Krystal D'Costa over at her Scientific American blog, Anthropology in Practice:

Ever since reading Jennifer Toth’s The Mole People​ as a teen, I’ve been intrigued by the metropolitan underground. Cities teem with life, and change happens at a dizzying pace. But what lurks beneath the streets remains a mystery to many—it almost remains a realm lost to time. Yet, to think of this space as stagnant would be foolish: from Paris to New York City, the subterranean has a life and character all of its own. And if you look closely, you’ll find traces of the urban centers on the surface—almost as though these spaces contain seeds of the personalities that thrive above ground.

National Geographic’s Neil Shea did a sweeping tour of the Parisian underground, covering everything from the catacombs to the old quarries to the hand carved party rooms inhabited by cataphiles—”people who love the Paris underground.” There are all sorts of spaces to be found beneath Paris—canals and reservoirs, crypts, bank vaults, wine cellars, quarries—and cataphiles claim them to party, perform, create artwork, do drugs and more. They explore, hook up, educate, and claim these forgotten places. They map them and create records though it seems that these spaces exist on the periphery of the surface world, which seems odd when you consider how much of the metropolis is drawn from the underground.

Kenan Malik in Eurozine:

In August 2011, smashing up stuff, and stealing it, was what defined the mayhem. In the 1980s, people living in Brixton, Tottenham, Handsworth and Toxteth, in the very places wrecked by the disorders, nevertheless supported the rioters. They recognized that the violence and the destruction were not ends in themselves but part of a necessary challenge to an oppressive system. Today, the fiercest opposition to the rioters comes from those who live in the areas they have trashed. There is real rage in these areas against the orgy of destruction.

Many on the Left, while condemning the riots, argue that they are nevertheless protests against poverty and social exclusion. “Many of the people involved,” the criminologist professor John Pitts suggested, “are likely to have been from low-income, high-unemployment estates, and many, if not most, do not have much of a legitimate future.” Many, such as former London mayor Ken Livingstone, have blamed the riots on the public expenditure cuts introduced by the current Coalition government.

There is little doubt that poverty and joblessness scar large areas of Britain and that the vicious public spending cuts will vastly exacerbate the problem. Tottenham, for instance, where the first riots broke out, is among London's poorest boroughs, with 54 applicants chasing every registered job vacancy. Britain is less equal, in wages, wealth and life chances, than at any time for a century. A map of the London riots matches almost exactly the map of the most deprived areas in London.

And yet, it is difficult to view the rioters simply as members of an “underclass”.

From The Telegraph:

From Smithsonian:

I’m sure this pains the people who take offense at the true-life tale And Tango Makes Three, but heterosexuality is not the rule in the animal world. There are hundreds of species, from bison to bunnies to beetles, that pair off in same-sex couples. (And then there are bonobos.) Birds often pair off this way, too. And now a study of zebra finches, published in Behavioural Ecology and Sociobiology, has found that the bonds between same-sex couples can be just as strong as those in heterosexual birds. Zebra finches, which live in grasslands and forests of Australia and Indonesia, form pairs that last a lifetime. The males sing to their partners, and the two share a nest and clean each other’s feathers. They nestle together and greet each other by nuzzling beaks.

Researchers raised groups of zebra finches in same-sex groups, all male and all female, and in each group the majority of birds paired up. They interacted frequently and often preened their partners. And they weren’t aggressive to each other as they were to other birds in the group. These are all characteristics found in heterosexual finch couples.

More here.

Gilbert King at Smithsonian:

He stood just four feet tall, his body contorted by a hump in his back and a crooked gait, and his stunted torso gave the illusion that his head, hands and feet were too big. But he was a giant among scientific thinkers, counting Albert Einstein, Nikola Tesla and Thomas Edison as friends, and his contributions to mathematics and electrical engineering made him one of the most beloved and instantly recognizable men of his time.

In the early 20th century, Charles Steinmetz could be seen peddling pedaling his bicycle down the streets of Schenectady, New York, in a suit and top hat, or floating down the Mohawk River in a canoe, kneeling over a makeshift desktop, where he passed hours scribbling notes and equations on papers that sometimes blew into the water. With a Blackstone panatela cigar seemingly glued to his lips, Steinmetz cringed as children scurried away upon seeing him—frightened, he believed, by the “queer, gnome-like figure” with the German accent. Such occurrences were all the more painful for Steinmetz, as it was a family and children that he longed for most in his life. But knowing that his deformity was congenital (both his father and grandfather were afflicted with kyphosis, an abnormal curvature of the upper spine), Steinmetz chose not to marry, fearful of passing on his deformity.

Born in 1865 in Breslau, Germany (now Wroclaw, Poland), Carl August Rudolph Steinmetz became a brilliant student of mathematics and chemistry at the University of Breslau, but he was forced to flee the country after the authorities became interested in his involvement with the Socialist Party. He arrived at Ellis Island in 1888 and was nearly turned away because he was a dwarf, but an American friend whom Steinmetz was traveling with convinced immigration officials that the young German Ph.D. was a genius whose presence would someday benefit all of America. In just a few years, Steinmetz would prove his American friend right.

More here.

Jean Bricmont and Diana Johnstone in CounterPunch:

Last March, a coalition of Western powers and Arab autocracies banded together to sponsor what was billed as a short little military operation to “protect Libyan civilians”.

On March 17, the UN Security Council adopted Resolution 1973 which gave that particular “coalition of the willing” the green light to start their little war by securing control of Libyan air space, which was subsequently used to bomb whatever NATO chose to bomb. The coalition leaders clearly expected the grateful citizens to take advantage of this vigorous “protection” to overthrow Moammer Gaddafi who allegedly wanted to “kill his own people”. Based on the assumption that Libya was neatly divided between “the people” on one side and the “evil dictator” on the other, this overthrow was expected to occur within days. In Western eyes, Gaddafi was a worse dictator than Tunisia’s Ben Ali or Egypt’s Mubarak, who fell without NATO intervention, so Gaddafi should have fallen that much faster.

Five months later, all the assumptions on which the war was based have proved to be more or less false. Human rights organizations have failed to find evidence of the “crimes against humanity” allegedly ordered by Gaddafi against “his own people”. The recognition of the Transitional National Council (TNC) as the “sole legitimate representative of the Libyan people” by Western governments has gone from premature to grotesque. NATO has entered and exacerbated a civil war that looks like a stalemate.

But however groundless and absurd the war turns out to be, on it goes. And what can stop it?

More here.

Our own Morgan Meis in The Smart Set:

Bruce Archer, the influential Professor of Design Research at Royal College of Art once wrote, “Design is that area of human experience, skill and knowledge which is concerned with man’s ability to mould his environment to suit his material and spiritual needs.” It is a good general definition, but it lacks specificity. Maybe the old Modernist credo “form follows function” is more direct. From that perspective, the purpose of design is to understand the function of an object and then make sure that the form of that object is as perfectly tailored to the function as possible. Think of an Eames molded chair from the 1940s. It is impossible to look at the inviting and simple curves of the chair without wanting to sit down in it. Good design is what works well; great design is when something that works well feels as if it couldn't possibly be doing anything else.

In recent decades, the “form follows function” credo has been challenged from all sides. The pure pragmatism of the credo now seems insufficient to the depth and complexity of our relationship to things. A contemporary person's interaction with manufactured things goes beyond the utilitarian. Here's something Paola Antonelli (a senior curator the Museum of Modern Art’s Department of Architecture and Design) wrote in her essay for the new MoMA show about contemporary design, “Talk to Me:” “The bond between people and things has always been filled with powerful and unspoken sentiments going well beyond functional expectations and including attachment, love, possessiveness, jealousy, pride, curiosity, anger, even friendship and partnership — think of the bond between a chef and his knives.” According to Antonelli, it has always been the case that the functionalist approach to design leaves behind the important bond between people and things. Recent developments in technology and design scream out that truth all the more.

More here.

How do you design a utopia? In 1972, John B. Calhoun detailed the specifications of his Mortality-Inhibiting Environment for Mice: a practical utopia built in the laboratory. Every aspect of Universe 25—as this particular model was called—was pitched to cater for the well-being of its rodent residents and increase their lifespan. The Universe took the form of a tank, 101 inches square, enclosed by walls 54 inches high. The first 37 inches of wall was structured so the mice could climb up, but they were prevented from escaping by 17 inches of bare wall above. Each wall had sixteen vertical mesh tunnels—call them stairwells—soldered to it. Four horizontal corridors opened off each stairwell, each leading to four nesting boxes. That means 256 boxes in total, each capable of housing fifteen mice. There was abundant clean food, water, and nesting material. The Universe was cleaned every four to eight weeks. There were no predators, the temperature was kept at a steady 68°F, and the mice were a disease-free elite selected from the National Institutes of Health’s breeding colony. Heaven. Four breeding pairs of mice were moved in on day one. After 104 days of upheaval as they familiarized themselves with their new world, they started to reproduce. In their fully catered paradise, the population increased exponentially, doubling every fifty-five days. Those were the good times, as the mice feasted on the fruited plain. To its members, the mouse civilization of Universe 25 must have seemed prosperous indeed. But its downfall was already certain—not just stagnation, but total and inevitable destruction.

more from Will Wiles at Cabinet here.

Natalie Abbasi in Guernica:

In each image I’ve incorporated myself twice, once as the Iranian and once as the American.

It has always been a struggle for me to explain myself, who I truly am, and how I should or shouldn’t act in culturally diverse situations. Occasionally I feel confused, proud, and even awkward about how to deal with the differences of my two halves. Am I Iranian? Am I American? Should I be Muslim from my father or Jewish from my mother? Such thoughts and issues are what puzzle me as to which behavior would be most appropriate. I feel that maybe these photographs will answer some questions. Questions people might have, or even questions I have for myself as a person who has lived biculturally and bilingually my whole life.

More here.

From PhysOrg:

The researchers found that an anti-ulcer medicine might treat lung cancer and an anticonvulsant might alleviate inflammatory bowel diseases.

The scientists drew their data from the NIH National Center for Biotechnology Information Gene Expression Omnibus, a publicly available database that contains the results of thousands of genomic studies on a wide range of topics, submitted by researchers across the globe. The resource catalogs changes in gene activity under various conditions, such as in diseased tissues or in response to medications. Butte's group focused on 100 diseases and 164 drugs. They created a computer program to search through the thousands of possible drug-disease combinations to find drugs and diseases whose gene expression patterns essentially cancelled each other out. For example, if a disease increased the activity of certain genes, the program tried to match it with one or more drugs that decreased the activity of those genes. Many of the drug-disease matches were known, and are already in clinical use, supporting the validity of the approach. For example, the analysis correctly predicted that prednisolone could treat Crohn's disease, a condition for which it is a standard therapy.

More here.

For years after the war and after the camps, Chava Rosenfarb woke up every morning at 4:00 a.m. to write. She’d open her eyes in the darkness and slip out of bed without waking her husband, make herself a cup of coffee, and sit down in her study, still wearing her nightgown. The study was even smaller than her kitchen—barely large enough for the table she had bought from a doctor’s office for ten dollars. On it she kept her notebooks. Sipping coffee, she’d start with the one on top, and by the light of a table lamp, beneath a portrait of the Yiddish writer I.L. Peretz, she’d review yesterday’s stories. Re-reading drew her back like a current, not into her pages but into the world to which she wanted to return. When she felt that world thickening around her, she’d skip ahead to where she’d left off the night before, pick up a pencil, and begin to write, slipping from her apartment in Montreal back to the last days of the Lodz ghetto. First to greet her there was always her favorite creation, Samuel Zuckerman. Born of Chava’s memories of the rich men of Lodz, Samuel was a “salon Zionist” and heir to a fortune, a Polish patriot who dreamed of Israel for other, poorer people; he couldn’t bear to think of leaving of Lodz, the Manchester of Poland. His passion was writing—a history of the Jews of Lodz, 250,000 of them, living in a city then known as the Manchester of Poland for its forest of smokestacks. But Samuel never got to tell the story.

more from Jeff Sharlet at Killing The Buddha here.

Was theory a gigantic hoax? On the contrary. It was the only salvation, for a twenty year period, from two colossal abdications by American thinkers and writers. From about 1975 to 1995, through a historical accident, a lot of American thinking and mental living got done by people who were French, and by young Americans who followed the French. The two grand abdications: one occurred in academic philosophy departments, the other in American fiction. In philosophy, from the 1930s on, a revolutionary group had been fighting inside universities to overcome the “tradition.” This insurgency, at first called “logical positivism” or “logical empiricism,” then simply “analytic philosophy,” was the best thing going. The original idea was that logical analysis of language would show which philosophical problems might be solved, and which eradicated because they were not phraseable in clear, logical language. That meant wiping out most of what Hegel had left us, and Europe still understood, as philosophy—including history, being, death, recognition, love. Still brand new in the 1930s (Carnap, Russell, Ayer) when trying to develop its ideal logical language, it had only just become institutional in the analytic pragmatism of the 1950s and 1960s (Quine), in time to be cranked up again in the 1970 (Kripke), saved from termination by the reintroduction of naive assumptions rejected at the start.

more from the editors at n+1 here.

From The Independent:

In autumn 1838, Bahram Modi, one of Bombay's most profitable traders, puts together “possibly the single most valuable cargo ever carried out of the Indian subcontinent”. Discreetly stowing thousands of chests of opium in his hold, Bahram sails for Canton where, in defiance of the Chinese authorities, opium has been smuggled into the country for decades. Fifteen prior sorties have steadily built up Bahram's wealth, while a long affair with the hostess of a kitchen boat has led to a son. That son is just one of a number of subtle subplots in the novel, which include a Cornish gardener charged with acquiring Chinese species for Kew Gardens. Accompanying him is Paulette, an orphan who, besotted by a mulatto sailor, flees the home of her benefactor, Mr Burnham, a bombastic British merchant in Calcutta. Burnham soon fetches up in Canton with his own cargo of opium and a pompous belief that free trade is “as immutable as God's commandments”. But Neel Rattan is also there – a Calcuttan aristocrat bankrupted by Burnham, jailed, transported and presumed dead. He is now working incognito as Bahram's scribe.

Even before coming to the main drama, Ghosh has in place this rich background of complex loyalties and antipathies among his polyglot cast. It's a background that is Dickensian in both its scope and tone. Effete young artist Robin Chinnery captures much of this colour in missives regaling Paulette with Canton news. Chinnery's gossipy asides offset the increasingly sombre turn of events when a reputedly incorruptible new governor is sent from Beijing to stamp out Canton's opium traffic.

More here.

From Scientific American:

You might think that temporary tattoos look cool, but what if they could also collect and transmit information about your heart rate, temperature, muscle contractions or brain waves?

A new flexible electronic circuit promises to do just that, by moving with the skin and staying in place without any adhesive. The research used existing semiconductor technology to imprint integrated circuits onto a thin, flexible silicon film that can be applied directly on the skin. The device is described in a new paper published online August 11 in Science. “The goal is really to blur the distinction between electronics and biological tissues,” John Rogers, a professor of materials science and engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (U.I.C.U.) and co-author of the new study, said in a podcast interview. The new technology might soon allow monitoring to become “simpler, more reliable and uninterrupted,” Zhenqiang Ma, a professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison's Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, wrote in an essay in the same issue of Science.

More here.

Proof

Her skin, saffron toasted in the sun,
eyes darting like a gazelle.

—That god who made her, how could he
have left her alone? Was he blind?

—This wonder is not the result of blindness:
she is a woman, and a sinuous vine.

The Buddha's doctrine is thus proven:
nothing in this world is created.
(Dharmakirti, 7th Century)

Prueba

La piel es azafrán al sol tostado,
son de gacela los sedientos ojos.

—Ese dios que la hizo, ¿cómo pudo
dejar que lo dejase? ¿Estaba ciego?

—No es hechura de ciego este prodigio:
es mujer y es sinuosa enredadera.

La doctrina del Buda así se prueba:
nada en este universo fue creado.
(Dharmakriti, siglo VII)

by Octavio Paz
from The Collected Poems 1957-1987
Carcanet Press, 1988

The eighth-grade students gathering on the west lawn of the state capitol in Sacramento were planning to lunch on fried chicken with California’s new governor, Ronald Reagan, and then tour the granite building constructed a century earlier to resemble the nation’s Capitol. But the festivities were interrupted by the arrival of 30 young black men and women carrying .357 Magnums, 12-gauge shotguns, and .45-caliber pistols. The 24 men and six women climbed the capitol steps, and one man, Bobby Seale, began to read from a prepared statement. “The American people in general and the black people in particular,” he announced, must “take careful note of the racist California legislature aimed at keeping the black people disarmed and powerless Black people have begged, prayed, petitioned, demonstrated, and everything else to get the racist power structure of America to right the wrongs which have historically been perpetuated against black people The time has come for black people to arm themselves against this terror before it is too late.” Seale then turned to the others. “All right, brothers, come on. We’re going inside.” He opened the door, and the radicals walked straight into the state’s most important government building, loaded guns in hand. No metal detectors stood in their way. It was May 2, 1967, and the Black Panthers’ invasion of the California statehouse launched the modern gun-rights movement.

more from Adam Winkler at The Atlantic here.

ONE DAY IN THE FALL of 2006 my mother, visiting from Chicago, and I were having breakfast in Brooklyn, with her rolling through updates on distant relatives who occupy various corners of the Midwest. She told me about our cousin, Helene Leaf, who was researching a Lutheran church founded in East Union, Minnesota, by my great-great-great uncle, Peter Carlson. I was until that point failing to pay attention, dutifully nodding and uttering, “Really?” every few seconds. But then something cut through the static of anonymous small towns and genealogical records: Helene had learned that another great-great-great uncle named Anders Johan Carlson had served in the Union army during the Civil War, and had been standing guard during the execution of several Indians, the sight of which had made him vomit—even, I imagined, as a crowd stood by stolidly, or perhaps even jubilantly. I had grown up in Chicago and had never heard of any such execution, and neither had my mother. The story stuck with me, though, quickly shifting into that category of things you feel like you’ve known all your life. A few months later, I did a cursory Google search and found that the event in question had taken place in Mankato, an unassuming town in southern Minnesota, on December 26, 1862. Thirty-eight Dakota men were hanged by the army, making it the largest mass execution to ever take place in the US. A story began to take shape: The scaffold fell from the Dakotas’ feet, the nooses tightened around their throats, and a resounding cry went up from the throng of a thousand onlookers.

more from Claire Barliant at Triple Canopy here.