Mitch Leslie in Science:

The patient who walked into Joel Lavine's office at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), medical center one day in the mid-1990s didn't know how sick he really was. He was morbidly obese. A brownish blemish known as acanthosis nigricans sprawled over the nape of his neck and into his armpit, signaling that he probably had developed insulin resistance, a condition in which cells don't respond normally to the hormone that controls blood sugar. A biopsy revealed striking damage to the patient's liver: so much fat crammed into the cells that it squashed their nuclei and other contents. Cirrhosis, or severe liver injury, was beginning as scar tissue ousted healthy cells. The patient essentially had the liver of a middle-aged alcoholic. Yet he was only 8 years old. To Lavine, a pediatric hepatologist, it was clear the boy was suffering from nonalcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH). A condition usually associated with obesity, NASH results from excess fat in the liver and, as the name indicates, doesn't stem from the alcohol abuse that causes many cases of severe fatty liver disease. Because NASH can destroy the liver, patients can require a liver transplant or even die.

…Ultimately, says molecular biologist Jay Horton of the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, fatty liver “is a disease of caloric excess.” The imbalance between calories consumed and burned triggers a complex series of changes that transform the organ's character. Many of the diet-derived fatty acids in the bloodstream make their way to the liver, which directs them to other parts of the body. “The liver is your traffic cop” for these building blocks of fats, says Elizabeth Parks, a nutritional physiologist at the University of Missouri in Columbia. But the organ itself typically holds onto little fat. For instance, Parks says, a fairly fit 70-kg man will carry about 14 kg of body fat—and only 125 g will reside in the liver. “

More here.

Michael Saler in The Nation:

In Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari recounts how humans have developed from brutes to demigods in the course of their evolutionary history: a grand narrative, one would think, but he perceives it as a comic-tragedy, and details it with mordant humor. Even the book’s subtitle, A Brief History of Humankind, is punning, making “Brief” the soul of wit. At slightly over 400 pages, the narrative is indeed concise, but Sapiens is also an extended brief about the suffering our species has caused itself and others. (The “historical record,” he summarizes for his jury of readers, “makes Homo sapienslook like an ecological serial killer.”) “Brief” is also used ironically, since Sapiens is manifestly “big” in key respects. Harari, an Israeli historian, may not have anticipated that his tome would become such a huge hit: Following its initial publication in Hebrew in 2011, it has become available in 26 languages, and the online lecture series derived from it has attracted 65,000 auditors. But Harari also knows that Sapiens is a characteristic work of “Big History,” a relatively new field of research that spans everything from the Big Bang (which Harari mentions in his first sentence) to speculations about the future (which Harari offers in his last chapter).

Because Sapiens summarily dispatches over 13 billion years of cosmic and terrestrial history in its opening paragraphs, focusing instead on our species’ trials and tribulations during the past 70,000 years, it might more accurately be defined as “Deep History,” another recent approach to historiography that extends the historian’s remit to the origins of the human species. Like Big History, Deep History views the lack of written records for human “prehistory” as an inspiring challenge to historians rather than an insurmountable obstacle, one that can be overcome by recent scientific findings and techniques. Both subfields have provoked controversy, but even more excitement, within and outside of academia. (Bill Gates has committed some of his personal fortune to institutionalizing Big History in high schools: See his bighistoryproject.com.) Deep History has brought historians and biologists into mutually beneficial conversations, both hoping to promote a degree of consilience while avoiding the reductive conclusions that plagued sociobiology in earlier decades, to say nothing of earlier pseudosciences like phrenology and eugenics. Histories Big or Deep by David Christian, Daniel Lord Smail, Jared Diamond, Ian Morris, and others have appealed to lay and professional audiences alike, especially over the past 10 years.

The similar global success of Sapiens raises the question: Why are works covering such vast timescales popular today, when in other respects we remain fixated on the hyperpresent, as manifested in tweets, instant news updates, and high-tech innovations that come so swiftly they have made “planned obsolescence” itself obsolete? One answer is that the Internet’s surfeit of information prompts a craving for the orientation provided by large narratives, those user-friendly global and historical positioning systems of the mind. These fell out of fashion in the heyday of postmodernism, when claims to objectivity and universality were regularly attacked for being subjective and self-interested. Contemporary “metanarratives,” however, tend to be more conscious of their status as provisional guides rather than God’s-eye views. And the new availability of Big Data and visualization tools for tracking patterns over time and space, such as Google’s Ngram Viewer and Stanford’s “Mapping the Republic of Letters” project, gratify this hunger for temporal and spatial bearings in handy ways.

More here.

David Berreby in Psychology Today:

In a sparsely appointed trailer in northern Iraq, close to the sandbagged front line where Kurds faced the advancing forces of the Islamic State, fighters sat on the floor last spring and talked to Lydia Wilson about war. “Here,” one would say, pointing to his neck, “is where I was wounded—and here, and here.” Another trailed off from his own story to tell her about the wars in which his father and grandfather had fought in defense of their ethnic identity. Others praised their French allies’ efficiency in carrying out air strikes—the Americans, they said, took too long to arrive and flew away too soon. Some wondered out loud whether the coming night would bring suicide attackers driving trucks laden with explosives toward their position. Daytime offered quiet and some respite in the trailer, but by nightfall, they knew, ISIS would be back.

Wilson, an ebullient English research fellow at the Centre for the Resolution of Intractable Conflict at Oxford, sat beside the men asking questions, listening intently, and scribbling in her notebook. At certain points she focused her attention on two men in particular. They had been led into the trailer in handcuffs and with their eyes down and at first had little to say. These men, the Kurds told her, had been working undercover for ISIS, planting car bombs and plotting assassinations. They had already been tried in Mosul and would soon be executed. For Wilson, the opportunity to talk with them could offer valuable information for her study of what motivates young men to kill or die in war.

More here.

Steve Wasserman in LARB:

And yet and yet: the sound of Susan’s voice is still in my head. Her lust for life, her avidity, her pursuit of aesthetic bliss, her detestation of philistinism, her love of learning, her opposition to ethical and aesthetic shallowness, her insistence on being a grown-up, her passion for justice and capacity for outrage, and, always, her hatred of suffering and death are everywhere to be found in her sentences, in her essays, and in her stories. Her exemplary effort to swallow the world, as she concludes her revelatory short story “Unguided Tour,” tells the tale:

If I go this fast, I won’t see anything. If I slow down —

Everything. — then I won’t have seen everything before it disappears.

Everywhere. I’ve been everywhere. I haven’t been everywhere, but it’s on my list.

Land’s end. But there’s water, O my heart. And salt on my tongue.

The end of the world. This is not the end of the world.

I hear most of all her cri de coeur, given to the narrator of her story “Debriefing” — it could be her epitaph, her final aria, as she ends her story with the defiant throbbing declaration:

Sisyphus, I. I cling to my rock, you don’t have to chain me. Stand back! I roll it up — up, up. And… down we go. I knew that would happen. See, I’m on my feet again. See, I’m starting to roll it up again. Don’t try to talk me out of it. Nothing, nothing could tear me away from this rock.

More here.

Alastair Sooke at the BBC.com:

It must be one of the most familiar images in modern art: a space-distorting interior that could never exist in reality, dominated by staircases sprouting surreally in all directions, and filled with expressionless, mannequin-like figures walking up and down like members of a religious order calmly going about their daily business.

Since the original lithograph was produced in the summer of 1953, Relativity – which belongs to a series of five prints by the same artist also featuring impossible constructions and multiple vanishing points – has been reproduced countless times on posters, mugs, T-shirts, items of stationery and even duvet covers.

Yet, if we’re honest, how much do most of us really know about its creator, the Dutch printmaker MC Escher (1898-1972)? The truth is that outside his homeland Escher remains something of an enigma.

more here.

Elizabeth Gumport at Bookforum:

The Men in My Life, Vivian Gornick’s 2008 collection of critical writing, begins with an essay on the nineteenth-century British novelist George Gissing. Gornick particularly admires his novel The Odd Women (1893). In the book’s feminist reformer, Rhoda Nunn, Gornick writes, “I see myself, and others of my generation, plain.” Caught between her ideological opposition to marriage and the uncertainties of taking a lover, Nunn falters, and “she becomes,” as Gornick puts it, “a walking embodiment of the gap between theory and practice.” This gap is familiar territory for Gornick: In her work as a critic and memoirist over the past several decades, she has studied moments in history when ideas remade our daily reality—and the times when the world, or we, would not yield. “I knew intimately what was tearing these people apart,” Gornick writes of Gissing’s characters. “What’s more, I recognized myself as one of the ‘odd’ women. Every fifty years from the time of the French Revolution, feminists had been described as ‘new’ women, ‘free’ women, ‘liberated’ women—but Gissing had gotten it just right. We were the ‘odd’ women.”

Gissing’s novel echoes through Gornick’s new memoir, The Odd Woman and the City. The book is ostensibly about Gornick’s thirty-year friendship with Leonard, “a witty, intelligent, gay man” (and fellow native of the Bronx). Scenes from their relationship are broken up by vignettes of Gornick’s daily life in the city, her encounters as a solitary walker on the streets of Manhattan. Like Gornick, Leonard loves to explore the city on foot, but that is not their only shared interest: “Our subject is the unlived life. The question for each of us: Would we have manufactured the inequity had one not been there, ready-made—he is gay, I am the Odd Woman—for our grievances to make use of?”

more here.

John Keay at Literary Review:

The original Great Game, those bouts of strategic shadow-boxing that preoccupied the intelligence communities of British India and tsarist Russia in the 19th century, was played out under the big skies of Central Asia and across the high passes of the western Himalayas. Camels and yaks did a lot of the heavy work; beards and turbans made for easy disguise. Bagging forbidden cities and bartering for rare bloodstock rivalled the gunrunning and the surveying. Heavy books and solid reputations resulted.

The arena earmarked by Bertil Lintner for what he calls the 'Great Game East' could not be more different. Squeezed between the Tibetan plateau, the southeast Asian rainforest and the Bay of Bengal, the leech-infested triangle where northeast India meets southwest China (with some nudging from Burma, Bangladesh and Bhutan) is one of the most impenetrable zones on earth. Heavy rainfall, dense forest and interminable hills defy developmental initiatives and harbour a scattered and impossibly diverse population. Adjacent settlements speak mutually incomprehensible languages; even 'tribe' proves to be a colonial term of convenience corresponding to little more than highly localised kinship. Ethnolinguistic identities – Indo-Bengali, Tai-Shan, Tibeto-Burman, Mon-Khmer – are crisscrossed with confessional allegiances, ranging from messianic Christianity to militant Islam, with Buddhism, Hinduism and numerous indeterminate forms of animism as default settings. Anthropologists have long thrived here. Ideologists have found the going tougher.

more here.

From KurzweilAI:

A new study has found quantifiable evidence that supports the common-sense idea that walking in nature could lower your risk of depression. The study, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, found that people who walked for 90 minutes in a natural area, as opposed to participants who walked in a high-traffic urban setting (El Camino Real in Palo Alto, California, a noisy street with three to four lanes in both directions), showed decreased activity in the subgenual prefrontal cortex, a brain region active during rumination — repetitive thought focused on negative emotions. “These results suggest that accessible natural areas may be vital for mental health in our rapidly urbanizing world,” said co-author Gretchen Daily, the Bing Professor in Environmental Science and a senior fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment. “Our findings can help inform the growing movement worldwide to make cities more livable, and to make nature more accessible to all who live in them.” “This finding is exciting because it demonstrates the impact of nature experience on an aspect of emotion regulation — something that may help explain how nature makes us feel better,” said lead author Gregory Bratman, a graduate student in Stanford’s Emmett Interdisciplinary Program in Environment and Resources, the Stanford Psychophysiology Lab and the Center for Conservation Biology. “These findings are important because they are consistent with, but do not yet prove, a causal link between increasing urbanization and increased rates of mental illness,” said co-author James Gross, a professor of psychology at Stanford.

Essential for urban planners to incorporate nature

It is essential for urban planners and other policymakers to understand the relationship between exposure to nature and mental health, the study’s authors write. “We want to explore what elements of nature — how much of it and what types of experiences — offer the greatest benefits,” Daily said. As noted in the paper, “Never before has such a large percentage of humanity been so far removed from nature [1]; more than 50% of people now live in urban areas, and by 2050, this proportion will be 70% [2]. Although urbanization has many benefits, it is also associated with increased levels of mental illness, including anxiety disorders and depression [3-5].”

More here.

Brian E. Gray at The Morning News:

There is a poignant scene in Cameron Crowe’s film Almost Famous in which the rock critic Lester Bangs warns 15-year-old William Miller of the perils of seduction by the musicians Miller is covering for Rolling Stone magazine. Banks (played by Philip Seymour Hoffman) says to Miller (Patrick Fugit portraying a young Cameron Crowe):

“They make you feel cool. And, hey, I’ve met you. You are not cool.”

This profound advice extends well beyond the worlds of rock ‘n roll and music criticism. All writers should take heed of Bangs’s insight that trying to be cool when you simply aren’t risks muddling one’s clarity of observation and analysis and jeopardizes credibility with readers. Journalists, historians, novelists, academics, judges—perhaps especially judges—should take note.

I recalled this scene while reading the two most recent opinions of Justice Samuel Alito, the Supreme Court’s junior member. Justice Alito wrote the opinion of the Court inPleasant Grove City v. Summon, which held that a local government does not violate the first amendment by maintaining a monument to the Ten Commandments in a public park while refusing to install other permanent monuments that express differing religious views.

more here.

Benjamin Riley at The New Criterion:

The portrait is meant to give us a direct line into the soul of its sitter, or at least we’re told. It’s meant to expose underlying truths about the subject, using physiognomy to express that which cannot be gleaned from the subject’s name alone.

And yet, why is it that whenever I view portraits that go anywhere beyond the shoulders, all I can focus on are the hands? An old art historian told me years ago that the true mark of an artist’s draughtsmanship is his ability to render hands, due to the difficulty in producing the form, especially the digits. Whether true or not, this bit of received wisdom has lodged itself firmly in my brain, nagging even the finest works. (I’m reminded of Gainsborough’s portraits, which for all their virtues can feature hands that are almost sickly.)

And so it is with the Morgan Library’s new portrait drawings show, “Life Lines: Portrait Drawings from Dürer to Picasso,” on view through September 8, 2015. The show, composed of fifty-one works, all but four of which are from the permanent collection, takes a wide view of the concept of portraiture, which is to say, there’s no shortage of hands.

more here.

Erin Sheehy at n+1:

My favorite photos in Hollywood Boulevard are the ones that don’t fit neatly into the time, the place, or the glib narrative of Hollywood, but instead are wildly individual: pictures of waiting, wandering, loitering with friends. Two girls with ombré hair can be pegged to the ’70s by the cut of their jeans and jackets, but their postures—one looking amused, the other staring at the camera with a directness I’ve only ever seen in teens who want to be looked at—reminds me of something more timeless. They’re young, and waiting for something to happen.

The very young resist Feldman’s taxonomic gaze: they’re busy making new ways of being. A signifier or a style that will one day become a marketable trend, or a tenet that’s taken to represent a generation, often starts as teenage idiosyncrasy. A modern-looking, androgynous pair, so similar they could be twins, poses against an uncluttered black and white wall that echoes their dark hair and pale skin. The one on the left wears no shirt, an open vest, and creased slacks. The one on the right wears a button-up with lapels spread wide and jeans so frayed they no longer look like hippie clothes, but something else. He stands with one hip cocked, a fist pressed into the small of his waist. They gaze up from under flat black brows with a bold, receptive sexuality. They look like they could be models, like they could be in New York, like they could be on an album cover tomorrow.

more here.

Cesar A. Hidalgo in the Huffington Post:

Most people think that information and computation are new things when in fact they are as old as the big bang. In the beginning, there was the bit, as my MIT colleague Seth Lloyd likes to say. Only recently, however, we have learned to see the bits embodied in atoms, cells, society and the economy.

But what is information? Colloquially, people think of information as the messages we use to communicate the state of a system. But information, which is not the same as meaning, includes also the order embodied in these systems, not just the messages we use to describe them. Think of the order you destroy when you crash a car. A car crash does not destroy atoms — it destroys the way in which these atoms are arranged. That change in order is technically a change in information.

Computation, on the other hand, is the use of energy to process information. It is the fundamental mechanism by which nature rearranges bits to produce order. Computation is everywhere but in an economic context, we can think of it as a more modern and more accurate interpretation of the ideas of labor advanced originally by Adam Smith and Karl Marx.

Smith and Marx did not know about information or computation, so they described economies using the language of energy that dominated the nineteenth century zeitgeist. The mechanical protagonists of the industrial revolution were machines that transformed heat into motion: engines for pumps, trains and cranes. These machines awed the nineteenth century masses with their power — masses that failed to see that what these machines were doing was increasing their ability to process information.

Processing information is the essence of all economic activities. It is not the privilege of the coder or the writer but what we do when we bake a cake, make a sandwich or manufacture a car. We compute when we take out the trash, do laundry or pair socks. All of these acts involve using energy to produce order — whether we are grouping undesirable objects in a trashcan or using a laundry machine to remove dirt from our shirts. All jobs are acts of computation, and the economy is a collective computer that involves all of us.

More here. [Thanks to Marko Ahtisaari.]

Ian P. Beacock in The Point:

One evening in October 1905, when most Berliners were bundled away at home, Kurt Hiller wandered alone through the Tiergarten. Well, not quite alone. Walking in the southeast corner of the park between Lennéstraße and the Brandenburg Gate, the nineteen-year-old law student found himself boxed in by silhouettes: men searching the shadows for the company of other men, the “warm brothers” (warme Brüder) for which Berlin was so well-known. It was Hiller’s first visit to the city’s most notorious cruising ground, but he quickly found what he was looking for. He sat down on a bench next to a wiry man perhaps ten years his senior, rakish and mysterious in the moonlight. The law student wasted little time with small talk; he asked about the most important things. The man raised his arm and flexed. “I checked for myself,” Hiller recalled. “His bicep was broad, curved, and strong as steel.” Returning to the apartment of his anonymous lover, Hiller noticed with some distaste that the man’s body was quilted with tattoos. This was a man of the outskirts: a sailor or a criminal, a soldier or a circus performer. Taken briefly aback, the law student was rapidly overcome by lust for the man’s taut, sculpted frame. He let the door to the hallway close behind him.

In the early 1920s, an American military intelligence officer stationed in Germany reported that Berlin was “known by connoisseurs as one of the most immoral cities in the world.” The German capital was infamous for its wildly sexual and transgressive atmosphere: the confident young women with cropped hair and revealing skirts, the swingers clubs openly catering to polyamorous couples and curious singles, the cocaine fueling the city’s roaring nightlife.

More here.

From Kirkus Reviews:

Emily Mitchell is the author of Viral. But who is Emily Mitchell, really?

“Emily Mitchell has worked as a waitress, a receptionist at a bakery/tanning salon, a short-order cook, a snowmobile driver, a crime-scene cleanup technician, an exotic animal trainer, a war correspondent, a phone dispatcher, a secretary, an environmental campaigner, a freelance journalist, a bean counter and a holistic pediatric oncologist,” Mitchell writes in “Biographies.”

“Biographies” isn’t her biography, but one of a dozen delightfully diverse stories in her debut story collection. Viral is no memoir. No bakery/tanning salon likely exists—but couldn’t another word for “tanning salon” be “bakery”? You might catch these kinds of thoughts fromViral.

“If you are willing to accept this first premise then we can go on this amazing ride together—I love work that does that,” says Mitchell, speaking of recently discovering Michael Martone’sBlue Guide to Indiana. It’s perfect praise for Viral.

More here.

Tia Olivia Serves Wallace Stevens a Cuban Egg
.

The ration books voided, there was little to eat,
so Tía Olivia ruffled four hens to serve Stevens
a fresh criollo egg. The singular image lay limp,
floating in a circle of miniature roses and vines
etched around the edges of the rough dish.
The saffron, inhuman soul staring at Stevens
who asks what yolk is this, so odd a yellow?

Tell me Señora, if you know, he petitions,
what exactly is the color of this temptation:
I can see a sun, but it is not the color of suns
nor of sunflowers, nor the yellows of Van Gogh,
it is neither corn nor school pencil, as it is,
so few things are yellow, this, even more precise.

He shakes some salt, eye to eye hypothesizing:
a carnival of hues under the gossamer membrane,
a liqueur of convoluted colors, quarter-part orange,
imbued shadows, watercolors running a song
down the spine of praying stems, but what, then,
of the color of the stems, what green for the leaves,
what color the flowers; what of order for our eyes
if I can not name this elusive yellow, Señora?

Intolerant, Tía Olivia bursts open Stevens's yolk,
plunging into it with a sharp piece of Cuban toast:
It is yellow, she says, amarillo y nada más, bien?
The unleashed pigments begin to fill the plate,
overflow onto the embroidered place mats,
stream down the table and through the living room
setting all the rocking chairs in motion then
over the mill tracks cutting through cane fields,
a viscous mass downing palm trees and shacks.

In its frothy wake whole choirs of church ladies
clutch their rosary beads and sing out in Latin,
exhausted macheteros wade in the stream,
holding glinting machetes overhead with one arm;
cafeteras, '57 Chevys, uniforms and empty bottles,
mangy dogs and fattened pigs saved from slaughter,
Soviet jeeps, Bohemia magazines, park benches,
all carried in the egg lava carving the molested valley
and emptying into the sea. Yellow, Stevens relents,
Yes. But then what the color of the sea, Señora?

by Richard Blanco
from City of a Hundred Fires
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1998

Robin McKie in The Guardian:

In June 1966, the British Nobel laureate Francis Crick helped to organise a meeting of the world’s leading geneticists at Cold Spring Harbour near New York. It was to be a triumphant event. For the previous decade and a half, biologists had been struggling to unravel the genetic code, the biological cipher that determines how genes are passed on to future generations and which controls the construction of proteins in our bodies. This effort had begun in 1953 when Crick and his colleague James Watson showed that DNA was the critical constituent of our genes and revealed that it had a double helical structure. Since then, scientists had been racing to find out how that double helix controlled the manufacture of amino acids from which our bodies’ proteins are constructed. At Cold Spring Harbour, they were ready to announce their success and revealed the detailed process by which units of DNA control the manufacture of particular amino acids via intermediary entities known as ribosomes. This is the genetic code.

It was a historic occasion, as Crick acknowledged. Biologists had achieved an understanding of life’s processes at a molecular level for the first time, a point reinforced by Matthew Cobb in this meticulous, carefully assembled and thoroughly enjoyable history of modern molecular biology. “Cracking the code was a leap forward in humanity’s understanding of the natural world… akin to the discoveries of Galileo and Einstein in physics, or the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species,” he states. Yet it had not been an easy business, as Cobb also makes clear. The effort involved hundreds of scientists and was similar, in scale, to the Apollo moon landings or the Manhattan project – though with one key difference. There was no leadership, no overseeing council, and no directed funding from governments pursuing military or political goals.

More here.

Brendan Maher in Nature:

The mammalian Y chromosome has long been thought of as a sort of genomic wasteland, usually shrinking over the course of evolution and largely bereft of pertinent information. Page’s work has helped to change perceptions of the Y chromosome by revealing that it contains remarkable patterns of repeating sequences that appear dozens to hundreds of times^{1, 2}. But the structure of these sequences and precise measures of how often they repeat have been difficult to determine. Standard sequencing technologies often cannot distinguish between long stretches of genetic code that differ by a single DNA ‘letter’. Page and his collaborators avoided this problem by using what he calls ‘super-resolution’ sequencing (a technique better known as single-haplotype iterative mapping and sequencing, or SHIMS), which can detect such minute variation between lengthy segments of DNA.

The team sequenced many large, continuous stretches of the Y chromosome and carefully scrutinized the areas that looked as if they overlapped. They found that repeating structures make up about 24% of the accessible DNA in the human Y chromosome, and 44% of that of the bull. And in the Y chromosome of the mouse, which is much larger than that of a human, repeating structures make up almost 90% of accessible DNA. The intricate patterns, which often contain palindromes — sequence that reads the same in forward and reverse order — carry three families of protein-coding genes. What the genes are doing — and how they got there — remains a mystery, however.

More here.