Carl Zimmer in the New York Times:

To help his readers fathom evolution, Charles Darwin asked them to consider their own hands.

“What can be more curious,” he asked, “than that the hand of a man, formed for grasping, that of a mole for digging, the leg of the horse, the paddle of the porpoise, and the wing of the bat, should all be constructed on the same pattern, and should include similar bones, in the same relative positions?”

Darwin had a straightforward explanation: People, moles, horses, porpoises and bats all shared a common ancestor that grew limbs with digits. Its descendants evolved different kinds of limbs adapted for different tasks. But they never lost the anatomical similarities that revealed their kinship.

As a Victorian naturalist, Darwin was limited in the similarities he could find. The most sophisticated equipment he could use for the task was a crude microscope. Today, scientists are carrying on his work with new biological tools. They are uncovering deep similarities that have been overlooked until now.

On Wednesday, a team of researchers at the University of Chicago reported that our hands share a deep evolutionary connection not only to bat wings or horse hooves, but also to fish fins.

The unexpected discovery will help researchers understand how our own ancestors left the water, transforming fins into limbs that they could use to move around on land.

More here.

From The Nervous Breakdown:

Are the essays in this book eulogies?

Yes…and no. We did try to take each of these dead persons seriously and therefore to write with some sympathy. In general, even with the living, we try to take people seriously and on their own terms. But the job of writing about recently deceased persons of note is not to say something nice simply for the sake of saying something nice. It is about digging and scratching at the lives in order to see what comes to the surface. Sometimes, this creates surprises.

What do you mean surprises? Can you give an example?

[Morgan] Well, when I started writing about Christopher Hitchens he had literally just died. I became very emotional as I wrote. The whole thing was written while crying, to be honest. I realized two things. One, that I had a lot of anger and resentment toward the man and two, that I actually loved him, in the non-romantic sense of the term. I realized that this love was generated by something other than the usual regard for his writing and argumentative skill. In fact, upon reflection, I realized that his writing and argumentative skill were, to my mind, overrated. That made my deep feeling of connection to the man all the more mysterious, a fact that pleased the hell out of me the more I thought about it. I tried to capture some of that in the essay, which, if it has any virtue at all, has the virtue of mostly refraining from restating the well-worn Hitchens clichés. The more I wrote about Hitch, the more I realized that I have no idea why he was such a powerful person.

More here.

Becca Rothfeld at The Nation:

“Not infrequently I unravelled what I had done, continuously tormented by scruples that were taking tighter hold and steadily paralysing me. These scruples concerned not only the subject of my narrative, which I felt I could not do justice to, no matter what approach I tried, but also the entire questionable business of writing.” This is the narrator of W.G. Sebald’s The Emigrants, and his stuttering, paradoxical lament, placed midway through the very story to which it cannot do justice, is a fresh unraveling: It undermines the book we are reading, which we now suspect to have failed, but it also defies its own prognoses for itself. In this way, even Sebald’s modest success—he has written a book he deems unwritable—is presented as a sort of failure. Unable to write effectively but unable to remain silent, Sebald, like his narrator, is condemned to speak unsatisfactorily.

The narrative in question, one of the four novella-length pieces that make up the masterful Emigrants, is a biography of a fictional painter named Max Ferber, a German expat whose parents perished in the Holocaust. (The character is modeled on the German artist Frank Auerbach, now a longtime citizen of the United Kingdom.) Like Sebald, Ferber works uncertainly, wavering between creation and destruction. He paints, then erases, until the vague beginnings of human shapes tentatively emerge, “evolved from a long lineage of grey, ancestral faces, rendered unto ash but still there, as ghostly presences, on the harried paper.”

more here.

Cynthia Haven at The Book Haven:

A villanelle, for those of you who don’t know the lovely form with its remarkable incantatory power, is a 19-line poem with a rhyme-and-refrain scheme that runs as follows: A¹bA² abA¹ abA² abA¹ abA² abA¹A² where letters (“a” and “b”) indicate the two rhyme sounds, upper case indicates a refrain (“A”), and superscript numerals (¹ and ²) indicate Refrain 1 and Refrain 2.

Got that? Think Elizabeth Bishop‘s “One Art” or Theodore Roethke‘s“The Waking.”

The history of the villanelle, from the Italian villanella, a rustic song, goes back to the 16th century. The French poet Théodore de Banville compared the interweaving refrain lines to “a braid of silver and gold threads, crossed with a third thread the color of a rose.” The complex form was fixed with Jean Passerat‘s “J’ay perdu ma Tourterelle” in 1606.

Here’s one more to add to the repertoire: “Self-pity” by a poet from the calm shores of Lake Michigan, Marnie Heyn, who has just published a collection of poems, Hades Lades, with The Writers’ Bloc Press.

more here.

Wei Tchou at The Paris Review:

For years my parents have told me about a photograph that shows my mother shaking hands with Zhou Enlai, the first premier of China under Mao Zedong. The photograph was taken in 1962, four years before the Cultural Revolution began, but it was lost until a few weeks ago, when a barrage of Instagram notifications, texts, e-mails, and WeChat messages alerted me that the picture had been found. It had turned up on Facebook, of all places, in a post detailing the history of my mother’s grade school in Shanghai. (A point of recent pride: Yao Ming, the basketball player, was a student at the same school, albeit decades later). An aunt of mine who lives in Hong Kong forwarded the picture to my father, who then distributed it across the Internet.

In the picture, my mother is fourteen. Her hair is in a low ponytail and she has an accordion strapped over her shoulders. She wears a checked knee-length skirt, a white blouse, white ankle socks, and Mary Janes. Several rows of Chinese flags fly in the background; in front of these stand many smiling girls holding bouquets of flowers

more here.

David V. Johnson in Dissent:

The rhetoric of revolution is in the air. Democratic socialist Senator Bernie Sanders launched an impressive bid for the Democratic presidential nomination on a call for “political revolution” and, since conceding the nomination to Hillary Clinton, has redirected his campaign into a permanent organization under the same banner. Donald Trump succeeded in his insurgent campaign for the GOP nomination by tapping populist anger against Washington’s corrupt establishment. In Europe, far-right and -left parties have scored eye-opening wins in the United Kingdom, France, Spain, Hungary, and Greece, and threaten to shred the fabric of the European Union and even some of its member states.

But all movements for revolutionary change inevitably confront the challenge of navigating (or disrupting) the institutions in which day-to-day politics is housed. Calls to end austerity, reform immigration, overhaul campaign finance, or correct massive inequality ultimately end up in the legislatures, executives, and courts. Radicals may seek to smash such institutions, but if they gain power, they face the Herculean task of building new ones.

The problem with revolutionary politics, in short, is that it tends to be naïve about political institutions. I can recommend no better corrective than liberal political philosopher Jeremy Waldron, and no better introduction to his thinking than his recently published collection of essays, Political Political Theory.

More here.

John Bohannon in Science:

The term “life hacking” usually refers to clever tweaks that make your life more productive. But this week in Science, a team of scientists comes a step closer to the literal meaning: hacking the machinery of life itself. They have designed—though not completely assembled—a synthetic Escherichia coli genome that could use a protein-coding scheme different from the one employed by all known life. Requiring a staggering 62,000 DNA changes, the finished genome would be the most complicated genetic engineering feat so far. E. coli running this rewritten genome could become a new workhorse for laboratory experiments and a factory for new industrial chemicals, its creators predict. Such a large-scale genomic hack once seemed impossible, but no longer, says Peter Carr, a bioengineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Lincoln Laboratory in Lexington who is not involved with the project. “It's not easy, but we can engineer life at profound scales, even something as fundamental as the genetic code.”

The genome hacking is underway in the lab of George Church at Harvard University, the DNA-sequencing pioneer who has become the most high-profile, and at times controversial, name in synthetic biology. The work takes advantage of the redundancy of life's genetic code, the language that DNA uses to instruct the cell's protein-synthesizing machinery. To produce proteins, cells “read” DNA's four-letter alphabet in clusters of three called codons. The 64 possible triplets are more than enough to encode the 20 amino acids that exist in nature, as well as the “stop” codons that mark the ends of genes. As a result, the genetic code has multiple codons for the same amino acid: the codons CCC and CCG both encode the amino acid proline, for example. Church and others hypothesized that redundant codons could be eliminated—by swapping out every CCC for a CCG in every gene, for instance—without harming the cell. The gene that enables CCC to be translated into proline could then be deleted entirely. “There are a number of 'killer apps'” of such a “recoded” cell, says Farren Isaacs, a bioengineer at Yale University, who, with Church and colleagues, showed a stop codon can be swapped out entirely from E. coli. The cells could be immune to viruses that impair bioreactors, for example, if crucial viral genes include now untranslatable codons.

More here.

Winter Rye

On an evening of broccoli
And Billy Collins
My mind drifts back to May,

When the pale-green bermuda
Replaced the winter rye, and my father
Dutifully attended to his guests.

He poured the wine and laughed
At little jokes, so nervous in their delivery,
And consoled her group of friends.

And so finally she was, as they say,
Put to rest, and it was quietly sound, enough so
That I found myself watching him carefully

Watching him smile at each and every guest,
Such dignity amid the Chardonnay,
Such grace among the last of the winter rye.
.

by Richard Fenwick
from Anon Seven
.

Orrin Devinsky in The New Yorker:

A year ago, I lost my best friend, Oliver Sacks. For many years, each week, Oliver and I would cruise north on the West Side bike path at sunrise. Alone, our bicycles a few inches apart, we spoke about everything and anything, but mostly about interesting patients, natural history, and food. His voice was soft, and I struggled to hear his words. But his volume and pedalling cadence always accelerated when the massive TRUMP PLACE buildings appeared to our right. He detested the giant protuberances that unpleasantly punctuated the view from our bike seats, and often cursed them. Instead, he looked forward to passing by the Seventy-ninth Street Boat Basin, which reminded him of his City Island days. There, he had a housekeeper who, once a week, would make a beef stew for him and divide it into seven daily portions. One day, when the portions began to decline in size, Oliver asked, “Did the price of beef go up? I will give you more.” His housekeeper sheepishly admitted to pilfering some stew; she could not afford it for herself. “Then I will give you money for eight pounds instead of four, and you keep half.”

We would climb the small hill into Riverside Park’s Ninety-first Street garden for a water stop, and Oliver would become absorbed by a crocus, columbine, hyacinth, or tulip. A stray dandelion once launched a discourse on their unfair label as weeds, the potential diuretic effect of their leaves, their definite edibility (he popped it in his mouth, stem and all), the plant’s name (the coarsely toothed leaves resembled lions’ teeth, leading the French to call it dent de lion), and the paradoxical fecundity of these asexual plants. Almost every living eukaryote—organisms with complex cells, from algae and fungi to plants and animals—reproduces sexually, at least some of the time. But certain dandelion species only reproduce asexually. Oliver predicted their “imminent” extinction, at least in geological time, since “only bdelloid rotifers survived tens of million of years living the sexless life.” It was one of the rare times I had something to add. John Maynard Smith, I told him, considered the bdelloid’s successful asexuality “an evolutionary scandal.”

“Very good,” Oliver agreed, with his broad, mischievous smile.

More here.

From KurzweilAI:

Anti-inflammatory drug mefenamic acid completely reversed memory loss and brain inflammation in mice genetically engineered to develop symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease and amyloid beta-induced memory loss, a team led by David Brough, PhD, from the University of Manchester has discovered. The non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drug (NSAID) drug targets an important inflammatory pathway called the NLRP3 inflammasome, which damages brain cells, according to Brough. This is the first time a drug has been shown to target this inflammatory pathway, highlighting its importance in the disease model, Brough said.

“Because this drug is already available and the toxicity and pharmacokinetics of the drug is known, the time for it to reach patients should, in theory, be shorter than if we were developing completely new drugs. We are now preparing applications to perform early phase II trials to determine a proof-of-concept that the molecules have an effect on neuroinflammation in humans.” “There is experimental evidence now to strongly suggest that inflammation in the brain makes Alzheimer’s disease worse. Until now, no drug has been available to target this pathway, so we are very excited by this result.” The research, funded by the Medical Research Council and the Alzheimer’s Society, paves the way for human trials that the team hopes to conduct in the future, but Brough cautions that more research is needed to identify its impact on humans and the long-term implications of its use. The findings were published Thursday Aug. 11 in an open-access paper authored by Brough and colleagues in the journal Nature Communications.

More here.

Christia Mercer in The Guardian:

The United States contains 5% of the world’s women and 33% of its incarcerated women, more per capita, and in absolute terms, than any other country in the world. Though that’s only 7% of the US prisoner population overall, the statistics don’t reflect the uniquely horrible circumstances many incarcerated women faced before their convictions.

They’re girls who were victimized as children, ignored in substandard schools and unprotected by social services. Girls who dropped out of high school, self-medicated with alcohol or illegal drugs and then made mistakes that got them caught up the in the prison industrial complex.

The reality of these women’s struggles was driven home anew in a report, released Wednesday by the Vera Institute of Justice and the Safety and Justice Challenge. It says that women are the fastest-growing demographic in our jails – where people are booked and held prior to conviction – and that this is exacerbating the societal disadvantages they face.

The US does a disservice to its female prisoner population by locking them up without giving them a first chance in life, much less a second one.

A shocking 32% of the women incarcerated in New York were victims of rape before arrest.

More here.

Science isn’t self-correcting, it’s self-destructing. To save the enterprise, scientists must come out of the lab and into the real world.

Daniel Sarewitz in The New Atlantis:

Science, pride of modernity, our one source of objective knowledge, is in deep trouble. Stoked by fifty years of growing public investments, scientists are more productive than ever, pouring out millions of articles in thousands of journals covering an ever-expanding array of fields and phenomena. But much of this supposed knowledge is turning out to be contestable, unreliable, unusable, or flat-out wrong. From metastatic cancer to climate change to growth economics to dietary standards, science that is supposed to yield clarity and solutions is in many instances leading instead to contradiction, controversy, and confusion. Along the way it is also undermining the four-hundred-year-old idea that wise human action can be built on a foundation of independently verifiable truths. Science is trapped in a self-destructive vortex; to escape, it will have to abdicate its protected political status and embrace both its limits and its accountability to the rest of society.

The story of how things got to this state is difficult to unravel, in no small part because the scientific enterprise is so well-defended by walls of hype, myth, and denial. But much of the problem can be traced back to a bald-faced but beautiful lie upon which rests the political and cultural power of science.

More here.

A conversation about style with David Wolf, commissioning editor at The Guardian Long Read.

Jo Livingstone in The Awl:

JL: You’ve used the term “academic writing” with me before, as an insult. Where did you get this term, and what does it mean?

DW: Well, obviously the thought is not original to me! There’s a stereotype — which is wrong on many levels, and I’m not endorsing it — that journalists write good, plain, intelligible, clear sentences which everyone understands, whereas academics write torturous, confusing, hermetic, boring shit that no one would want to read unless they were also an academic. They don’t realize they’re doing this: they’re oblivious to the fact that they are writing in an academic way. This is the stereotype.

JL: This stereotype does match reality sometimes. Often an academic thinks they are clarifying when in fact they’re obfuscating, if the reader doesn’t share the same vocabulary of professional terms.

DW: Yeah, I think vocabulary is an important part of this — I would guess for many academics, their ideal readers will all have a similar intellectual framework, have read the same books, know the same lingo. But that isn’t going to be the case, of course, if you’re writing for a wider audience. Now, there are a lot of different ways — not just assuming readers will understand certain phrases and references — that academic writing can go wrong for a journalistic audience. Obviously there was that big argument about this in the nineties and early ’00s.

More here.

Richard Smyth at the Times Literary Supplement:

It’s important, then, that humankind somehow finds a place in the wilderness. Muir was indulgent towards day-trippers in search of a brush with the wild (“Among the gains of a coach-trip are the acquaintances made and the fresh views into human nature; for the wilderness is a shrewd touchstone, even thus lightly approached”). Leopold was tactful and tolerant – up to a point – with regard to the “recreational use” of wilderness by hunters and fishermen. One of the most important lines in Feral is Monbiot’s quotation from Byron: the point of rewilding, he says, is to “love not man the less, but Nature more”.

But an undeniable misanthropic streak runs through wilderness appreciation in Britain. Wild Life on Moor and Fell (1937), a nature novel by W. R. Calvert, features a lead character named “Peter the Hermit”, a “strange and lonely man”, a “dweller in the Wild”, who retires to a remote Cumbrian cottage, his only contact with mankind being a reluctant monthly trip to a barber’s shop (where he is “irked” by a “desultory and one-sided” conversation). It’s a familiar archetype. Britain has had few John Muirs, hiking jovially to the mountaintop and beckoning to the city charabancs to follow him up (though of course Muir had no love for the city itself). Instead one might think of Henry Williamson and his fascist tendencies and disdain for the “spiciness and hyper-stimulation” of town life, or T. H. White, cloistered with his goshawk and his sexual anguish.

more here.

Anthony Cartwright at Granta:

Geology is destiny.

The Black Country is porous, like its limestone, and hard as Rowley rag, the dolerite in its quarries. For a time this was the most heavily industrialised few square miles on the planet, and yet, as its name suggests, it has never been fully urban. Its hills mark the watershed between the rivers Severn and Trent, thewrosne of Old English, a word that translates as ‘the link’. The Black Country’s borders are ill-defined, corresponding roughly to the old South Staffordshire coalfield (which incorporates enclaves of Worcestershire and Shropshire). It is in the English midlands, to the west of Birmingham, but not of it. On that, at least, we can all agree.

When I ring my dad on the day of the referendum he tells me that he has seen people queuing off the Rowley Road to vote. The hills fall away south below the line of voters, past the blackened brick of the air shaft that comes from the tunnel bored through the land below, past the shell of Cobb’s Engine House which used to pump water from the nearby mines into the canal, past Clent and Walton and the woods that once belonged to King Offa and Saint Kenelm, webbed with lanes where they say Harry Ca Nab, the leader of the devil’s hunt, still sometimes rides on his wild bull. He will surely be out tonight; Lord of Misrule.

more here.

Kristin Dombek at n+1:

THE NARCISSIST IS, according to the internet, empty. Normal, healthy people are full of self, a kind of substance like a soul or personhood that, if you have it, emanates warmly from inside of you toward the outside of you. No one knows what it is, but everyone agrees that narcissists do not have it. Disturbingly, however, they are often better than anyone else at seeming to have it. Because what they have inside is empty space, they have had to make a study of the selves of others in order to invent something that looks and sounds like one. Narcissists are imitators par excellence. And they do not copy the small, boring parts of selves. They take what they think are the biggest, most impressive parts of other selves, and devise a hologram of self that seems superpowered. Let’s call it “selfiness,” this simulacrum of a superpowered self. Sometimes they seem crazy or are really dull, but often, perhaps because they have had to try harder than most to make it, the selfiness they’ve come up with is qualitatively better, when you first encounter it, than the ordinary, naturally occurring selves of normal, healthy people. Narcissists are the most popular kids at school. They are rock stars. They are movie stars. They are not really rock stars or movie stars, but they seem like they are. They may tell you that you are the only one who really sees them for who they really are, which is probably a trick. If one of your parents is a narcissist, he or she will tell you that you are a rock star, too, which is definitely a trick.

more here.

The Problem of Describing Trees

The aspen glitters in the wind
And that delights us.

The leaf flutters, turning,
Because that motion in the heat of August
Protects its cells from drying out. Likewise the leaf
Of the cottonwood.

The gene pool threw up a wobbly stem
And the tree danced. No.
The tree capitalized.
No. There are limits to saying,
In language, what the tree did.

It is good sometimes for poetry to disenchant us.

Dance with me, dancer. Oh, I will.

Mountains, sky,
The aspen doing something in the wind.
.

by Robert Hass
from Time and Materials
Ecco, 2007
.

Saïd Sayrafiezadeh in the New York Times:

One summer afternoon, when I was 4 or 5 years old, I was raped by a next-door neighbor. If the act itself was gruesome, the aftermath was surprisingly uneventful, beginning with the fact that my mother, despite knowing what had transpired, did nothing. As for me, I did what everyone tries to do under similar circumstances: move on and be normal. With the exception of the occasional nightmare that visited me in the years that followed, I was convinced that there had been no lasting damage. How miraculous it was that I had emerged unscathed.

This could very well have been the end of the story if not for my freshman year in college, when I found myself being pursued, some might say stalked, by a male professor who had somehow determined, at least in his own mind, that I was gay. He had also determined, or so he said, that I was a good writer, or a great writer, hyperbole I happily accepted without question since I was in need of any and all approbation.

He gave me books, he gave me money, he gave me dinner. He also gave me letters, multipaged and pornographic, describing in no uncertain terms what we would do once I got over my sexual inhibitions. Sometimes I would hear him driving past my apartment building in his silver sports car with its distinctive downshift. Sometimes I imagined I heard him driving past. Sometimes I would wake up to find that a letter had been placed in my mailbox at some point during the night.

I was not gay and I told him so.

More here.