John Gaudet in Salon:

The history of Egypt boggles the mind. By any standard the scale of achievement was enormous, but through it all, it seems clear that the economy remained rooted in agriculture. It was the everyday business of the ancient Egyptians to produce food. This they did using a system that was the envy of all. Sandra Postel, Director of the Global Water Policy Project, said that overall, Egypt’s system of basin irrigation proved inherently more stable from an ecological, political, social, and institutional perspective than that of any other irrigation-based society in human history, including the Fertile Crescent of Mesopotamia where a fallow year had to be interposed to rest the land between harvests on land that was also subject to salinization, something that did not happen along the Nile. “Fundamentally … the system sustained an advanced civilization through numerous political upheavals and other destabilizing events over some 5,000 years. No other place on Earth has been in continuous cultivation for so long.”

According to Dr. Butzer, during late Paleolithic times the great bulk of early settlements were concentrated in the floodplains on the levees and the immediate riverbanks of the Nile. From 5000 BC, well before the first wooden boats, it probably occurred to most Egyptians that travel by water was a must. Today from satellite images, arable land in the Nile Valley is seen as a long green swath running the length of Egypt, with a bright blue river running down its center reminding everyone that if they intended to travel from one end of the country to the other, the message was clear: use a boat. Since boats made of wood were costly, everyday vessels—the thousands, even millions of small craft that were the work boats of ordinary souls—had to be made of cheap, reliable stuff. And that was as true in prehistoric times as it is in the 21st century. Today it is plastic and fiberglass. Then, it was papyrus.

More here.

George Johnson in The New York Times:

Not long after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, while the world was reckoning with the specter of nuclear energy, a businessman named Roger Babson was worrying about another of nature’s forces: gravity. It had been 55 years since his sister Edith drowned in the Annisquam River, in Gloucester, Mass., when gravity, as Babson later described it, “came up and seized her like a dragon and brought her to the bottom.” Later on, the dragon took his grandson, too, as he tried to save a friend during a boating mishap. Something had to be done. “It seems as if there must be discovered some partial insulator of gravity which could be used to save millions of lives and prevent accidents,” Babson wrote in a manifesto, “Gravity — Our Enemy Number One.” In 1949, drawing on his considerable wealth, he started the Gravity Research Foundation and began awarding annual cash prizes for the best new ideas for furthering his cause. It turned out to be a hopeless one. By the time the 2014 awards were announced last month, the foundation was no longer hoping to counteract gravity — it forms the very architecture of space-time — but to better understand it. What began as a crank endeavor has become mainstream. Over the years, winners of the prizes have included the likes of Stephen Hawking, Freeman Dyson, Roger Penrose and Martin Rees.

With his theory of general relativity, Einstein described gravity with an elegance that has not been surpassed. A mass like the sun makes the universe bend, causing smaller masses like planets to move toward it. The problem is that nature’s other three forces are described in an entirely different way, by quantum mechanics. In this system forces are conveyed by particles. Photons, the most familiar example, are the carriers of light. For many scientists, the ultimate prize would be proof that gravity is carried by gravitons, allowing it to mesh neatly with the rest of the machine.

More here.

Lee Ellis at The Believer:

Since 1996, Californians with the right doctors’ notes have had legal clearance to grow and possess pot. That year, Proposition 215, a voter initiative granting limited immunity from prosecution to “seriously ill” residents whose health conditions might be improved by the use of the drug, passed on a statewide ballot. In 2003, Senate Bill 420 upheld the law, and added a handy medical marijuana ID card program (to date, nearly seventy-two thousand cards have been issued). Neither the proposition nor the senate bill superseded federal law, however; as such, raids on growers and dispensaries carried out by federal agents were frequent from 1996 until March 2009, when Attorney General Eric Holder announced that marijuana grows and storefronts complying with state law would not be a priority for the Obama administration.

In the wake of the proposition, twenty states and the District of Columbia passed medical marijuana legislation. Colorado and Washington recently went a step further by permitting recreational use. While traditionally conservative states have been slow to relax harsh punishments for possession (in Kansas, holding any amount of marijuana—even a single gram—can earn the offender up to a year in prison), it’s clear that blue America is trending toward legalization.

more here.

Shougat Dasgupta at Caravan:

Being a football fan used to be about being local, about sublimated parochialism, about pride in your team and, synecdochically, your neighbourhood, your city, your country. Supporting a football team was an expression of solidarity, an assertion of community. Football culture was by its nature insular, and this was as true in India as, say, in Britain. Take Celtic and Rangers in Glasgow, Al Ahly and Zamalek in Cairo, East Bengal and Mohun Bagan in Kolkata: all local rivalries with attendant histories of identity, immigration, belonging, class, even food; rivalries made piquant by proximity. It was a culture built on shared experience, on being at the stadium with your people, on active partisan support. There is no need to gloss over the violence such insularity can breed—the deaths of sixteen fans in Kolkata in 1980, for instance, when a derby unravelled into a riot—to acknowledge how intrinsic football once was to fans’ understanding of their place in the world.

Early in Dev Dutta Roy’s An Incredible Tale from the Beautiful Game—an awful novel made endearing by the author’s affection and enthusiasm for Kolkata football—is a throwaway sentence that encapsulates what it once meant to be a football fan. “It was a Sunday morning of September,” he writes. “All the newspapers of Calcutta, of which Dadu used to buy three—Anandabazar and Juganter in Bengali and The Statesman in English—were talking about a great match that was going to be played four fifteen that afternoon … I and Kakka never missed such a big match. We were morally bound to be there.”

Morally bound to be there.

more here.

Adam Kirsch at Tablet:

The Zhivago Affair, by Peter Finn and Petra Couvee, is a detailed reconstruction of one of the most fascinating of the Cold War’s cultural skirmishes. Today the novel Doctor Zhivago, by Boris Pasternak, sits placidly on the shelves of Russian classics, alongside War and Peaceand Crime and Punishment. Most people, if they know the story at all, probably know it from David Lean’s widescreen film epic, starring Omar Sharif and Julie Christie and the balalaika-heavy “Lara’s Theme.” But when it was published in 1957, Doctor Zhivago touched off a worldwide controversy, as the Soviet Union tried ineffectually to stop the book from appearing and then reacted with outrage when Pasternak was awarded the Nobel Prize. No book except The Gulag Archipelago, which Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn would publish some 15 years later, caused more anguish to the Soviets during the whole Cold War.

What made Doctor Zhivago such a bitter pill for Khrushchev’s regime to swallow? Unlike Solzhenitsyn’s book, which was a head-on indictment of Soviet crimes, Pasternak’s novel was a poetic and abstract work, most of whose literary energy goes into miraculously vivid descriptions of weather and nature. Indeed, Doctor Zhivago was Pasternak’s first and only novel; before he started writing it, in 1945, he had been famous as a lyric poet and translator of Shakespeare. It was partly Pasternak’s great stature as a poet—he was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature several times on the strength of his verse alone—that made it difficult for the Soviet leadership to deal with him. If even Stalin, in his massacre of Soviet writers, had taken care to spare Pasternak, how could Khrushchev—who was supposed to be presiding over a “thaw” in Soviet cultural life—dare to silence or jail him?

more here.

Sarah C.P. Williams in Scientific American:

Studying the effect of stressful intensive care unit (ICU) shifts on medical residents, biologist Matthias Nahrendorf of Harvard Medical School in Boston recently found that blood samples taken when the doctors were most stressed out had the highest levels of neutrophils and monocytes. To probe whether these white blood cells, or leukocytes, are the missing link between stress and atherosclerosis, he and his colleagues turned to experiments on mice. Nahrendorf’s team exposed mice for up to 6 weeks to stressful situations, including tilting their cages, rapidly alternating light with darkness, or regularly switching the mice between isolation and crowded quarters. Compared with control mice, the stressed mice—like stressed doctors—had increased levels of neutrophils and monocytes in their blood. The researchers then homed in on an explanation for the higher levels of immune cells. They already knew that chronic stress increases blood concentrations of the hormone noradrenaline; noradrenaline, Nahrendorf discovered, binds to a cell surface receptor protein called β₃ on stem cells in the bone marrow. In turn, the chemical environment of the bone marrow changes and there’s an increase in the activity of the white blood cells produced by the stem cells. “It makes sense that stress wakes up these immune cells because an enlarged production of leukocytes prepares you for danger, such as in a fight, where you might be injured,” Nahrendorf says. “But chronic stress is a different story—there’s no wound to heal and no infection.”

In mice living with chronic stress, Nahrendorf’s team reported today in Nature Medicine, atherosclerotic plaques more closely resemble plaques known to be most at risk of rupturing and causing a heart attack or stroke. When the scientists blocked the β₃ receptor, though, stressed mice not only had fewer of these dangerous plaques, but also had reduced levels of the active immune cells in their plaques, pinpointing β₃ as a key link between stress and atheroscelerosis. The finding could lead to new drugs to help prevent cardiovascular disease, suggests biologist Lynn Hedrick of the La Jolla Institute for Allergy and Immunology in San Diego, California. “I think this gives us a really direct hint that the β₃ receptor is important in regulating the stress-induced response by the bone marrow,” Hedrick says. “If we can develop a drug that targets the receptor, this may be very clinically relevant.”

More here.

My little bastard, impious offspring
in case it must be said to you again
here it is said again what should
be said again and again: negotiation
for a non-negotiable end, negotiate
all that’s non-negotiable. Cut
this slogan into your flesh, score
it on your forehead with a record needle
put your boots back on and go back
to the burning star you came from.

by Martín Gambarotta
from Para un plan primavera
publisher: Libros del Perro Negro, Santiago, 2013

Dulce cabroncito, impío vástago
por si debe sértelo dicho otra vez
acá queda dicho otra vez lo que debe
serte dicho una y otra vez: negociación
para un fin no negociable, negociar
todo por lo innegociable. Inflígete
esta consigna en la carne, grábatela
en la frente con una púa de tocadiscos
cálzate otra vez las botas y regresa
a la estrella cáustica de la que viniste.

.

Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe:

The last few years have seen a number of prominent scientists step up to microphones and belittle the value of philosophy. Stephen Hawking, Lawrence Krauss, and Neil deGrasse Tyson are well-known examples. To redress the balance a bit, philosopher of physics Wayne Myrvold has asked some physicists to explain why talking to philosophers has actually been useful to them. I was one of the respondents, and you can read my entry at the Rotman Institute blog. I was going to cross-post my response here, but instead let me try to say the same thing in different words.

Roughly speaking, physicists tend to have three different kinds of lazy critiques of philosophy: one that is totally dopey, one that is frustratingly annoying, and one that is deeply depressing.

• “Philosophy tries to understand the universe by pure thought, without collecting experimental data.”

This is the totally dopey criticism. Yes, most philosophers do not actually go out and collect data (although there are exceptions). But it makes no sense to jump right from there to the accusation that philosophy completely ignores the empirical information we have collected about the world. When science (or common-sense observation) reveals something interesting and important about the world, philosophers obviously take it into account. (Aside: of course there are bad philosophers, who do all sorts of stupid things, just as there are bad practitioners of every field. Let’s concentrate on the good ones, of whom there are plenty.)

More here.

Shaj Mathew in The New Republic:

“Soccer is popular,” Jorge Luis Borges observed, “because stupidity is popular.”

At first glance, the Argentine writer’s animus toward “the beautiful game” seems to reflect the attitude of today’s typical soccer hater, whose lazy gibes have almost become a refrain by now: Soccer is boring. There are too many tie scores. I can’t stand the fake injuries.

And it’s true: Borges did call soccer “aesthetically ugly.” He did say, “Soccer is one of England’s biggest crimes.” And apparently, he even scheduled one of his lectures so that it would intentionally conflict with Argentina’s first game of the 1978 World Cup. But Borges’ distaste for the sport stemmed from something far more troubling than aesthetics. His problem was with soccer fan culture, which he linked to the kind of blind popular support that propped up the leaders of the twentieth century’s most horrifying political movements. In his lifetime, he saw elements of fascism, Peronism, and even anti-Semitism emerge in the Argentinean political sphere, so his intense suspicion of popular political movements and mass culture—the apogee of which, in Argentina, is soccer—makes a lot of sense. (“There is an idea of supremacy, of power, [in soccer] that seems horrible to me,” he oncewrote.) Borges opposed dogmatism in any shape or form, so he was naturally suspicious of his countrymen’s unqualified devotion to any doctrine or religion—even to their dear albiceleste.

Soccer is inextricably tied to nationalism, another one of Borges’ objections to the sport. “Nationalism only allows for affirmations, and every doctrine that discards doubt, negation, is a form of fanaticism and stupidity,” he said.

More here.

Marco Roth in n + 1:

From the thumbnail headshot accompanying his essay in the Times, “the drone philosopher,” as I’ve begun to think of him, appears to be in his late twenties, or a boyish 30. In an oddly confessional-style first paragraph, he recalls what it was like to watch the second Iraq War from his college dorm television. He has clean-shaven Ken-doll looks and a prominent squarish jaw, recalling the former Republican vice-presidential candidate and representative from Wisconsin’s First Congressional District, Paul Ryan. I doubt the drone philosopher would be flattered by the comparison. The tone of his article makes him out to be a thoughtful liberal, more interested in weighing complexities than in easy solutions, simultaneously attracted by and wary of power, not unlike the commander in chief he hopes will one day read his papers.

I can make out a bit of wide-striped collegiate tie, a white collar, and the padded shoulders of a suit jacket in the photograph. I know I’m being unfair, but I don’t trust his looks. Since Republicans have become so successful at branding themselves the party of white men, I now suspect that any white guy in a suit may harbor right-wing nationalist tendencies, much as the CIA’s rules governing drone strikes have determined that groups of “military age” men in certain regions of Pakistan and Yemen may be profiled as terrorists.

More here.

Mohsin Hamid has picked the three winners from the nine finalists:

1. Top Quark, $500: Ali Eteraz, The Death of the Urdu Script
   
2. Strange Quark, $200: Olga Tokarczuk, Everywhere and Nowhere
3. Charm Quark, $100: Matthew Jakubowski, Honest work: an experimental review of an experimental translation

Here is what Mohsin had to say about them:

It was a great collection of pieces — a real pleasure to read during a hot summer week in Lahore. Here are the winners.

1. Ali Eteraz, “The Death of the Urdu Script” (Medium). Typography, a “murder” mystery, geopolitics, history, D.E.I.T.Y., Apple vs Microsoft vs Twitter, a third way between Arabization and the West, penmanship — this piece had it all. Succinctly far-ranging and wonderfully poignant, I hope it's widely read and helps save the script it champions.

2. Olga Tokarczuk, “Everywhere and Nowhere” (n + 1). For the traveler in each of us. A lovely flow, supple musings. Fabulous. “Fluidity, mobility, illusoriness–these are precisely the qualities that make us civilized. Barbarians don't travel. They simply go to destinations or conduct raids.”

3. Matthew Jakubowski, “Honest work: an experimental review of an experimental translation” (3:AM Magazine). A brief flickering of something that brings to mind “Pale Fire,” this text about a text about a text about a text is magical and wise. It shimmers.

Congratulations also from 3QD to the winners (remember, you must claim the money within one month from today–just send me an email). And feel free, in fact we encourage you, to leave your acceptance speech as a comment here! And thanks to everyone who participated. Many thanks also, of course, to Mohsin Hamid for doing the final judging.

The three prize logos at the top of this post were designed by Sughra Raza, me, and Carla Goller. I hope the winners will display them with pride on their own blogs!

Details about the prize here.

Ekua Holmes. All Weather Friends.

More here and here.