From Nature:

Mice that had been genetically engineered to develop tumours failed to do so. Instead, the animals grew up to be huge and very hairy. And when the tips of the pups’ toes were clipped off in a routine tagging procedure, they often grew back. What was different about these mice was that they carried a protein, Lin28a, which is generally produced only in developing embryos. Lin28a has already garnered attention for its involvement in the functioning of stem cells and in cancer. A study published today in Cell¹ now shows that this protein can improve tissue repair — even in adults. In mice genetically modified to produce the protein throughout their lives, the animals’ hair grew faster than normal and puncture wounds in their ears healed almost completely. “We were just so shocked that such a small change in this gene could have profound effects on a complex regenerating tissue,” says Hao Zhu, a cell biologist at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas and an author on the study.

Resetting cells using embryonic genes has been seen before, most prominently in the creation of cells known as induced pluripotent stem cells, which acquire an embryonic-like state after a suite of genes is activated. But the latest study reveals that such de-ageing changes can be made not just in cultured cells, but in developed tissues within an organism. It suggests that it might be possible to make older tissues behave more like young ones, which are much better at repairing damage. In mammalian fetuses, for example, even deep wounds can heal without scarring.

More here.

Matthew Hutson in Aeon:

Objectification has been defined in feminist literature to include several elements, including the denial of autonomy and the denial of subjectivity — we see the person as lacking self-determination and feelings. He or she becomes, in the viewer’s mind, an object, a ‘piece of meat’, devoid of any internal life.

At least that’s what we thought. Recent research, however, would suggest that there is a more complex, though no less disturbing, process at play when we objectify not only girls and women, but boys and men as well. In contrast to popular belief, when we ‘objectify’ we don’t treat people as objects with no intelligence or emotions of their own. Several notable psychologists are beginning to argue that, when we objectify someone, we don’t assume that they have less mind overall, but that they have a different type of mind.

We spend much of our day pondering other peoples’ minds. They can love us, hate us, help us, or harm us — but we can never experience them directly, a fact that drives the work of the psychologist Kurt Gray. In his Mind Perception and Morality Lab at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the 32-year-old assistant professor began a research project into how we piece together incomplete data to build an idea of another person. This question led him to research attitudes toward persistent vegetative states, torture and judgments of guilt, robot-human interactions, belief in God, the fundamental structure of morality, and, most recently, objectification — the influence of embodiment on mind-perception. His findings offered what Gray calls ‘a significant twist on objectification’. What emerged was that we see the capacity for feelings, whether pleasure or pain or happiness or anger, as distinct from the capacity for intellectual thought and planning. Namely, that we treat those we objectify as less intelligent, yet simultaneously we endow them with a greater ability tofeel things.

More here.

Stephen T Asma in Aeon:

Most of the people reading this article do not possess the skill to start a fire from scratch. And yet, many anthropologists think that the mastery of fire literally transformed our ancestors into human beings. They say it gave us cooking, protection and heat, and also reshaped our very anatomy. In Catching Fire (2009), the Harvard anthropologist Richard Wrangham argues that eating cooked food produced the efficient Homo erectus digestive tract, freeing up energy for brain growth.

Be this as it may, our ancestors lived for a long time without fire and we could presumably do it again, however unpleasant that sounds. In fact our ancestors did lose the knack of fire-starting, for generations. Control of fire first appears in South Africa as early as 1.5 million years ago. It crops up again in Israel and China around 700,000 years ago, but doesn’t appear in European populations until 300,000 years later. Why the dark interludes? Perhaps a tribe lost its master fire-starter to a predator before she had a chance to pass on the technique. Perhaps a whole population of fire adepts was wiped out in a single catastrophe. Either scenario could have blacked out whole millennia before the vital techniques were reinvented or re-encountered.

It appears, despite fire’s incredible value for survival, that natural selection has not given human brains any sort of prewired module for controlling it. Such skills belong instead to the realm of culture: not the high culture of libraries and works of art but an older, dumber process of transmission, working person-to-person and generation-to-generation, fragile enough to lose everything in a single tragic decade but sturdy enough to survive for millennia under the right conditions. And it isn’t the only vital skill to hang by so slender a thread.

More here.

Our own Morgan Meis in The Smart Set:

Have you ever felt odd? Perhaps an odd feeling came upon you one morning at the market. You saw the piles of vegetables and the cuts of meats covered in clear plastic. You noticed, with particular attention, the little signs above the individual fruits giving their names and prices. Suddenly, it seemed unaccountably odd that any of this should make any sense to anyone. How very strange that these numbers and words and pictures and physical objects are all related, you thought. It was a warm morning and you walked out into the sunlight with a beating heart and a sheen of sweat on the palms of your hands. For a few more moments you trusted neither sun, nor earth, nor sky. All aspects of reality seemed as arbitrary to you as those signs above the fruit in the market. And then the feeling faded and you were back in the world again. You proceeded to go about your day.

René Magritte must have had mornings like that. Think of the painting he made in 1935. The painting is called “La Clef des songes” (The Interpretation of Dreams). It is a painting of a board with four panels. The board is like an old school primer, used to teach children the names of things. There is a horse, a clock, a pitcher, and a valise. Under the objects are words. The horse is labeled “the door.” The clock is labeled “the wind.” The pitcher is labeled “the bird.” And the valise is labeled “the valise.” Why are three objects mislabeled, while one object is correctly labeled? Maybe it is like our confused morning at the market. We felt odd not because the fruits were labeled incorrectly, but because the relationship of signs suddenly struck us as utterly arbitrary even when everything had been labeled correctly. Likewise, when we see the three incorrectly labeled objects in “La Clef des songes,” we begin to distrust even the correct labeling of the valise. What does the word “valise” have to do with the picture of the valise, and what does the picture really have to do with the actual thing? When we represent reality in words or pictures, do we come closer to that reality, or push it further away?

More here.

Peter Beinart in Open Zion:

I’m not saying that American Jews who criticize Israel are persecuted, or that doing so requires any great bravery. It doesn’t. But there’s an inevitable tension between being part of a close-knit community and challenging what that community believes. As I began writing critically about Israel, I began to feel it. When I asked one friend to comment on the manuscript of my book, he at first replied that for the sake of our friendship, he would rather not. At the kosher for Passover resort where I had been a speaker for many years (and no longer am), one guest told the proprietors that he wanted a room that would allow him to walk to and from meals without ever laying eyes on me. One Saturday morning when I was walking to synagogue, a man asked me if I was Peter Beinart. When I said yes, he announced—loud enough for his kids and mine to hear—that “I think your politics are shit.”

I’d been expecting some of that. What I hadn’t expected was something else: The yeshiva student in Brooklyn who emailed me because he felt that his school’s depiction of Arabs was inhumane. The middle-aged employee of a right-wing Jewish group who told me she had grown so disturbed by the way her organization depicted Muslims that she began, literally, cold calling local Muslims so she could see for herself if they were as pathological as she had been told. The college student and Birthright alum who almost began to cry at a panel sponsored by the Jewish Federations of North America as she described feeling “betrayed” because what “I’ve been told growing up [about Israel]…a lot of it has not been honest and not been true.”

As these unusual experiences mounted, I began to wonder whether it might be possible to build a different sort of community, a group blog infused with Jewish commitment yet dedicated to a radically open conversation that included Palestinians. When I proposed calling the blog “Zion Square,” which later became “Open Zion,” some supporters said it was too parochial. But that was exactly the point. I didn’t want a purely universalist space, devoid of tribal commitment. I wanted to show that asking the hardest, most painful, questions about Israel could be a Jewish, even Zionist, act.

More here.

Jeff McMahan and others discuss at the Boston Review:

The military services in the United States have been organized on a volunteer basis since 1973, when President Richard Nixon abolished the draft. The end of conscription came as a relief to most people—to young men, their parents, and eventually the leaders of the military services, which had been plagued by internal dissent and a lack of professionalism, partly as a result of having so many unwilling members.

Though isolated voices have always challenged the shift to a volunteer military, their criticisms have recently become more widespread and more vocal. The main objections come from two quite different directions.

Some critics argue that the reliance on an all-volunteer, professional army has led to diminished public concern and vigilance with respect to the wars the government decides to fight. Limiting the burdens of military service to volunteers has, according to these critics, weakened inhibitions against the use of military force. When the Iraq War was debated in 2002–3, most citizens were not concerned that they or their children would be required to fight. This eliminated a powerful constraint against the resort to war. According to these critics, the reintroduction of some form of conscription is necessary to reestablish greater democratic control over the practice of war.

Other critics come from the ranks of just war theorists. Their concern is not with diminished public vigilance but with individual moral responsibility.

More here.

Abby Kluchin and Ajay Singh Chaudhary in Social Text:

At present there is a broad and sustained assault upon forms of critical education and scholarship. As a result, wide swaths of the humanities, social sciences and even the theoretical sciences are in danger of becoming the rarefied pursuits of a tiny, economically privileged elite or vanishing altogether. This is not due to lack of interest or to the transformation or exhaustion of these disciplines. Students and faculty alike are encouraged to pursue “practical” or “applied” fields at the expense of a liberal arts education in the humanities and social sciences, or even some of the theoretical areas within the highly touted “STEM” fields. This shift accompanies the growing trend towards the internalization of diffuse corporate ideologies within universities, in the “re-engineering” of the labor force as well as the increasingly prevalent view of students as “consumers” in the market of higher education. ¹

We understand this phenomenon within the context of broader economic trends. The transformation of many formerly stable sectors of economic life into modes of precarious labor is by no means confined to academia. But American higher education represents a fairly dramatic example of this trend. In 1975, nearly 60% of faculty at American colleges and universities had full-time, stable employment. ² Today, approximately 76% of the academic workforce is made up of contingent, undercompensated, and part-time workers who lack job security. ³ This transformation is not only disastrous for the livelihood and well-being of this workforce, but also has significant repercussions for the state of the academy, as it drastically constrains possibilities for research and writing and adversely affects the quality of students’ education.

These phenomena are unfolding within a political and administrative climate that is antagonistic to critical education and research. The past decade provides copious examples. In 2011, Florida Governor Rick Scott threatened the elimination of all state funding for anthropology. At the national level, the Senate recently adopted new rules limiting National Science Foundation funding and support in political science to projects that demonstrably promote “the national security or the economic interests of the United States.” The American Political Science Association aptly summarized the new rules: “While political science research is most immediately affected, at risk is any and all research in any and all disciplines funded by the NSF. The amendment makes all scientific research vulnerable to the whims of political pressure.”

More here.

Damian Walford Davies at the Times Literary Supplement:

Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772) – neuroscientist avant la lettre, philosopher, mystic and interlocutor of spirits from whom William Blake dramatically swerved in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell(“And lo! Swedenborg is the Angel sitting at the tomb; his writings are the linen clothes folded up”) – never visited Swansea. At least, not while alive. His post-mortem movements, however, lead precisely to that unlikely place. They also lead, in the late 1950s, to a veiled elegy for that town’s most famous literary son – Dylan Thomas – by the writer unprepossessingly dubbed “Swansea’s other poet”: Vernon Watkins (1906–67). Watkins’s poetic necrology is a recension of the remarkable story of Swedenborg’s skull – a case of “cranioklepty” (a term coined by Colin Dickey in a recent study of cranial larceny or “skullduggery”) that stretches from 1790 to 1959, and beyond.

Dickey is the most recent writer to chronicle Swedenborg’s unquiet cranium. The skull had an eventful afterlife, accruing cultural capital in an age of phrenological obsession, cabinet curiosities and general disrespect for the disjecta ossa of men of presumed “genius”.

more here.

Nicholas Rombes at Berfrois:

1960

The writer Delmore Schwartz was Reed’s professor at Syracuse University, where Reed, who majored in English, graduated in 1964. In 2012, Reed published a tribute to Schwartz that read, in part:

You told us to break into ______’s estate where your wife was being held
prisoner. Your wrists broken by those who were your enemies. The pills
jumbling your fine mind. I met you in the bar where you had just ordered five
drinks. You said they were so slow that by the time you had the fifth you
should have ordered again. Our scotch classes. Vermouth. The jukebox you
hated — the lyrics so pathetic.

Schwartz’s poem from 1960, “All Night, All Night,” is an impossible, reverse wind-up chronicle of the desperate, aloof preoccupations of Reed’s lyrics and sound. In another universe, closely aligned with ours, this could be the song that the Velvet Underground almost recorded:

All Night, All Night

“I have been one acquainted with the night” – Robert Frost

Rode in the train all night, in the sick light. A bird
Flew parallel with a singular will. In daydream’s moods and
attitudes
The other passengers slumped, dozed, slept, read,
Waiting, and waiting for place to be displaced
On the exact track of safety or the rack of accident.

more here.

Hope Resse's interview with Tom Bissell at Paris Review:

I’d just moved to Portland. I was sitting in an empty apartment on an air mattress waiting for my girlfriend and all my stuff to arrive in a U-Haul. I spent the day looking on the Internet for something to occupy myself. I stumbled across clips of The Room and watched them in various states of amazement. It’s unlike any movie I’ve ever seen. Through a stroke of coincidence I’ll never understand, it turned out that the movie was premiering in Portland that night at a theater five blocks from the apartment I’d rented. What’s really funny is that someone was recording an audience-reaction documentary there that night, so on YouTube there’s a clip of me being interviewed before I saw it for the first time. I felt so exhilarated by the movie, by its combination of complete incompetence and utter confidence. It swept me up, and my aesthetic life has never been the same since. I’m obsessed with it. I love it. Whether you want to call it outsider art or bananas art or disaster art, the movie has something that movies made with infinitesimally more precision and expertise will never have. It has a big beating heart.

more here.

Naomi Klein in New Statesman:

In December 2012, a pink-haired complex systems researcher named Brad Werner made his way through the throng of 24,000 earth and space scientists at the Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union, held annually in San Francisco. This year’s conference had some big-name participants, from Ed Stone of Nasa’s Voyager project, explaining a new milestone on the path to interstellar space, to the film-maker James Cameron, discussing his adventures in deep-sea submersibles. But it was Werner’s own session that was attracting much of the buzz. It was titled “Is Earth F**ked?” (full title: “Is Earth F**ked? Dynamical Futility of Global Environmental Management and Possibilities for Sustainability via Direct Action Activism”). Standing at the front of the conference room, the geophysicist from the University of California, San Diego walked the crowd through the advanced computer model he was using to answer that question. He talked about system boundaries, perturbations, dissipation, attractors, bifurcations and a whole bunch of other stuff largely incomprehensible to those of us uninitiated in complex systems theory. But the bottom line was clear enough: global capitalism has made the depletion of resources so rapid, convenient and barrier-free that “earth-human systems” are becoming dangerously unstable in response. When pressed by a journalist for a clear answer on the “are we f**ked” question, Werner set the jargon aside and replied, “More or less.”

There was one dynamic in the model, however, that offered some hope. Werner termed it “resistance” – movements of “people or groups of people” who “adopt a certain set of dynamics that does not fit within the capitalist culture”. According to the abstract for his presentation, this includes “environmental direct action, resistance taken from outside the dominant culture, as in protests, blockades and sabotage by indigenous peoples, workers, anarchists and other activist groups”.

More here.

Julie Bosman in The New York Times:

Here’s how Brandon Stanton spends several hours each day: He walks up to total strangers in New York City, requests permission to take their pictures and then asks questions so personal they might make Oprah Winfrey blush. “What was the saddest moment of your life?” Mr. Stanton asked Jonathan Cummings, a 29-year-old from Queens who was loading crates of beer into a restaurant in the East Village on Tuesday. Mr. Cummings, who had just agreed to be photographed and seemed charmed by Mr. Stanton, didn’t hesitate before giving an answer. (It involved an arrest after a brawl in Las Vegas.) With a combination of disarming folksiness and passable — though admittedly inexpert — photography skills, Mr. Stanton has achieved one of the most unlikely success stories in a city filled with them. After posting pictures and quotations on his Facebook page, Tumblr blog and website, HumansOfNewYork.com, he has amassed more than one million fans in three years. Now, hundreds of those pictures and interviews have been compiled into a book, “Humans of New York,” which has become an instant publishing phenomenon. After its first week on sale last month, the book landed in the No. 1 spot on the New York Times hardcover nonfiction best-seller list, catapulting past Bill O’Reilly’s “Killing Jesus.” During an event at the Barnes & Noble in Union Square, Mr. Stanton attracted such a crowd that the store ran out of his books. Mr. Stanton — a hybrid of interviewer, photographer and eager chronicler of street life — said this week that he was still stunned by the runaway success of his book, which has more than 145,000 copies in print. “It seemed like a stupid idea, just taking pictures of people on the street,” he said. “But there’s a comfort, an affirmation, a validation in being exposed to people with similar problems.”

Mr. Stanton is a 29-year-old Georgia native with no training as a journalist. He has owned two cameras in his life and admits he has never learned the technically correct way to use them. When he moved to New York in 2010, he was friendless, nearly broke and recently relieved of his job as a bond trader in Chicago. In the three years since, he has transformed himself into a recognizable face (who is approached by fans several times a day) with a healthy income unusual for a young, inexperienced photographer.

Picture: “We ordered her those pants, and as soon as they arrived, she cut off the bottoms and made a pair of gloves.”

More here.

Porpoise
.

Every year, when we're fly fishing for tarpon
off Key West, Guy insists that porpoises
are good luck. But it's not so banal
as catching more fish or having a fashion
model fall out of the sky lightly on your head,
or at your feet depending on certain
preferences. It's what porpoises do to the ocean.
You see a school making love off Boca Grande,
the baby with his question mark staring
at us a few feet from the boat.
Porpoises dance for as long as they live.
You can do nothing for them.
They alter the universe.
.

by Jim Harrison
from The Shape of the Journey
Copper Canyon Press, 1998

From KurzweilAI:

One in five stars in our galaxy like the Sun have planets about the size of Earth and a surface temperature conducive to life, astronomers at UC Berkeley and University of Hawaii, Manoa now estimate.

The estimate was based on a statistical analysis of all the Kepler observations of NASA’s Kepler space telescope of the 200 billion stars in our galaxy. Given that about 20 percent of stars are Sun-like, the researchers say, that amounts to several tens of billions of potentially habitable, Earth-size planets in the Milky Way Galaxy. “When you look up at the thousands of stars in the night sky, the nearest Sun-like star with an Earth-size planet in its habitable zone is probably only 12 light years away and can be seen with the naked eye. That is amazing,” said UC Berkeley graduate student Erik Petigura, who led the analysis of the Kepler data.

More here.

Mark Bostridge at Literary Review:

Television coverage of the Booker Prize has rarely been distinguished or insightful. In fact, more often than not, it's been marked by embarrassing behaviour of some kind or other by a gauche, misinformed presenter or a tired and emotional agent or publisher. Nonetheless, the TV presentation of 1979's proceedings must rate as an all-time low. That year a heavyweight win for V S Naipaul'sA Bend in the River had been widely predicted, but in the event the prize was awarded to Penelope Fitzgerald for her third novel, Offshore.

The subsequent discussion on the Book Programme was, as Hermione Lee says in her life of Fitzgerald, 'breathtakingly condescending', as the interviewer, Robert Robinson, together with his assorted guests, competed to pour scorn on the winner as she sat in the studio alongside them, looking like she'd been hit hard over the head. Full of self-congratulatory candour, Susan Hill launched in at the start by admitting that although it was an appalling thing to say – and she stressed that she didn't want 'to discomfort' Fitzgerald – she wouldn't have chosen her book as the winner. Off air, as Fitzgerald later wrote to the novelist Francis King, Robinson was in a bad temper and complaining to his producer, 'who are these people, you promised me they were going to be the losers.'

By that time, in her early sixties, Penelope Fitzgerald was long accustomed to humiliation and, far worse, to catastrophe.

more here.

Joan Acocella at The New Yorker:

Boccaccio was not a noble; he was one of the nuova gente, the mercantile middle class, whose steady rise since the twelfth century the nobles feared and deplored. Boccaccio’s father, Boccaccino di Chellino, was a merchant, and he expected Giovanni to join the trade. Giovanni was born illegitimate, but Boccaccino acknowledged him. When the boy was thirteen, Boccaccino moved from Florence to Naples to work for an important counting house, and he took his son with him, to learn the business: receive clients, oversee inventory, and the like. Boccaccio did not enjoy this work, and so his indulgent father paid for him to go to university, to study canon law. Boccaccio didn’t like that, either, but during this time he read widely. (The Decameron is, unostentatiously, a very learned book.) He also began to write: romances in verse and prose, mostly. With those literary credits, plus his father’s contacts, he gained entry to Naples’s Angevin court, whose refinements seeped into his work. He later said that he had never wanted to be anything but a poet. In Naples, he became one, of the late-medieval stripe. These were the happiest years of his life.

more here.

China Miéville at Guernica:

“In the occupied West Bank, “Undesirable life is ended, and unauthorized death is banned.”

So we should ask Mohammed Al-Durra. He isn’t dead again.

Recall his face. Even from a government one of the chief exports of which is images of screaming children, his was particularly choice, tucked behind his desperate father, pinned by fire. Until Israeli bullets visit them and they both go limp. He for good. Pour encourager les autres.

Now, though, thirteen years after he was shot on camera—one year more than he lived—he has been brought back to life. But wait before you celebrate: there are no very clear protocols for this strange paper resurrection. Mohammed Al-Durra is a bureaucratic Lazarus. After a long official investigation, by the power vested in it, the Israeli government has declared him not dead. He did not die.

There was another boy at the hospital, there were no injuries, it was a trick. A blood libel to suggest he was killed by Israelis, the same day as were Nizar Aida and Khaled al-Bazyan, one day before Muhammad al-Abasi and Sara Hasan and Samer Tubanja and Sami al-Taramsi and Hussam Bakhit and Iyad al-Khashishi, two before Wael Qatawi and Aseel Asleh, three before Hussam al-Hamshari and Amr al-Rifai, but stop because listing killed children takes a long time. Keep his name out of that file.

more here.

The Wedding Poem

This day
Let no one claim
That love is false. Let no one
Tell a tale of love's dilution,
Cross his lips with doubt,
Or discuss the up and down and up
Of love chained to a balance beam –
Laundry and who takes out the trash.

Instead, let us make a pact:
To stop for this short time
The radio in our heads, the voices
Of discontent that drive us mad –
The committee of shoulds and oughts
And might have beens. The old harangue
Of never never never.
To forsake, for these next minutes
(Not for this couple but for ourselves),
All the symptoms of our days.

Then, together, let us swear,
That this sun, this sky, these vows,
This bubble balanced on the point
of a knife is all there is –
For we have pushed aside the walls
That close us in
To come to this shared space. And see –
We have filled the space with flowers,
Where love, like some bright bird
Too swift to hold,
May light for us a while and sing.

by Alice Friman
from Proposing on the Brooklyn Bridge
Poetworks / Grayson Books, 2003

Debra Satz, Mark Budolfson, Blake Francis, and Hyunseop Kim over at the Boston Review:

Ethics are important. The economic divide between the developed and developing world highlights the ethical dimensions of energy access in a climate-constrained world. Is it fair to hinder economic growth in developing countries because the wealthiest nations have changed the composition of the atmosphere and changed the climate of the planet? To what extent do the developed nations bear responsibility for not only remedying the problem, but also for compensating those people who are now suffering because of climate climate, or who could face tight emissions restrictions? As the economic balance of the world changes, what role should rapidly developing nations share in the responsibility to address these issues?

Here, we examine these issues through the lens of one country, Pakistan, which is struggling with a severe energy crisis that is holding back economic development and exacerbating political instability.

More here.