Carl Zimmer in This View of Life:

The vinegar worm (officially known as Caenorhabditis elegans) is about as simple as an animal can be. When this soil-dwelling nematode reaches its adult size, it measures a millimeter from its blind head to its tapered tail. It contains only a thousand cells in its entire body. Your body, by contrast, is made of 36 trillion cells. Yet the vinegar worm divides up its few cells into the various parts you can find in other animals like us, from muscles to a nervous system to a gut to sex organs.

In the early 1960s, a scientist named Sydney Brenner fell in love with the vinegar worm’s simplicity. He had decided to embark on a major study of humans and other animals. He wanted to know how our complex bodies develop from a single cell. He was also curious as to how neurons wired into nervous systems that could perceive the outside world and produce quick responses to keep animals alive. Scientists had studied these two questions for decades, but they still knew next to nothing about the molecules involved. When Brenner became acquainted with the vinegar worm in the scientific literature, he realized it could help scientists find some answers.

Its simplicity was what made it so enticing. Under a microscope, scientists could make out every single cell in the worm’s transparent body. It would breed contentedly in a lab, requiring nothing but bacteria to feed on. Scientists could search for mutant worms that behaved in strange ways, and study them to gain clues to how their mutations to certain genes steered them awry.

Brenner’s instinct proved correct. In 2002, he shared the Nobel Prize with John Sulston and Robert Horvitz for their research on the vinegar worm. Other scientists have done pioneering work on the animal as well, with over 22,000 papers published on it over the past five decades. Today, they show no signs of slowing down.

But something fascinating unfolded along the way.

More here.

Darhil Crooks, creative director at The Atlantic:

On January 7, 12 people were brutally murdered in Paris, including journalists, editors, and illustrators. Along with the brave staff of Charlie Hebdo, freedom of expression itself was attacked that day, and, in France and elsewhere, it remains under threat. We reached out to some of our contributors and asked them to articulate their reactions to this assault the best way they know how: through illustration. This gallery is dedicated to the people who lost their lives this week.

More here.

David Ferguson in Raw Story:

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control says that Americans are now statistically more likely to be killed by a gun than in a car accident.

The Economist reported Friday that death by cars in this country is on the decline. Safety technology continues to improve, states and municipalities have enacted tougher seatbelt laws and fewer young people are driving, which means that streets and highways in the U.S. are safer than ever.

Deaths by gunshot, however, are on a slight increase in the U.S., meaning that currently, Americans are slightly more likely to be killed by bullets — whether through suicide, accidents or domestic violence — than in a road accident.

The Center for American Progress released a report last year saying that soon the two lines would intersect for people 25 and under, but now the Bloomberg News has released its own numbers, which indicate that gun deaths have overtaken road accidents as a cause of death for the whole population, regardless of age.

More here.

Zephyr Teachout in The New York Times:

Steven Brill is not easily intimidated. The founder of Court TV and Brill’s Content, among many other ventures, Brill likes to dive deeply and quickly into complicated national policy issues — public education, health care — that he, by his own admission, knows relatively little about when he begins. This is his great appeal and can be a great frustration. It makes him vulnerable to the charisma of his sources, as was apparent in his 2011 book, “Class Warfare,” in which he seemed dazzled by individuals involved in privatizing public education, while he largely ignored the existing research.

But in Brill’s new book, “America’s Bitter Pill,” his fresh, outsider curiosity makes him a superb guide to the maze of issues in American health care and health care reform. He breaks down insider language, asks fundamental and surprising questions, and leaves the reader — at least this one — full of more questions yet with a much clearer map of the lines of debate. You may not be persuaded by his conclusions, but you’ll emerge with a broader understanding of the characters and questions shaping our health care system.

More here.

We Sinful Women

.
It is we sinful women
who are not awed by the grandeur of those who wear gowns

who don’t sell our lives
who don’t bow our heads
who don’t fold our hands together.

It is we sinful women
while those who sell the harvests of our bodies
become exalted
become distinguished
become the just princes of the material world.

It is we sinful women
who come out raising the banner of truth
up against barricades of lies on the highways
who find stories of persecution piled on each threshold
who find that tongues which could speak have been severed.

It is we sinful women.
Now, even if the night gives chase
these eyes shall not be put out.
For the wall which has been razed
don’t insist now on raising it again.

It is we sinful women
who are not awed by the grandeur of those who wear gowns

who don’t sell our bodies
who don’t bow our heads
who don’t fold our hands together.
.

by Kishwar Naheed
from We Sinful Women: Contemporary Urdu Feminist Poetry
The Women’s Press Ltd, London, 1991,
translation: Rukhsana Ahmad

Pico Iyer at Lapham's Quarterly:

From the moment westerners began living in Bali, soon after World War I, they sent back two messages, more or less contradictory: first, they were no longer foreign—they had gone native, and felt wonderfully at home in Eden; second, the rest of us would always remain outsiders, the gates to the garden having closed behind them. By 1930, Hickman Powell, a reporter from Duluth, was entitling his book on Bali The Last Paradise; soon thereafter, the Mexican artist Miguel Covarrubias, author of Island of Bali, was wondering if Paradise was lost when its denizens began wearing shorts. Here was a truly unfallen place, every newcomer seemed to report, which would fall as soon as the next newcomer disembarked.

This is the point of the foreign. We don’t travel halfway across the world to find the same things we could have seen at home. Those who undertake long and dangerous journeys have every incentive in stressing their discovery of a world far better than the one they left behind.Paul Gauguin became a “true savage, a real Maori,” he wrote, after he traveled deep into the jungles of Polynesia (having found his first port of call, Papeete, a place polluted by “the absurdities of civilization”). His outsider’s appeal in the South Seas put to shame his Everyman status as an artist of uncertain prospects back in Paris.

more here.

Charles Baxter at The New York Review of Books:

For adolescents, something about horror never goes out of style. They often feel an excited disgust upon learning how things really are, and their disgust is merely a notch away from the more thoroughgoing pleasures of horror. It is the closest they can come to the sublime.

Every teacher of creative writing in every American college and university is no doubt familiar with the tendency of young people, usually young men, to concoct gruesome narratives that take place in an edgily unspecified locale. Mayhem, awkward sentences, paper-thin characterizations, and complicated weaponry vie for the reader’s attention. But always there are the aliens, organic or machinelike or both, and always the accompanying rage and revulsion.

The authors of these horrific fictions sit in the back of the classroom avoiding eye contact, rarely speaking to anybody. Shabbily dressed, fidgety, tattooed, hysterically sullen, they are bored by realism and reality when not actively hostile to both. When asked about their reading, they will gamely mumble the usual list of names: Neal Stephenson, Stephen King, J.G. Ballard, and Philip K. Dick. But the name that I have heard most often mentioned in these litanies is that of H.P. Lovecraft, whom they revere. He is their spirit-guide.

more here.

Stefany Anne Golberg at The Smart Set:

Between autumns of 1942 and 1943, the English critic Cyril Connolly took a break from writing articles and set out to write a masterpiece. This, he wrote on the first page of his book, is the true function of a writer. Nothing else is of consequence. “How few writers will admit it,” he wrote “or having drawn the conclusion, will be prepared to lay aside the piece of iridescent mediocrity on which they have embarked! …. Every excursion into journalism, broadcasting, propaganda and writing for the films, however grandiose, will be doomed to disappointment.”

“Writers always hope that their next book is going to be their best,” wrote Connolly, “and will not acknowledge that they are prevented by their present way of life from ever creating anything different.”

It was agreed that Connolly’s previous books — a satirical novel about the decadent life in the South of France, a collection of essays — had not been masterpieces. For his third attempt, Connolly had three little notebooks and a “private grief” to help him. What makes a masterpiece, wrote Connolly, are the following: A love of life and nature; an interest in, mingled with contempt for humanity; and a lack of belief in the idea of progress.

more here.

Kenan Malik in Pandaemonium:

What is really racist is the idea only nice white liberals want to challenge religion or demolish its pretensions or can handle satire and ridicule. Those who claim that it is ‘racist’ or ‘Islamophobic’ to mock the Prophet Mohammad, appear to imagine, with the racists, that all Muslims are reactionaries. It is here that leftwing ‘anti-racism’ joins hands with rightwing anti-Muslim bigotry.

What is called ‘offence to a community’ is more often than not actually a struggle within communities. There are hudreds of thousands, within Muslim communities in the West, and within Muslim-majority countries across the world, challenging religious-based reactionary ideas and policies and institutions; writers, cartoonists, political activists, daily putting their lives on the line in facing down blasphemy laws, standing up for equal rights and fighting for democratic freedoms; people like Pakistani cartoonist Sabir Nazar, the Bangladeshi writer Taslima Nasreen, exiled to India after death threats, or the Iranian blogger Soheil Arabi, sentenced to death last year for ‘insulting the Prophet’. What happened in the Charlie Hebdo offices in Paris was viscerally shocking; but in the non-Western world, those who stand up for their rights face such threats every day.

What nurtures the reactionaries, both within Muslim communities and outside it, is the pusillanimity of many so-called liberals, their unwillingness to stand up for basic liberal principles, their readiness to betray the progressives within minority communities. On the one hand, this allows Muslim extremists the room to operate. The more that society gives licence for people to be offended, the more that people will seize the opportunity to feel offended. And the more deadly they will become in expressing their outrage. There will always be extremists who respond as the Charlie Hebdo killers did.

More here.

Emily T. Troscianko on the Centre for Medical Humanities blog:

Image credit: Gerrit Dou, The Dropsical Woman (detail), c. 1663

It was a surprise, and a fairly depressing one, especially given how much interest philosophical questions of ethics in the medical domain elicited in this session, when various remarks and anecdotes from the students began to make clear just how little respect the clinical world has for the medical humanities. One student who’d taken an intercalated course in medical humanities after her third year told us how, on her first fourth-year placement, only one of all the anaesthetists she’d told about it had responded in the least bit positively, and one had even tried to make her look foolish in front of a surgeon by asking her to tell him what subject she’d chosen (hey, this’ll make you laugh: guess what she chose?!). The consensus seemed to be bafflement (with or without a bit of ridicule thrown in): why on earth would you choose the medical humanities – how is it going to make you a better doctor? And the more profound disappointment was that, after a year of studying it to degree level, all the student herself could say was, well, it had been a useful grounding in the history of medicine, had made her generally better educated and well rounded, but to be honest it hadn’t really been directly useful.

This sounds to me like a call to arms – softly spoken, perhaps, but one we need to recognise and act on. If a highly motivated and intelligent medic chooses to spend a year devoting herself to the medical humanities, don’t we need to make sure she comes out of it not saying something polite about being a more rounded individual now, but inspired and energised by all the ways it’s going to contribute directly and indirectly to her future professional practice?

Maybe with this in view we need, for a start, to dare to say that critiquing stuff isn’t all we do…We can use our detailed understanding of how poetry and prose work to set up a programme that has direct and demonstrable benefits for women prisoners (Robinson and Billington 2013), or work with a national charity to enhance our understanding of how eating disorders may be affected by reading fiction. We can use our expertise in phonetics and linguistics to design a mobile app for screening and monitoringdisorders affecting speech. We can collaborate with the Royal Society of Medicine to bring theological and philosophical insights on compassion to bear on healthcare practice . And these are just four projects I happen to know about or be involved in, mostly happening right on my doorstep in Oxford.

Read the full piece here.

Anoosh Chakelian in New Statesman:

How cartoonists around the world reacted to the murder of journalists and cartoonists at the French satirical magazine, Charlie Hebdo.

I think, therefore i am not anymore.

More here.

Chris Millington in HistoryToday:

On 7 January 2015, armed gunmen killed twelve people in an attack on the offices of satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in the centre of Paris. French President Francois Hollande immediately condemned the violence as ‘cowardly murder’ and an act of terrorism. Terrorist violence has a long history in France. The term ‘terrorism’ itself was coined in the wake of the 1789 revolution as a term to describe the government’s bloody campaign against counter-revolutionaries. Only during the late 19th century did the label acquire its modern, more negative connotation. At this time anarchists around the world, inspired by their counterparts in Russia, targeted heads of state, whether presidents or monarchs, during the so-called ‘Decade of Regicide’ between 1892 and 1901. US President William McKinley, assassinated in September 1901, was the most high-profile victim of this spasm of violence. Civilians were not spared the anarchists’ attacks. Thus in February 1894, Frenchman Emile Henry tossed a bomb into a plush Parisian restaurant and fled.

As anarchism receded after the First World War a new ideology, fascism, inspired home-grown terrorists in France. In November 1937, the Comité Secret d’Action Révolutionnaire, otherwise known as the Cagoule, was exposed by the French police authorities. The Cagoule had emerged from the extreme right-wing street politics of the decade that had afflicted France as elsewhere in Europe. The Cagoule did not commit indiscriminate attacks against civilians; it assassinated several prominent Italian antifascists who were resident in France in return for arms from Mussolini. Yet its master plan was to overthrow the democratic Third Republic and install a fascist regime in its place. To achieve this goal, Cagoule activists committed several anonymous bombings, notably in Paris, hoping to spread the fear that the communist party had in fact perpetrated the attacks and that social revolution was imminent. Yet the group failed to convince its friends in the army to take pre-emptive action against the left and the authorities uncovered the plot. Political violence continued throughout the so-called ‘Dark Years’ of the Occupation.

Picture: Parisian members of the Cagoule at a party celebrating the terrorist organisation's activities, December 3rd, 1937

More here.

Michael Schulson in Aeon:

As moderns, we take it for granted that the best decisions stem from a process of empirical analysis and informed choice, with a clear goal in mind. That kind of decision-making, at least in theory, undergirds the ways that we choose political leaders, play the stock market, and select candidates for schools and jobs. It also shapes the way in which we critique the rituals and superstitions of others. But, as the Kantu’ illustrate, there are plenty of situations when random chance really is your best option. And those situations might be far more prevalent in our modern lives than we generally admit.

Over the millennia, cultures have expended a great deal of time, energy and ingenuity in order to introduce some element of chance into decision-making. Naskapi hunters in the Canadian province of Labrador would roast the scapula of a caribou in order to determine the direction of their next hunt, reading the cracks that formed on the surface of the bone like a map. In China, people have long sought guidance in the passages of the I Ching, using the intricate manipulation of 49 yarrow stalks to determine which section of the book they ought to consult. The Azande of central Africa, when faced with a difficult choice, would force a powdery poison down a chicken’s throat, finding the answer to their question in whether or not the chicken survived – a hard-to-predict, if not quite random, outcome. (‘I found this as satisfactory a way of running my home and affairs as any other I know of,’ wrote the British anthropologist E E Evans-Pritchard, who adopted some local customs during his time with the Azande in the 1920s).

More here.

Tehmina Kazi in Left Foot Forward:

False Assumption One

‘Charlie Hebdo magazine was needlessly provocative’

Manufacturers of outrage and assorted agitators do not need any kind of ‘provocation’ for their actions. When Jyllands-Posten published the Danish cartoons in September 2005, protests in Muslim-majority countries did not start until four months later.

Mona Eltahawy’s interview with Jytte Klausen, the Danish-born author of the Yale Press’s forthcoming book, Cartoons That Shook the World, recognised that lag. According to Yale Press’s Web site, she argues that Muslim reaction to the cartoons was not spontaneous but, rather, that it was orchestrated “first by those with vested interests in elections in Denmark and Egypt”, and later by “extremists seeking to destabilize governments in Pakistan, Lebanon, Libya, and Nigeria”.

Further, Quilliam Foundation director and Liberal Democrat prospective parliamentary candidate Maajid Nawaz re-tweeted a ‘Jesus and Mo’ cartoon on 12 January 2014. Most of the people who called for his de-selection – and helped to whip up the resultant furore – conveniently ignored his earlier mention of the cartoons on the BBC’s Big Questions programme. The broadcast itself attracted barely a whisper on social media.

False Assumption Two

‘The Left should defend all expressions of Islam at all costs’

Professor Karima Bennoune said it best in her article, ‘Why Bill Maher and Ben Affleck are both wrong‘:

“We do not need either stereotypical generalizations or minimising responses to fundamentalism, however well-intentioned.

“What we need is a principled, anti-racist critique of Muslim fundamentalism that pulls no punches, but that also distinguishes between Islam (the diverse religious tradition) and Islamism (an extreme right-wing political ideology). We need support, understanding and to have our existence recognised.”

More here.

Justin Smith at his blog:

But then after class I went and looked at an online archive of Charlie Hebdo cartoons, and I apologize to the academics among you who think language and other symbolic acts can be violent in the same way shooting someone in the head with a machine gun is violent, but reviewing this work, with which I have long been passively familiar, my principal thought was: these cartoons are fucking great! Charb, in particular, is a genius. They have nothing in common with the uninspired image of Mohammed with a turban-bomb in the Jyllands-Posten, which is one of the distal causes of today's attack. They are light and joyous. They don't just condemn one way of looking at the world; they also celebrate another way. That way is the raunchy and ridiculous way, for which I have a deep personal fondness.

I've been disturbed over the evident lurch at Charlie Hebdo over the past few years from its longstanding commitment to French-style liberté de la parole and to exposing all species of rottenness, to an unhealthy obsession with the menace of Islam and the specter of a future 'Eurabia'. But as Marco Roth reminds today, Charlie Hebdo has not only published satirical cartoons aimed at radical Islam, they have also been “relentless in exposing corruption among French government officials, especially during the Chirac years, and also corruption among members of the Front National.” We could also add the exposure of the inhumanity of the blockade of Gaza, bullfighting…

more here.

Morgan Meis in The Smart Set:

You might have heard the story about the three Swiss. They were sitting around at an Inn together. They were: Arnold Böcklin (the painter), his son Carlo, and the writer Gottfried Keller. Nobody said anything for a long time. Then, Carlo said, “It’s hot.” More time passed. Finally, the elder Böcklin replied, “and there’s no wind.” Silence. Then, Gottfried Keller got up and left. As he was leaving, he said, “I won’t drink with these chatterboxes.”

Walter Benjamin told this story in an essay about Robert Walser written for Das Tagebuch in 1929. Benjamin argued that there is something distinctively Swiss about Walser’s writing style. Benjamin called this Swiss quality Scham, which Rodney Livingstone translates as “reticence.” You can also hear the English word “shame” in the German word “Scham.” The three Swiss at the Inn silently agree that it is embarrassing to express a thought or observation. Silence is best because it is safest. But silence is also hard to do. So, we talk. Then, inevitably, we feel disappointment at what we’ve just said.

According to Benjamin, Robert Walser deeply understood and experienced this kind of embarrassment. The funny thing about the embarrassment of talking is that it can lead to streams of words. When Walser does talk (and his writing is basically a stream of talking captured on the page), the words pour out in a torrent, stumbling over one another as they come. The incredible clumsiness of Walser’s writing, which is also the source of its delight, is the result, thinks Benjamin, of this root sense of shame. The desire to stop language results, paradoxically, in its profusion.

More here.

Jenny Diski at The London Review of Books:

I recall two versions of me as I look back over the first few months of living with Doris. One conforms to a description in Doris’s 1974 novel, Memoirs of a Survivor, of how 12-year-old Emily Cartwright settled in with the unnamed female narrator she’d been left with. The child is handed over and makes the narrator (in the film she was called ‘D’) extremely uneasy. The narrator interrogates her own feelings about this imposition: ‘[Emily] was watching me, carefully, closely: the thought came into my mind that this was the expert assessment of possibilities by a prisoner observing a new jailer.’ Emily is described as having ‘a bright impervious voice and smile’, of being ‘an enamelled presence’. The narrator looks for something in Emily that she might be able to like, but Emily always responds like ‘a self-presenting little madam’. Mostly Emily keeps to herself, huddled in her bedroom with her creature, Hugo, a dog-like cat, or a cat-like dog. When she comes out she is immoderately polite, excessively grateful. The narrator recognises Emily’s manner as an act, yet ‘while I was really quite soft and ridiculous with pity for her, I was in a frenzy of irritation, because of my inability ever, even for a moment to get behind the guard she had set up.’ Emily is indolent, unlike the industrious narrator, sitting for hours in a chair looking out of the window, while ‘she entertained me with comment: this was a deliberate and measured offering; she had been known, it was clear, for her “amusing comments”.’ Emily spears passers-by and neighbours with her acid insights and cruel stories. The narrator sees ‘a sour little smile, as if she was thinking: I’ve got you, you can’t escape me!’ She almost enjoys listening to Emily’s too-accurate comments, ‘but I was reluctant too, watching the knife being slipped in so neatly, so precisely, and again and again.’ This narrator, who has other things to do, has been presented, for no obvious reason, with a damaged child, too clever by half, whom she accepts as her obligation, but struggles to like.

more here.

Amartya Sen in The Guardian:

Twenty-five hundred years ago, the young Gautama Buddha left his princely home, in the foothills of the Himalayas, in a state of agitation and agony. What was he so distressed about? We learn from his biography that he was moved in particular by seeing the penalties of ill health – by the sight of mortality (a dead body being taken to cremation), morbidity (a person severely afflicted by illness), and disability (a person reduced and ravaged by unaided old age). Health has been a primary concern of human beings throughout history. It should, therefore, come as no surprise that healthcare for all – “universal healthcare” (UHC) – has been a highly appealing social objective in most countries in the world, even in those that have not got very far in actually providing it.

The usual reason given for not attempting to provide universal healthcare in a country is poverty. The United States, which can certainly afford to provide healthcare at quite a high level for all Americans, is exceptional in terms of the popularity of the view that any kind of public establishment of universal healthcare must somehow involve unacceptable intrusions into private life. There is considerable political complexity in the resistance to UHC in the US, often led by medical business and fed by ideologues who want “the government to be out of our lives”, and also in the systematic cultivation of a deep suspicion of any kind of national health service, as is standard in Europe (“socialised medicine” is now a term of horror in the US).

One of the oddities in the contemporary world is our astonishing failure to make adequate use of policy lessons that can be drawn from the diversity of experiences that the heterogeneous world already provides. There is much evidence of the big contributions that UHC can make in advancing the lives of people, and also (and this is very important) in enhancing economic and social opportunities – including facilitating the possibility of sustained economic growth (as has been firmly demonstrated in the experience of south-east Asian countries, such as Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore and, more recently, China).

More here.