stable and endangered.  For those who care about the American Dream, there’s much work to do.  There just isn’t more work to do now than there was a few decades ago.  That’s hardly consolation.

Still, if it doesn’t change the fact that upward mobility is something we need more of, it should change the conversation about why we don’t have it.  The story of many on the left is that America was humming along nicely until Reagan rigged the system for the rich.  Carter’s loss ended the hopes of the working class.  It was a convenient story, but now we know it’s basically false.