Although I can see him still—
by W.B. Yeats
Although I can see him still—
by W.B. Yeats
James Gallagher in BBC:
The activity of hundreds of genes was altered when people's sleep was cut to less than six hours a day for a week. Writing in the journal PNAS, the researchers said the results helped explain how poor sleep damaged health. Heart disease, diabetes, obesity and poor brain function have all been linked to substandard sleep. What missing hours in bed actually does to alter health, however, is unknown. So researchers at the University of Surrey analysed the blood of 26 people after they had had plenty of sleep, up to 10 hours each night for a week, and compared the results with samples after a week of fewer than six hours a night. More than 700 genes were altered by the shift. Each contains the instructions for building a protein, so those that became more active produced more proteins – changing the chemistry of the body. Meanwhile the natural body clock was disturbed – some genes naturally wax and wane in activity through the day, but this effect was dulled by sleep deprivation.
Prof Colin Smith, from the University of Surrey, told the BBC: “There was quite a dramatic change in activity in many different kinds of genes.” Areas such as the immune system and how the body responds to damage and stress were affected. Prof Smith added: “Clearly sleep is critical to rebuilding the body and maintaining a functional state, all kinds of damage appear to occur – hinting at what may lead to ill health. “If we can't actually replenish and replace new cells, then that's going to lead to degenerative diseases.” He said many people may be even more sleep deprived in their daily lives than those in the study – suggesting these changes may be common.
More here.
Helen Morgan in ArtAsiaPacific:
Throughout extended periods of political conflict in Palestine, artistic practice has emerged as a critical tool. In the face of cultural annihilation, art helps bring the fight for survival to the world’s attention, offering a unique perspective on military occupation. Artist Rana Bishara explores the complex issues that have emerged in the region following decades of hostility and injustice. Drawing from both collective memory and individual stories, Bishara makes works that explore irrevocable trauma and distress, yet simultaneously encourage strength, hope and resistance. Her paintings, installation art, sculpture and performance constantly employ symbolic materials and imagery and, while highly political, are thought-provoking and sensitive. These works reflect the range of emotions interwoven in the fabric of the Palestinian experience and are threaded with the recurrent themes of displacement, home and exile. ArtAsiaPacific met with Bishara to discuss symbolism and the role of art in resistance.
You used a cactus to make your piece Homage to Prisoner Hanaa al-Shalabi in Israeli Prison on Her 32nd Day of Hunger Strike(2012). Can you explain why you chose this material?
Cacti are the only things that remain of the 531 villages and towns that were destroyed and depopulated in the 1948 war. They mark the locations of villages and serve as fences. I collect them from the fields outside the villages, viewing them as elements of Palestine. I dry them, work into them, plant them and they begin to grow again. A cactus is so strong, so resilient. There was a big hunger strike of Palestinians in Israeli prisons—there are around 10,000 prisoners—and I am now carving some of their faces into cacti, in order to give hope and patience.In Arabic, the word cactus, “sabar,” means “to be patient.”
More here.
For those of you who haven't seen this:
Jonathan Benthall at the Times Literary Supplement:
“The whole Question is this: Are Lust and Hunger both alike Passions of physical Necessity, and the one equally with the other independent of the Reason, & the Will? Shame upon our Race, that there lives the Individual who dares even ask the Question!” Thus Coleridge annotated his copy of An Essay on the Principle of Population by Malthus, appalled by his claim that human beings are dominated by the need for sexual outlets as well as for physical sustenance. Coleridge’s is but one example of the obloquy that the Revd Thomas Malthus FRS (1776–1834) has attracted. Yet Malthus has intermittently attracted admirers – including Charles Darwin, Alfred Russel Wallace, H. G. Wells, John Maynard Keynes, Winston Churchill and Adolf Hitler. Now two outstanding scholars hail him independently as one of the great canonical thinkers who set an agenda that has permanent immediacy. Robert J. Mayhew’s speciality is historical geography and intellectual history; Alan Macfarlane is a social anthropologist and historian who has published widely on England, Nepal, Japan and China.
In his admirably rounded Malthus: The life and legacies of an untimely prophet Mayhew draws our attention to the actual writings of this pioneer of demography and political economy, and to his historical context, especially the revolutionary enthusiasm which Malthus was concerned to dampen. He questioned the belief that redistribution of resources to the poor would advance social progress: the poor would cancel it out by having more children.
more here.
Jonathan Russell Clark at The Millions:
Epigraphs, despite what my young mind believed, are more than mere pontification. Writers don’t use them to boast. They are less like some wine and entrée pairing and more like the first lesson in a long class. Writers must teach a reader how to read their book. They must instruct the tone, the pace, the ostensible project of a given work. An epigraph is an opportunity to situate a novel, a story, or an essay, and, more importantly, to orient the reader to the book’s intentions.
To demonstrate the multiple uses of the epigraph, I’d like to discuss a few salient examples. But I’m going to shy away from the classic epigraphs we all know, those of Hemingway, Tolstoy, etc., the kinds regularly found in lists with titles like “The 15 Greatest Epigraphs of All Time,” and talk about some recent books, since those are the ones that have excited (and, in some cases, confounded) me enough to write about the subject in the first place.
A good epigraph establishes the theme, but when it works best it does more than this.
more here.
Gary Gutting in the New York Times:
Many philosophers at leading American departments are specialists in metaphysics: the study of the most general aspects of reality such as being and time. The major work of one of the most prominent philosophers of the 20th century, Martin Heidegger, is “Being and Time,” a profound study of these two topics. Nonetheless, hardly any of these American metaphysicians have paid serious attention to Heidegger’s book.
The standard explanation for this oddity is that the metaphysicians are analytic philosophers, whereas Heidegger is a continentalphilosopher. Although the two sorts of philosophers seldom read one another’s work, when they do, the results can be ugly. A famous debate between Jacques Derrida (continental) and John Searle (analytic) ended with Searle denouncing Derrida’s “obscurantism” and Derrida mocking Searle’s “superficiality.”
The distinction between analytic and continental philosophers seems odd, first of all, because it contrasts a geographical characterization (philosophy done on the European continent, particularly Germany and France) with a methodological one (philosophy done by analyzing concepts). It’s like, as Bernard Williams pointed out, dividing cars into four-wheel-drive and made-in-Japan. It becomes even odder when we realize that some of the founders of analytic philosophy (like Frege and Carnap) were Europeans, that many of the leading centers of “continental” philosophy are at American universities, and that many “analytic” philosophers have no interest in analyzing concepts.
More here.
Brad Plumer in Vox:
The world's plant and animal species are going extinct at a rate 1,000 to 10,000 times faster than they did before humans came along. If that continues, we could lose one-third to half of all species by the end of the century. A variety of birds, frogs, fish, mammals — gone.
Those grim statistics come from a big recent study inScience, led by Duke University biologist Stuart Pimm. The paper was the most comprehensive attempt yet to calculate a “death rate” for the world's species — an update on work first begun in 1995.
It's not an easy calculation to make: We still haven't fully tallied all the current species on Earth, for instance. So the researchers had to make estimates on how many species there are likely to be, how many are dying off, and what that “death rate” likely was before humans ever arrived on the scene.
Based on updated research, Pimm and his colleagues estimated that roughly 0.1 out of 1 million species went extinct each year before humans showed up. That's the “background rate.” But nowadays, thanks to deforestation, habitat loss, and other factors, the “death rate” has increased to an estimated 100 to 1,000 extinctions per million species-years.
That's a big deal. And, not surprisingly, many of the media reports on Pimm's paper underscored that the Earth is now facing a “sixth extinction” comparable to the five earlier mass extinctions in history.
More here.
Amy Davidson in The New Yorker:
George Will is a victim: a victim of a particular thing he calls “victimhood,” which comes with “privileges,” nice things that George Will, or people like George Will, don’t get to have. And this thought, in a column that Will published this past weekend in the Washington Post, is not just attached to a standard rant about, say, affirmative action. Colleges and universities have now learned, he writes, “that when they make victimhood a coveted status that confers privileges, victims proliferate”; he sees this quite plainly in “the supposed campus epidemic of rape, a.k.a. ‘sexual assault.’ ” Students and educators, in Will’s world, are being swarmed by covetous young women.
Why might one covet the “status” of a survivor of sexual assault, and what are these “privileges” that Will sees? Does he worry that he will be asked to give up his seat for some eighteen-year-old girl who has reported a rape? Or is it that she will be allowed to go to the front of the line in the dining hall at her college, or be deferred to in a way that strikes him as unseemly? Perhaps what he calls a privilege is a young woman such as that being listened to by her elders and having her story taken seriously. That counts as a privilege—an extra benefit—only if a girl, in the normal course of things, wouldn’t and needn’t be heard. “Privilege” suggests puzzlement with the very idea of a voice like that mattering, and, potentially, changing the life of a young man. The image Will is conjuring up is of deceptive or “hypersensitive, even delusional” women clamoring for attention, and deliriously pleased to have found a way to get it.
More here.
The voting round of our politics and social science prize (details here) is over. Thanks to the nominators and the voters for participating.
So here they are, the top 20, in descending order from the most voted-for:
* There is a three-way tie for last place, hence there are 21 entries.
The editors of 3 Quarks Daily will now pick the top six entries from these, and after possibly adding up to three “wildcard” entries, will send that list of finalists to Mohsin Hamid for final judging. We will post the shortlist of finalists here on this coming Monday, June 16, 2014.
Jane Hu in Slate:
Once upon a time, weird fish ruled the world. The oceans teemed with primitive vertebrates that lacked eyes, ears, and even fins. Fish ate by sucking up water and debris from the ocean floor, filtering out the goodies, and then releasing the rest through their gills. Once fish evolved jaws, they began to chomp on more complex plants and animals. Scientists announced today in Nature that Metaspriggina, a primitive fish that lived roughly 505 million years ago, played a key role in the origin of jaws.
Like other fish, Metaspriggina had bones called gill arches to support its gills. But while more primitive fish had seven individual gill arches, scientists found that Metaspriggina had seven pairs of gill arches. This fish did not have full-fledged jaws, but its gill arches, with paired separate bones rather than continuous single bones, were “a staging post in the evolutionary story of vertebrates,” says paleontologist Simon Conway Morris, the study’s lead author. Morris and his co-author, Jean-Bernard Caron, propose that the pair of gill arches closest to the head evolved into the upper and lower jaw bones.Paleontologists have long predicted such a creature, but Metaspriggina is the first fossil evidence that supports the prediction. “Everyone said it should have existed, but it’s never been found,” Morris said. “It looks remarkably like the hypothetical animal that we’d talked about.”
More here.
Joe Fassler in The Atlantic:
Last week, Stuart Dybek, one of America’s living masters of the short story, published two new, and very different collections. The nine pieces in Paper Lantern: Love Stories are fairly conventional—they’re stories with drawn characters, and clear conflicts, that reach a certain length. Ecstatic Cahoots: Fifty Short Stories is more focused on the evocative power of language itself—as the strange, musical pairing of words in its title suggests. In offerings that range in length from two lines to nearly 10 pages, from narrative to wholly impressionistic, Dybek uses fragments, koans, and brief lyric flights to capture whole worlds in miniature. In our conversation for this series, Dybek discussed the troubled label “flash fiction” (which was also the topic, and title, of Nathanael Rich’s review in this month’s Atlantic magazine), a form without a solid definition.
Stuart Dybek: It goes way back. From high school on, I wrote these strange, varied, and very short prose pieces that didn’t seem to fit into any established genre. I didn’t have any literary pretensions about what I was doing—it was just one way I liked to work. I thought I was writing stories, but I learned quickly that I’d taken on a form without an easy category. At the time, you could only publish very short prose works, something editors uniformly regarded as “prose poems,” in poetry magazines. So I sent my stuff out that way—because there was no other outlet for it—even though, deep down, I felt I was fudging.