Devika Bakshi in Open The Magazine:

My city is not mine. I have always felt this, but only realised it fully last week, when, in the aftermath of the unspeakably brutal rape of a 23-year-old woman by six men, I began talking to women around me about safety. This is not a new subject. I have grown up and into an understanding that this city is hostile towards me, and that everything possible must be done to keep me safe.

My safety, my mother tells me, has always been a primary concern for her. No men in the house. A maid supervising the daily carpool to school. Boarding school and college abroad. Having spent her youth getting pawed by men in DTC buses, once only narrowly escaping an acid attack, she was determined to shield me from what she knew to be a harsh city for women. Every effort was made, every resource utilised to ensure I could circumvent the hazards of this city and be the independent person I was already becoming—elsewhere.

I now understand that that alternative would have been to stay here, in the city but removed from it, skirting its edges, tunneling through it, being smuggled in a tightly regulated bubble between illusory safe spaces—ones with gates, or guards, or a cover charge—like so many young women I know whose parents can afford to keep them safe, to hold them apart from the city.

Though irreproachable in its intent, the tragedy of this approach, as my mother puts it, is that you can’t give your child the confidence to operate in the world. Indeed, our collective fear of the city transforms it into an adversary, with whom we interact tentatively and only when necessary, careful not to do anything to provoke its ire.

We abide by a hallowed yet vague code of conduct: don’t stay out after dark, don’t wear anything that shows off your legs, don’t trust strangers, especially men, don’t stand out in a crowd.

We negotiate our own curfews: no autorickshaws after 8, no metro after 10, no driving alone after 11.

We permit ourselves small conditional freedoms: if you must go out, go in a group with boys, go to someone’s house, go only to this or that safe neighbourhood, take a driver.

Justin Smith over at his website:

Different people, different closets. I don't quite know how to say it delicately so I'm just going to come right out and say it. I believe in God. Apart from periodic spells of foolish pride, I have believed in God all my life. Even during these spells, I did not so much cease to believe, as turn my back on what I believed.

As far as I'm concerned there cannot really be any concern that God does not exist. Even to see God's existence as a problem is to misapprehend what is at stake, since God just is the love, sweet and radiant, that charges through every drop and leaf and mote of the creation, always ready to be felt by anyone who is ready to believe.

God is not male, and I cannot say 'he', however tempted I am to remain with the conventions of my beautiful language and its beautiful tradition of devotional writing. But this is a relatively trivial corollary of the more important point that God is not a being, and so also neither a monarch nor a father nor a ruler of any sort. God is love, and I can keep my love of God and have my anarchism too.

Indeed, as I see it the two not only can but must go together. To believe in God, and to feel the divine love that charges through all of creation, is precisely not to bow down, but to rejoice. The great travesty of the history of religion, and the victory of its enemies, has been to bend the idea of God to the legitimation of earthly rulers, to convince people that God is like dad, or the king, or the tyrant, but more so, and that, conversely, these mundane potentates are little reflections of God. There is none of this in my love of God, which shines out of my encounter with creatures, God's creatures, that themselves have no power other than the power of their own growth and integrity, their own life, which is itself an expression of the same joy in God as my own.

To experience this joy is to know that the states of my soul and the states of infinite nature always fit, that each is an expression of the other, and so, that my death cannot be the end of anything, since nature, of which my soul was a modulation, a beautiful if dirty outcropping, will keep doing what it always does, and I, now only more obviously a convolution of nature, will flow along in streams and breezes and cosmic rays and will no longer be held up on this concern about the 'I' at all, about its finitude and its mortality.

Michael Saler in the TLS:

B. Jack Copeland’s new biography of the father of modern computing opens with an Alan Turing Test: “Three words to sum up Alan Turing?”. It’s a challenging question for such a multifaceted man. No doubt Watson, the polymath computer that won at Jeopardy! in 2011, could generate apt terms, but so, too, could more ordinary folk, especially given the wide publicity the English mathematician has received during this centenary year of his birth. Yet Turing’s justified fame was unthinkable a little more than a generation ago. The man who helped defeat the Nazis and create the digital age was known among mathematicians and computer scientists, but few others. His crucial contributions to decrypting German codes during the war remained classified for decades after his death in 1954. And his signal concept of an all-purpose, stored-program computer – the model for our digital devices today – was often attributed to others, from Charles Babbage in the nineteenth century to John von Neumann in the twentieth. (With his unfinished “Analytical Engine”, Babbage was on the right track, but never posited the critical idea of storing programs in memory, enabling a single machine to execute multiple tasks – in effect becoming the “universal” machine residing on our desks and chirping in our pockets. Turing made this breakthrough, which in turn inspired von Neumann’s general architecture for electronic computers that became the industry standard.) Until his classified war work became public knowledge and the genealogy of modern computing was sorted out, Turing would not have been associated with Newton, Darwin or Einstein – a comparison drawn by Barack Obama in an address to the Houses of Parliament in 2011 – or considered among the “leading figures in the Allied victory over Hitler”, as Copeland does here. Picasso would have been an unlikely comparison also, but like the restless artist Turing was a fertile innovator, leaving new fields to sprout from his seedlings (computer science, artificial intelligence, mathematical biology), and making pioneering contributions to others (logic, cryptography, statistics).

From The Independent:

What could be more thrilling than finally having your debut novel published after years of honing your craft? Especially if it has been your goal since childhood; and the book is set to become not merely a modern classic, but a rite-of-passage read for every morose, misunderstood and proto-feminist teenager for years to come. But for one young writer, publication, respectful reviews and a growing reputation were not enough; which is why early 2013 sees both the 50th anniversary of the publication of Sylvia Plath's sole novel, The Bell Jar, and of its author's suicide, which followed a few weeks later. Plath folded a cloth, placed it in her gas oven, and laid her head inside early in the morning of 11 February 1963, having first sealed the door of her children's bedroom. She was 30. “A doctor put her on very heavy sedatives – and in the gap between one pill & the next she turned on the oven, and gassed herself,” her anguished, estranged husband, the poet Ted Hughes, wrote to a friend. “A Nurse was to arrive at 9am – couldn't get in, & it was 11am before they finally got to Sylvia. She was still warm.”

To celebrate the happier anniversary, at least, there is a sparkling new edition of The Bell Jar, which has never been out of print, a series of events are planned for later in the year, and this month sees the publication of a major new biography, Mad Girl's Love Song by Andrew Wilson. In the past, Plath's hotly contested life has been a minefield for those who attempted to interpret it. “I tried to be as objective as possible,” says Wilson. “I've got no agenda, I didn't read the other biographies, I went to the archives completely fresh, trying to stand back and see what kind of evidence there was.” He has conjured up a youthful, blonde and vibrant Plath, albeit one with a disturbing shadow side. But the dark fact of the suicide, on a bitter morning in one of the worst English winters on record, overshadows our understanding of the life and work of Sylvia Plath, and has cast something like a curse on the lives of those who survived her.

More here.

From Eureka Alert:

A new ray of hope has broken through the clouded outcomes associated with Alzheimer's disease. A new research report published in January 2013 print issue of the FASEB Journal by scientists from the National Institutes of Health shows that when a molecule called TFP5 is injected into mice with disease that is the equivalent of human Alzheimer's, symptoms are reversed and memory is restored—without obvious toxic side effects. “We hope that clinical trial studies in AD patients should yield an extended and a better quality of life as observed in mice upon TFP5 treatment,” said Harish C. Pant, Ph.D., a senior researcher involved in the work from the Laboratory of Neurochemistry at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders at Stroke at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, MD. “Therefore, we suggest that TFP5 should be an effective therapeutic compound.”

To make this discovery, Pant and colleagues used mice with a disease considered the equivalent of Alzheimer's. One set of these mice were injected with the small molecule TFP5, while the other was injected with saline as placebo. The mice, after a series of intraperitoneal injections of TFP5, displayed a substantial reduction in the various disease symptoms along with restoration of memory loss. In addition, the mice receiving TFP5 injections experienced no weight loss, neurological stress (anxiety) or signs of toxicity. The disease in the placebo mice, however, progressed normally as expected. TFP5 was derived from the regulator of a key brain enzyme, called Cdk5. The over activation of Cdk5 is implicated in the formation of plaques and tangles, the major hallmark of Alzheimer's disease. “The next step is to find out if this molecule can have the same effects in people, and if not, to find out which molecule will,” said Gerald Weissmann, M.D., Editor-in-Chief of the FASEB Journal. “Now that we know that we can target the basic molecular defects in Alzheimer's disease, we can hope for treatments far better – and more specific – than anything we have today.”

Picture: Areas of the brain affected by Alzheimer's disease.

More here.

New Years Eve

There are only two things now,
The great black night scooped out
And this fire-glow.

This fire-glow, the core,
And we the two ripe pips
That are held in store.

Listen, the darkness rings
As it circulates round our fire.
Take off your things.

Your shoulders, your bruised throat!
Your breasts, your nakedness!
This fiery coat!

As the darkness flickers and dips,
As the firelight falls and leaps
From your feet to your lips!
.

by D.H. Lawrence

Twenty-seven years ago, Bailyn released “The Peopling of British North America,” a terse “sketch” of a bigger project: an attempt to understand and recount “the westward trans-Atlantic movement of people” from Europe and Africa to the Americas. “One of the greatest events in recorded history,” Bailyn called it, with “consequences . . . beyond measure,” a vast migration that was “the foundation of American history.” At the same time, he issued the first volume of his project, “Voyagers to the West,” a study of the English who came to this land just before the Revolution. It won a Pulitzer. Now comes “The Barbarous Years,” the next installment. It circles back to a period that most Americans don’t hear much about in school: the chaotic decades from the establishment of Jamestown (England’s first permanent colony in the Americas) in 1607 up to King Philip’s War (the vicious conflict that effectively expelled Indians from New England) in 1675-76. Bailyn’s goal is to show how a jumble of migrants, “low and high born,” sought “to recreate, if not to improve, in this remote and, to them, barbarous environment, the life they had known before.”

more from Charles C. Mann at the NY Times here.

For a currently declinist, anxious America, and pessimists across the western world, Detroit stands as a cautionary tale, its rise and fall an ideal subject for any nonfiction writer with some historical skills, a bit of courage and street wisdom, and a few gothic adjectives at their disposal. For the first few chapters here, it seems almost too ideal. Unlike many of Detroit’s recent explorers, Binelli has local roots. He writes for Rolling Stone magazine, and uses a busy, knowing prose. Initially, this volume reads less like a book than a good book proposal, authoritative but self-conscious, switching restlessly between past and present, scene-setting and summary, energetic promotion of the topic at hand and world-weary commentary on rival Detroit portraits. Binelli then traces the city’s ascent, from its foundation in 1701 as a French fur-trading post, well situated between two of the Great Lakes, to the self-mythologising “Motor City” of Detroit’s brief heyday.

more from Andy Beckett at The Guardian here.

For most of our species’ history, all human beings lived surrounded by people they had known since childhood. Meeting strangers would have been rare and exciting; depending on local customs, newcomers would perhaps have been invited in for food and rest, or perhaps killed on the spot. But they would never, ever have been simply ignored. What is now normal in cities around the world actually runs deeply against our nature – which might explain both why my four-year-old daughter has a tendency to stop strangers in the street to say hello, and why many grown-ups who have learnt to suppress this instinct suffer from chronic loneliness. This is an example of how we might better understand ourselves by looking at our origins. Our experience as hunter-gatherers, herders and subsistence farmers has shaped us genetically and culturally, argues Jared Diamond in The World Until Yesterday. We must therefore understand these ways of life in order to solve modern problems such as loneliness, obesity or the unhappy condition of many elderly people.

more from Stephen Cave at the FT here.

Sean Carroll in his personal blog:

Longtime readers know I feel strongly that it should be more widely appreciated that the laws underlying the physics of everyday life are completely understood. (If you need more convincing: here, here, here.) For purposes of one of my talks next week in Oxford, I thought it would be useful to actually summarize those laws on a slide. Here’s the most compact way I could think to do it, while retaining some useful information. (As Feynman has pointed out, every equation in the world can be written U=0, for some definition of U— but it might not be useful.) Click to embiggen.

This is the amplitude to undergo a transition from one configuration to another in the path-integral formalism of quantum mechanics, within the framework of quantum field theory, with field content and dynamics described by general relativity (for gravity) and the Standard Model of particle physics (for everything else). The notations in red are just meant to be suggestive, don’t take them too seriously. But we see all the parts of known microscopic physics there — all the particles and forces. (We don’t understand the full theory of quantum gravity, but we understand it perfectly well at the everyday level. An ultraviolet cutoff fixes problems with renormalization.) No experiment ever done here on Earth has contradicted this model.

More here.

Frank Close in Prospect:

What is the most beautiful natural phenomenon that you have ever seen? A brilliant rainbow set against a distant storm, or a blood red sky just after sunset, perhaps? But anyone who has experienced the diamond ring effect that heralds the start of a total solar eclipse will agree it puts all others in the shade.

About once every 18 months, the moon passes directly between the sun and earth. As the moon moves slowly across the face of the sun, it casts a shadow on the earth’s surface about 100 miles in diameter, which is the distance from one horizon to another. As our planet spins in its daily round, the shadow rushes across land and sea at about 2000 miles an hour. Those beneath it as it passes see, for a few minutes, night brought to the dome of the sky directly overhead. Looking up myopically, you would see stars as if it were normal night, accompanied by an awesome sight: a circle of profound blackness, a veritable hole in the sky, surrounded by shimmering white light, like a black sunflower with the most delicate of silver petals. One watcher described it to me as like “looking into the valley of death with the lights of heaven far away calling for me to enter.”

There is a slow build-up to the show, as the moon gradually covers the sun, which becomes a thin crescent as darkness falls. Then as totality approaches, excitement mounts. After the thrill of the eclipse you can’t wait to do it again, but wait you must until that exquisite alignment of sun, moon and earth comes around once more, and when it does you must go to the thin arc where the moon’s shadow momentarily sweeps across a small part of the globe.

More here.

To My Brother George

Many the wonder I have this day seen:
The sun, when he first kist away the tears
that fill'd the eyes of morn; the laurel'd peers
Who from the feathery gold of evening lean;
The ocean with its vastness, its blue green,
Its ships, its rocks, its caves, its hopes, its fears,
Its voice mysterious, which whoso hears
Must think on what will be, and what has been.
E'en now, dear George, while this for you I wrote,
Cynthia is from her silken curtains peeping
So scantly, that it seems her bridal night,
and she her half-discover'd revels keeping.
But what, without the social thought of thee,
Would be the wonders of the sky and sea?

by John Keats

From The New Yorker:

Helicobacter pylori may be the most successful pathogen in human history. While not as deadly as the bacteria that cause tuberculosis, cholera, and the plague, it infects more people than all the others combined. H. pylori, which migrated out of Africa along with our ancestors, has been intertwined with our species for at least two hundred thousand years. Although the bacterium occupies half the stomachs on earth, its role in our lives was never clear. Then, in 1982, to the astonishment of the medical world, two scientists, Barry Marshall and J. Robin Warren, discovered that H. pylori is the principal cause of gastritis and peptic ulcers; it has since been associated with an increased risk of stomach cancer as well. Until that discovery, for which the men shared a Nobel Prize, in 2005, stress, not an infection, was assumed to be the major cause of peptic ulcers. H. pylori is shaped like a corkscrew and is three microns long. (A grain of sand is about three hundred microns.) It is also one of the rare microbes that live comfortably in the brutally acidic surroundings of the stomach. Doctors realized that antibiotics could rid the body of the bacterium and cure the disease; treating ulcers this way has been so successful that there have been periodic discussions of trying to eradicate H. pylori altogether. The consensus was clear; as one prominent gastroenterologist wrote in 1997, “The only good Helicobacter pylori is a dead Helicobacter pylori.” Eradication proved complicated and expensive, however, and the effort never gained momentum. Yet few scientists questioned the goal. “Helicobacter was a cause of cancer and of ulcers,’’ Martin J. Blaser, the chairman of the Department of Medicine and a professor of microbiology at the New York University School of Medicine, told me recently. “It was bad for us. So the idea was to get it out of our bodies, as fast as we can. I don’t know of anyone who said, Gee, we better think about the consequences.”

No one was more eager to rout the organism from the human gut than Blaser, who has devoted most of his working life to the study of H. pylori. His laboratory at N.Y.U. developed the first standard blood tests to identify the microbe, and most of them are commonly in use today. But Blaser, a restless intellect who, in addition to his medical duties, helped start the Bellevue Literary Review, wondered how an organism as old as humans could survive if it caused nothing but harm. “That isn’t how evolution works,” he said. “H. pylori is an ancestral component of humanity.” By the nineteen-nineties, Blaser had begun to look more closely at the bacterium’s molecular behavior, and in 1998 he published a paper in the British Medical Journal suggesting, contrary to prevailing views, that it might not be so dangerous after all. The following year, he started the Foundation for Bacteriology, to help focus attention on the critical, and usually positive, role that these organisms play in human evolution.

More here.

From The New York Times:

In 2002 the New York Institute for the Humanities organized a symposium under the title “Was Athanasius Kircher the Coolest Guy Ever, or What?“ The highlights of this 17th-century German Jesuit polymath’s sprawling résumé, summed up in John Glassie’s brisk new biography, suggest the question wasn’t completely absurd. Kircher’s dozens of books — totaling some seven million words in Latin — covered optics, magnetism, geology, volcanology, medicine, archaeology, acoustics, Sinology and much, much more. He invented machines for generating mathematical music, did research on a universal language and collaborated with Bernini on the spectacular Fountain of the Four Rivers in Rome, where Kircher spent much of his adult life. He claimed to have deciphered Egyptian hieroglyphics and was one of the first to use a microscope to study disease. Visitors flocked to his Museum Kircherianum to see mermaids’ tails, talking statues and other wonders, not least the great genius himself. True, few of Kircher’s big ideas, elaborated in gargantuan books like “The Great Art of Knowing,” hold up today, if they even held up then. Descartes, after flipping through Kircher’s 1641 treatise on magnetism, pronounced him “more of a charlatan than a scholar.” But then did Descartes ever build a vomiting machine or a clock powered by a sunflower seed, let alone design a “cat piano” played by pricking the tails of seven cats with differently pitched cries? Enough said.

In “A Man of Misconceptions,” the first general-interest biography of Kircher, Mr. Glassie draws on three decades of renewed scholarly interest in his work to deliver a stirring if sometimes backhanded defense. So what if his works, “in number, bulk and uselessness are not surpassed in the whole field of learning,“ as one early-20th-century scholar put it? There’s something to be said, Mr. Glassie writes, merely “for having been a source of so many ideas — right, wrong, half right, half-baked, ridiculous, beautiful and all-encompassing.”

More here.

Many raised their eyebrows: a war in Europe? Unimaginable, especially since the great majority of Europeans were not alive during the last major military confrontation. True, in the early 1990s Yugoslavia went through a bloody collapse right on our doorstep. But back then everything seemed so remote, despite the fact that those unhappy places were only a few hours’ drive away. There are many possible arguments against the idea that a war in Europe could still break out. But how valid are they in the midst of the storm that has taken over the Union? Can Europe really break apart? Jacques Delors, Jürgen Habermas, José Ignacio Torreblanca, Daniel Daianu, Ulrike Guérot, Slavenka Drakulic, John Grahl and others discuss the causes for the current crisis — and how to solve it. [ more ] One argument is that “European leaders wouldn’t allow it”. But which leaders are we talking about? Twentieth-century visionaries? Certainly not. Not only would the collapse of the European project bring forth an entirely different type of leader, it would actually be hastened by them. We can already feel their presence on what are still the peripheries of the national political stages. However they are becoming increasingly active and influential.

more from Ovidiu Nahoi at Eurozine here.

In 1955 I had a wonderful opportunity to participate in an expedition to observe a total solar eclipse in Ceylon. Thirty-two years later, in 1987, I was able to return to the eclipse site, and I was asked what did I notice that was different. I mused that Sri Lanka seemed much more crowded than Ceylon had been. That’s right, our tour guide responded. The population had doubled in those three decades. Since 1900 the entire world population has quadrupled. The physical mass of human beings and domesticated animals now makes up 90 percent of the vertebrate mass, up from 0.1 percent 10,000 years ago. The accelerating expansion of technological power, combined with the explosive growth of the world population and unsustainable consumption and production patterns, brings unparalleled challenges for the unity of nations. Already some centuries ago the expanding human population began to change the environment. Today, humans have modified more than 80 percent of Earth’s land surface.

more from Owen Gingerich at The American Scholar here.

These fictions sometimes extend to phantom settlements. In 2010, the place (because no such term—city, town, hamlet—exists for imaginary locations) known as Argleton disappeared from Google Maps. The poverty of digital archives means its provenance remains a mystery, but it existed for some brief period prior to this date. It lived, as it were, for some time as a settlement within the boundaries of the civil parish of Aughton in West Lancashire. The cascade effect of digital technologies has ensured its survival, partial as it may be, in real estate, employment, and weather databases. At time of writing, TravelRepublic.co.uk lists the West Tower Country House Hotel, the Swan Hotel, Martin Lane Farmhouse Holiday Cottage, the Farmhouse Burscough, and numerous others as potential holiday accommodations in Argleton. Padz.com lists rental accommodation—at least one “BRILLIANT MALE STUDENT FLAT!” and numerous others—in Argleton. And Enormo.co.uk has “a modern, two bedroomed, ground floor apartment, located in an established area just minutes walk from Ormskirk Town Centre shopping and transport facilities” located in the ghost precinct. Attempt to walk it and only fields are found.

more from James Bridle at Cabinet here.

Emma Young in The Ledger:

In 1908, Linda Hazzard, an American with some training as a nurse, published “Fasting for the Cure of Disease,” which claimed that minimal food was the route to recovery from a variety of illnesses, including cancer. Hazzard was jailed after one of her patients died of starvation. But what if she was, at least partly, right?

A new surge of interest in fasting suggests that it might indeed help people with cancer. It might also reduce the risk of developing cancer, guard against diabetes and heart disease, help control asthma and even stave off Parkinson's disease and dementia.

“We know from animal models,” says Mark Mattson at the National Institute on Aging, “that if we start an intermittent fasting diet at what would be the equivalent of middle age in people, we can delay the onset of Alzheimer's and Parkinson's.”

Until recently, most studies linking diet with health and longevity focused on calorie restriction. They have had some impressive results, with the life span of various lab animals lengthened by up to 50 percent after their caloric intake was cut in half. But these effects do not seem to extend to primates.

More here.

David Rothkopf at CNN:

The last political drama of 2012 and the first one of 2013 suggest that if you love America, you might want to consider making your New Year's resolution quitting whatever political party you belong to.

The “fiscal cliff” debate and the last-minute deal it produced have so far resolved nothing except to show that our system is profoundly broken and that radical changes are needed to fix it.

While many in Washington are breathing a sigh of relief and some are trying to spin the outcome as a win for the president, those who characterize this bill as a genuine victory for anyone at all have clearly lost perspective. The deal brokered by Vice President Joe Biden and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell does make good on President Obama's promise to bring a little more equity to the tax code by raising rates on wealthier Americans, and it temporarily averts the most draconian “sequestration” cuts. But the list of what it does not do, and what it does wrong, is long.

By midday Tuesday, the Congressional Budget Office had concluded that the Biden-McConnell package would add nearly $4 trillion to federal deficits over the next 10 years. This was largely because it actually extends and makes permanent more than 80% of the Bush tax cuts. So much for the idea that this whole struggle was supposed to help America get its financial house in order.

Just as bad, or perhaps worse in terms of the day-to-day lives of average people, the bill only postpones the forced cuts of sequestration by two months, to precisely the moment the country will be engaged in another ruinous debate about lifting our national debt ceiling to ensure the country can pay its bills. It thus creates a new, even more dangerous fiscal cliff. Next time around, the markets will not be so blasé about congressional brinkmanship if the national credit rating and the stability of a bedrock of the international financial system are at stake.

More here.