Mitch Leslie in Science:

Researchers have changed the size of a handful of Florida ants by chemically modifying their DNA, rather than by changing its encoded information. The work is the latest advance from a field known as epigenetics and may help explain how the insects—despite their high degree of genetic similarity—grow into the different varieties of workers needed in a colony.

This discovery “takes the field leaps and bounds forward,” says entomologist Andrew Suarez of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, who wasn’t connected to the study. “It’s providing a better understanding of how genes interact with the environment to generate diversity.”

Ant nests have division of labor down pat. The queen spends her time pumping out eggs, and the workers, which are genetically similar sisters, perform all the other jobs necessary to keep the colony thriving, such as tending the young, gathering food, and excavating tunnels. Workers in many ant species specialize even further, forming so-called subcastes that look different and have different roles. In Florida carpenter ants (Camponotus floridanus), for example, workers tend to fall into two groups. Minor workers, which can be less than 6 mm long, rear the young and forage for food. Major workers, which can be almost twice as long, use their large jaws to protect the colony from predators.

A team from McGill University in Montreal, Canada, suspected that the mechanism involves DNA methylation: the addition of a chemical to DNA. Genome sequencing and other methods suggest that these physical differences don’t usually stem from genetic differences between individual ants. Instead, environmental factors help push workers to become majors or minors—specifically, the amount of food and coddling that young ants receive. But just how do these factors change the size of ants?

More here.

Bernardine Evaristo in The Guardian:

Africa has 54 countries and more than a billion people. One of the most ridiculous myths about it is that homosexuality did not exist in the continent until white men imported it. Robert Mugabe is one such propagator, calling homosexuality “un-African” and a “white disease”.

Throughout history people everywhere have explored and experimented with their sexuality. The desire to do so has never been confined to particular geographical locations. Its reach is universal. Yet today the myth of a pre-colonial sexual innocence, or more fittingly, ignorance, is used to endorse anti-gay legislation and stir up homophobia and persecution in Africa. In my father's country, Nigeria, a new law passed in January carries a 14-year prison sentence for same-sex marriage and up to 10 years for membership or promotion of gay groups. In Uganda, the Anti-Homosexuality Act can impose life imprisonment. Latter-day evangelicals from the US are partly to blame for this continuing persecution, but so are Africa's political leaders such as presidents Yahya Jammeh of the Gambia and Yoweri Museveni of Uganda, who use rabble-rousing anti-gay rhetoric to increase their power base and popularity.

While much has been written about this dangerous turn of events, little has been written about its origins. Two trailblazing studies in the field – Boy Wives and Female Husbands edited by Stephen O Murray and Will Roscoe, and Heterosexual Africa? by Marc Epprecht – demolish the revisionist arguments about Africa's sexual history. From the 16th century onwards, homosexuality has been recorded in Africa by European missionaries, adventurers and officials who used it to reinforce ideas of African societies in need of Christian cleansing.

More here.

Fred Kaplan in Slate:

It is a useful thing when a political party reveals itself as utterly unsuited for national leadership. This may be the one redeeming feature of Monday’s letter to the Iranian government signed by 47 (or, to put it another way, all but seven) Senate Republicans. The letter—which encourages Iran’s leaders to dismiss the ongoing nuclear talks with the United States and five other nations—is as brazen, gratuitous, and plainly stupid an act as any committed by the Senate in recent times, and that says a lot. It may also be illegal.

The banalities begin with the greeting: “An Open Letter to the Leaders of the Islamic Republic of Iran.” By custom, a serious letter to foreign leaders would address them by name. Who is it that the senators are seeking to influence: the supreme leader, the Parliament, the Revolutionary Guards? Clearly none of the above, otherwise it wouldn’t be an open letter. Nor, if this were a serious attempt of some sort, would Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (who was among the missive’s signatories) leave the task of organizing it to the likes of Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton, an otherwise unknown freshman. As usual, the Republicans’ goal is simple: to embarrass and undermine President Barack Obama. The idiocies begin with the first sentence: “It has come to our attention while observing your nuclear negotiations with our government that you may not fully understand our constitutional system.” First, I’m curious: How has this come to their attention? Second, the letter writers reveal that they don’t understand our constitutional system either.

Paul Kerley in BBC News:

These colourful and intricate images are this year's Wellcome Image Awards finalists. From a greenfly's eye, to a curved human spine – they showcase the best in science imaging techniques. Below is the final selection of 20 – but which one will be named overall winner on Wednesday 18 March?

Featuring an intricate pattern, with an almost carpet-like appearance in places, this photo is of a stomach chamber in a goat.

It shows the goat's reticulum – the second of four stomach chambers found in cattle, sheep and goats.

The oesophagus – the tube that carries food from the mouth to the stomach – is seen at the top of the image.

The photo by Michael Frank is of a specimen now held at the Royal Veterinary College in London, that would have come from a culled animal.

More here.

Without You

Again, damn it, radio, television, the papers.
The powers that be, as expected, are consummate crooks.
Those back in the days at least had some fear, today’s are no better.

I’d forbid the days to pass without you,
their pitiful sum total – you don’t come,
in the morning you are not to be found even in any of the mirrors,
you don’t arrive at noontime with a purse, a vagina,
an underarm, skin, a scent, an apple –
what should I do between noon and the evening?

In the evening you also do not come.
I want to know what has happened. Maybe you were on your way here,
perhaps they were running after you, maybe they raped you.
I think they cannot not rape you.

All this is radio, television, the papers.
The day without you is my untalented loneliness.
I lie under the ceiling, I pass.
Nothing has happened anywhere, you aren’t here.

A few armed conflicts,
a couple of traitors on TV.
The dollar exchange rate grew,
no trading in rubles today.
.

by Yuri Andrukhovych
translation: 2004, Vitaly Chernetsky

Arun Chaudhary in The Forward:

A camera operator who actually listens sounds like some impossibly perfect romantic partner, but viewing the Maysles’ work through this lens is an incredibly useful exercise for anyone with even a passing interest in documentary films.

Terms like “impressionistic,” “soft” and “dynamic” are used to describe Albert Maysles’ camerawork. But I think “listening” is a more apt word. His camera is constantly finding the most interesting sound — rather than the image — in any situation.

Even as dialogue plays, his camera will leave the subjects to capture the images behind the background noises: children playing with noisy wooden toys in a living room, that sort of thing. Traditionally, we see these images as “cutaways” in films, shots that cover up the editing happening in the dialogue, so the editor can cut back to the face seamlessly. But Albert confidently films these environmental moments as primary footage, sometimes even walking away from his subjects in mid-sentence even as his brother David would keep the mic on the speaker. Over and over again, we pan from sources of ambient noise to the faces of the subject. Emphasis on pan. That means these shots are one continuous take. Albert is making editing decisions that can’t be undone in the camera itself. And he is making these decisions on the basis of sound.

Here’s an example with a writerly touch: There’s a scene in “Salesman,” which follows four struggling door-to-door Bible salesman, in which the Maysleses suggest the poverty of a family not by narration or even dialogue but through the ambient audio track. The man of the house, a tired-looking fellow in a faded undershirt, puts on a record when he sees he has company. He’s clearly proud of his selection, and the scratchy Muzak cover of the Beatles’ “Yesterday” that comes on competes with the strained dialogue for the viewer’s attention and beautifully encapsulates the sadness of the scene. Lesser filmmakers might’ve asked the man to turn it down and missed a powerful opportunity.

More here.

Carl Zimmer in his excellent blog, The Loom:

In May 2010, a whale showed up on the wrong side of the world.

A team of marine biologists was conducting a survey off the coast of Israel when they spotted it. At first they thought it was a sperm whale. But each time the animal surfaced, the more clearly they could see that it had the wrong anatomy. When they got back on land, they looked closely at the photographs they had taken and realized, to their shock, that it was a gray whale. This species is a common sight off the coast of California, but biologists had never seen one outside of the Pacific before.

Aviad Scheinin, one of the marine biologists on the survey, posted the news on the web. “Nice Photoshopping,” someone replied.

Three weeks later, Scheinin got one more bit of news about the whale. It was photographed off the coast of Spain, having traveled 1864 miles. Then it disappeared.

After three years, a second gray whale appeared off the coast of Namibia in 2013. Comparing photographs, scientists could see that it was a different animal than the one that visited Israel. After lingering along the coast of Namibia for a month, the whale vanished.

These two sightings have left whale experts startled. In an interview with theOrange County Register, one scientists compared the feeling to walking down a street in California and seeing a giraffe.

But according to a new study, these two whales may be a hint of the new normal. Gray whales may be poised to move into the Atlantic, because we’re opening a path for them through the Arctic. But it’s not an unprecedented invasion. To some extent, it’s a case of history repeating itself.

More here.

Grayson Clary in The New Inquiry:

American author Robert Ferrigno doesn’t pussyfoot. Explaining his vote in the 2004 presidential election, he told Slate, “I’ll be voting for Bush because his approach to stopping the people who want to kill my children is the right one, i.e., kill them first.” Where relations between West and Mideast are concerned, he calls himself “a great believer in the clash of civilizations.” But it was a reasonably nuanced vision of American Islamism that landed Ferrigno on the New York Times best-seller list just under a decade ago with a futurist novel called Prayers for the Assassin. Its protagonist must be one the most popular Muslim heroes in American fiction, and the first sequel — Sins of the Assassin — earned an Edgar Award nomination for Best Novel. A third book rounded out the trilogy in 2009; sketching Islamic futures seems to be a decent living.

This aesthetic and its companion politics — call it Islamophobic futurism — seized the spotlight again this January. That month, French writer Michel Houellebecq published Submission, a tale of future France and its Muslim president. Wreathed in charges of anti-Muslim bigotry, its author was lampooned on the cover of Charlie Hebdo the day that magazine’s staff was massacred by al-Qaeda affiliated gunmen. Largely lost in the hubbub that followed was the divided mind animating Houellebecq’s novel. Because as Adam Gopnik pointed out, “The portrait of the Islamic regime is quite fond; [Houellebecq] likes the fundamentalists’ suavity and sureness.” This even though the troublemaker admitted, in an interview with the Paris Review, to using “scare tactics.” In this particular micro-genre, the two attitudes are perfectly compatible.

More here.

Tessa Hedley in The Guardian:

The 1950s are still close enough to touch: just around the corner of our past, linked to us through living memory. The core of Virginia Nicholson’s new book, about women’s lives in the UK in that decade, is drawn from interviews she conducted with women who were young then – bolstered with material from memoirs, archives and newspapers. She’s got a good ear for their stories, and it’s in the detail that they come to life. Liz, the daughter of an accountant in Lewes in Sussex, was having fun with the Young Conservatives at the time of Churchill’s triumph in the 1951 election: hunting, playing tennis, acquiring basic secretarial skills at Mr Box’s Academy in Brighton, or hooked into her full-length taffeta ball gown, wearing rose pink lipstick, dancing at the Young Farmers’ Club. Until one night David Monnington, a local farmer and landowner, proposed to her. “I would like to marry you,” he said. “But I don’t think I could marry anyone who leads the kind of social life you lead.” Liz was so besotted with him that she “just gave up doing all the things I liked”. She joined him in his isolated farmhouse in the Pevensey Levels, and “buckled down to work”: no heating, no car, no help, David’s dinner on the table at 12 sharp – and soon, two babies. When Liz was once exasperated and said “bloody”, David turned on her. “Take your pearls off,” he said – and confiscated her treasured necklace, telling her she could have it back when she’d learned not to swear.

More here.

Dan Jones in Nature:

It was 2000, recalls Coleman, head of the Morton Deutsch International Center for Cooperation and Conflict Resolution at Columbia University in New York City. He had broken his foot and decided to spend his convalescence at home delving into the research literature on intractable conflict. But what he found left him deeply frustrated. “People had their simple, sovereign theories about why conflicts become intractable,” he says. “It's because of trauma, or social identity or a history of humiliation. We understood pieces of the problem, but not how they interact.” Coleman discovered an alternative approach just a few years later, when he came across the work of social psychologists Robin Vallacher and Andrzej Nowak, both now at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton. Their work was not directly related to conflict — they were studying things such as how the human sense of self emerges, and how feelings about others can switch from positive to negative. But Coleman was impressed with Vallacher and Nowak's use of a mathematical tool known as dynamical systems theory to analyse their results.

Made famous by James Gleick's 1987 book Chaos, this theory provides a framework for understanding a remarkably broad range of complex systems, from weather patterns to neural activity in the brain. One way to visualize the mathematics is to imagine a landscape of hills and valleys. The behaviour of the complex system corresponds to the path of a ball rolling across this landscape. The trajectory becomes very complicated as the ball is deflected by the hills. But eventually, the ball will get trapped in one of the valleys, where it will either cycle endlessly around the walls or sink to the middle and lie still. The ball's final trajectory or resting place is called an attractor. To Coleman, this kind of entrapment was the perfect metaphor for the stable, if destructive, patterns of social behaviour seen in intractable conflicts. The landscapes in this case are mainly psychological and social, comprising innumerable strata of history, identity and collective memories of harms suffered at the hands of the 'other'. Yet the resulting conflict attractors are terribly real, he says, with psychological forces conspiring to “create simplistic narratives about conflicts that are devoid of nuance and keep us locked in”.

Picture: The Israeli–Palestinian conflict has been ongoing for 68 years.

More here.

Christopher Caldwell in WSJ:

At its simplest level, the strip is about the friendship between a bright 6-year-old misfit (Calvin) and his pet tiger (Hobbes). Its “trick” is that Hobbes is a lifeless stuffed animal when others are present and a rollicking, witty companion when they are not. So the story can be understood on many levels. It is about the richness of the imagination, the subversiveness of creativity and the irreconcilability of private yearnings and worldly reality. Where Calvin sees a leaf-monster trying to swallow him, Calvin’s father sees his troublemaker son scattering the leaf-piles he has spent all afternoon raking….

From these situations emerges a social and a philosophical vision, unsystematic but nonetheless profound. The late political scientist James Q. Wilson described “Calvin and Hobbes” as “our only popular explication of the moral philosophy of Aristotle.” Wilson meant that the social order is founded on self-control and delayed gratification—and that Calvin is hopeless at these things. Calvin thinks that “life should be more like TV” and that he is “destined for greatness” whether he does his homework or not. His favorite sport is “Calvinball,” in which he is entitled to make up the rules as he goes along.

Day-in, day-out, Calvin keeps running into evidence that the world isn’t built to his (and our) specifications. All humor is, in one way or another, about our resistance to that evidence.

Read the rest here.

David Auerbach in The American Reader [h/t: Marco Roth]:

We live in an age where the most “radical” book of economics to make a splash, Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century, explicitly distances itself from Marxism on numerous occasions, and ends by calling only for a modest wealth tax . We live in an age where the Occupy movement, despite its sometimes radical appearance, orients itself around such conventionally liberal reforms as the campaign for a living wage, prosecution of criminal bankers and tougher financial laws (e.g., “Occupy the SEC”), and exhibits a polite antagonism toward the one percent of plutocrats. The radical left’s best-known contemporary thinker, Slavoj Žižek, is treated as more of a clown than an ally by what should be his ideological homebase. (“His strategic notions,” writes Ben Kunkel in the leftist New Statesman, “are various and incompatible,” while Marxist critic Terry Eagleton deems Žižek “outrageously irresponsible.”)

One might think that the radical, anti-liberal left is just bitter that they have been pushed off the edge of the spectrum of political discourse and relegated to ever-shrinking university departments and a handful of sympathetic periodicals. The story, however, is more complicated than that—and its complications have profound relevance to the frustrations and peculiarities of the current Western political landscape. The burgeoning anti-oppression movement is concerned primarily with manifestations of false consciousness, and their diagnoses consequently center not on the overtly reactionary forces of society, but on those claiming to be liberal and progressive. Yet what does it mean to be focused on “racism without racists” when racists are hardly an extinct breed? What led to this focus, and what does it mean to the future of leftism? Classifying leftist ideology in a framework of agency and trust, I find a buried contradiction at the heart of anti-oppressive activism, one in which practitioners pathologically self-position themselves in a space of chronic moral jeopardy.

THE FRAMEWORK

Leftist Concepts: Trust (x) vs. Agency (y)

The x-axis is the Axis of Trust, with a positive Solidarity Pole and a negative Suspicion Pole. The y-axis is the Axis of Agency, with a positive Ethical Pole and a negative Structural Pole. The labels on the graph above designate leftist positions. Some of these positions are concepts or ideologies, while others are movements or organizations. In both cases, however, their positions on the graph are a consequence of the practical implications of people who hold a particular ideology, subscribe to the validity of a particular concept or belong to a particular movement.

More here.

3

Every day, the heavens

Spin on their axes. Things

Happen, as things have, and

Always will. Why worry?

4

Why blame the hangman

Or shun the preacher?

That face is familiar

Whatever the disguise.

Ghalib
translations: M. Shahid Alam

Julia Amalia Heyer and Christoph Pauly interview Thomas Piketty in Spiegel:

SPIEGEL: You publicly rejoiced over Alexis Tsipras' election victory in Greece. What do you think the chances are that the European Union and Athens will agree on a path to resolve the crisis?

Piketty: The way Europe behaved in the crisis was nothing short of disastrous. Five years ago, the United States and Europe had approximately the same unemployment rate and level of public debt. But now, five years later, it's a different story: Unemployment has exploded here in Europe, while it has declined in the United States. Our economic output remains below the 2007 level. It has declined by up to 10 percent in Spain and Italy, and by 25 percent in Greece.

SPIEGEL: The new leftist government in Athens hasn't exactly gotten off to an impressive start. Do you seriously believe that Prime Minister Tsipras can revive the Greek economy?

Piketty: Greece alone won't be able to do anything. It has to come from France, Germany and Brussels. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) already admitted three years ago that the austerity policies had been taken too far. The fact that the affected countries were forced to reduce their deficit in much too short a time had a terrible impact on growth. We Europeans, poorly organized as we are, have used our impenetrable political instruments to turn the financial crisis, which began in the United States, into a debt crisis. This has tragically turned into a crisis of confidence across Europe.

SPIEGEL: European governments have tried to avert the crisis by implementing numerous reforms. What do mean when you refer to impenetrable political instruments?

Piketty: We may have a common currency for 19 countries, but each of these countries has a different tax system, and fiscal policy was never harmonized in Europe. It can't work. In creating the euro zone, we have created a monster. Before there was a common currency, the countries could simply devalue their currencies to become more competitive. As a member of the euro zone, Greece was barred from using this established and effective concept.

SPIEGEL: You're sounding a little like Alexis Tsipras, who argues that because others are at fault, Greece doesn't have to pay back its own debts.

More here.

Jay Bookman in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution:

Forty-seven Republican senators have signed onto a remarkable letter to Iran’s leadership, in which they warn that the United States could and probably would break any deal that is reached by President Obama as soon as 2017, when a new president takes office.**

Content and motive aside, the letter itself drips with insulting condescension.

“It has come to our attention while observing your nuclear negotiations with our government that you may not fully understand our constitutional system,” the letter lectures right from the opening sentence. After pointing out that Obama leaves office in 2017, the senators remind Iran’s leaders that “most of us will remain in office well beyond then, perhaps decades,” and that they would consider a deal “nothing more than an executive agreement between President Obama and Ayatollah Khamenei,” rather than an agreement between countries.

The senators conclude with the hope that “this letter enriches your knowledge of our constitutional system and promotes mutual understanding and clarity as nuclear negotiations continue.”

In short, the letter is a clear effort to sabotage the talks.

More here.

Omri Boehm in the New York Times:

Look at the media in nearly any country on any given day and you will find that there is no shortage of opinions on Israel and its policies. So when a respected public figure declines to share his own, it’s worth taking note.

In an extensive interview given in 2012 to the Israeli daily Haaretz, the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas was asked for his opinion about Israeli politics. His answer was that while “the present situation and the policies of the Israeli government” do require a “political kind of evaluation,” this is not “the business of a private German citizen of my generation.” (my emphasis).

The reluctance of German intellectuals to speak critically about Israel is, of course, understandable. Many would agree that refusing to comment in this case is only appropriate — German responsibility for the crimes of the Holocaust would make it so. Evidently, Habermas’s silence speaks for many other intellectuals, including ones who belong to younger generations.

Still, the problem with Habermas’s answer to Haaretz and the stance it represents is that, in fact, Habermas is not much of a private German citizen at all: when the quintessential public intellectual seeks refuge in privacy; when the founder of a branch of philosophy called discourse ethics refuses to speak, there are theoretical and political consequences. Silence here is itself a speech act, and a very public one indeed.

In order to understand the meaning of this silence, it is necessary to go back to Kant’s concept of enlightenment. In his well-known essay from 1784 — “What Is Enlightenment?” — Kant defines enlightenment as “man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity,” a process of growing up that consists in finding the “courage” to think for oneself. That does not mean, however, to think by oneself, or alone. On the contrary, Kant insists that using one’s “own understanding” is possible only through a “public use of one’s reason,” in at least two interrelated ways.

More here.

Natalie Wolchover in Quanta:

Thirty years have passed since a pair of physicists, working together on a stormy summer night in Aspen, Colo., realized that string theory might have what it takes to be the “theory of everything.”

“We must be getting pretty close,” Michael Green recalls telling John Schwarz as the thunder raged and they hammered away at a proof of the theory’s internal consistency, “because the gods are trying to prevent us from completing this calculation.”

Their mathematics that night suggested that all phenomena in nature, including the seemingly irreconcilable forces of gravity and quantum mechanics, could arise from the harmonics of tiny, vibrating loops of energy, or “strings.” The work touched off a string theory revolution and spawned a generation of specialists who believed they were banging down the door of the ultimate theory of nature. But today, there’s still no answer. Because the strings that are said to quiver at the core of elementary particles are too small to detect — probably ever — the theory cannot be experimentally confirmed. Nor can it be disproven: Almost any observed feature of the universe jibes with the strings’ endless repertoire of tunes.

The publication of Green and Schwarz’s paper “was 30 years ago this month,” the string theorist and popular-science author Brian Greene wrote in Smithsonian Magazine in January, “making the moment ripe for taking stock: Is string theory revealing reality’s deep laws? Or, as some detractors have claimed, is it a mathematical mirage that has sidetracked a generation of physicists?” Greene had no answer, expressing doubt that string theory will “confront data” in his lifetime.

Recently, however, some string theorists have started developing a new tactic that gives them hope of someday answering these questions.

More here.