Ed Yong in The Atlantic:

Around 385 million years ago, fish started hauling themselves onto land. Over time, their flattened fins gradually transformed into sturdy legs, ending in feet and digits. Rather than paddling through water, they started striding over solid ground. Eventually, these pioneers gave rise to the tetrapods—the lineage of four-legged animals that includes reptiles, amphibians, and mammals like us. This transition from water to land is an evocative one, and for obvious reasons, people tend to focus on the legs. They are the organs that changed most obviously, that gave the tetrapods their name, and that carried them into their evolutionary future.

But Malcolm MacIver from Northwestern University was more interested in eyes.

The earliest tetrapods had much bigger eyes than their fishy forebears. MacIver always assumed that this enlargement happened after they marched onto land, allowing them to see further and to plan their paths. “That was an expectation fueled by ignorance,” he says. Actually, after studying the fossils of many fishapods—extinct species that were intermediate between fish and tetrapods—MacIver found that bigger eyes evolved before walking legs.

As the eyes swelled in size, they also moved to the tops of their owners’ heads, allowing them to peer out of the water surface like crocodiles do today.

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Michael Kazin in the New York Times:

One hundred years ago today, Congress voted to enter what was then the largest and bloodiest war in history. Four days earlier, President Woodrow Wilson had sought to unite a sharply divided populace with a stirring claim that the nation “is privileged to spend her blood and her might for the principles that gave her birth and happiness and the peace which she has treasured.” The war lasted only another year and a half, but in that time, an astounding 117,000 American soldiers were killed and 202,000 wounded.

Still, most Americans know little about why the United States fought in World War I, or why it mattered. The “Great War” that tore apart Europe and the Middle East and took the lives of over 17 million people worldwide lacks the high drama and moral gravity of the Civil War and World War II, in which the very survival of the nation seemed at stake.

World War I is less easy to explain. America intervened nearly three years after it began, and the “doughboys,” as our troops were called, engaged in serious combat for only a few months. More Americans in uniform died away from the battlefield — thousands from the Spanish flu — than with weapons in hand. After victory was achieved, Wilson’s audacious hope of making a peace that would advance democracy and national self-determination blew up in his face when the Senate refused to ratify the treaty he had signed at the Palace of Versailles.

But attention should be paid. America’s decision to join the Allies was a turning point in world history. It altered the fortunes of the war and the course of the 20th century — and not necessarily for the better. Its entry most likely foreclosed the possibility of a negotiated peace among belligerent powers that were exhausted from years mired in trench warfare.

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Annie Julia Wyman at n+1:

VERY EARLY IN PORTRAITS, in a remarkable essay on Courbet, Berger writes “the only justification for criticism is that it allows us to see more clearly” (it makes sense that Berger’s take on Courbet would be remarkable, since both were preoccupied with painting as a faithful transcript of experience, though then again there is no artist with whom Berger did not share something or from whom he did not learn anything—a mark of the high value he placed on intellectual and artistic receptivity). Criticism is only one level of thinking; Berger’s reviews would offer a desperately incomplete representation of his total production, which is one reason why, in Portraits, Overton selects from across Berger’s oeuvre: the fiction contains art writing; the poetry contains art writing, as do the letters and the eulogies for dead friends written to long-dead artists.

The same catholic editorial procedure holds for Landscapes, with a slight modification. Overton specifies in his introduction that the book intends to survey the theoretical territory of Berger’s work on art, then offer examples of the territory described. The book’s first half is thus headed “Redrawing the Maps,” the second “Terrain”; the first contains odes to Gabriel García Márquez and to James Joyce. It also contains shorter pieces on Fredric Antal, Max Raphael, and Walter Benjamin: Marxist humanists like Berger, emigrants like Berger (though not, unlike Berger, emigrants by choice).

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Gabrielle Bellot at Literary Hub:

To be sure, anti-Stratfordianism—even when it does not involve conspiracies—tends to be looked down upon in academia, and it does not seem a desperate swipe of Occam’s razor to suggest that maybe Shakespeare really just was a brilliant playwright from a humble background. If anything, it’s an old pernicious classism that won’t die to assume someone from a lower socioeconomic position must produce “low” art in turn. Many great writers have struggled and created work that seems all the more remarkable for the circumstances they produced it in. (The broader argument that Shakespeare could not have written about worlds he did not travel to certainly makes one want to look at Tolkien’s passport.)

I myself am a Stratfordian with an open mind. But the fact that The New Oxford Shakespeare so casually and definitively listed Shakespeare as a co-author is provocative and intriguing, all the same. And all of this raises larger, older questions: what does it really mean to say that someone has authored a text? Is it fair to use stylistic and textual analysis to determine authorship? Is anyone, in a larger sense, truly the “single” author of any text? Is the author a stable idea, or forever in flux?

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Steven Nadler at the Times Literary Supplement:

When exactly did philosophy become “modern”? In his film Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sex But Were Afraid To Ask (1972), Woody Allen’s medieval jester tries to hasten his seduction of the queen by warning her that “before you know it the Renaissance will be here and we’ll all be painting”. But of course there is neither a clean beginning nor end to the Middle Ages, or some moment or event that represents the commencement of the Renaissance. Why, then, should there be a specific point that marks the start of modernity in philosophy or a single thinker or movement that can be undisputedly identified as the first modern philosopher or philosophy? Descartes is often called “the father of modern philos­ophy”, and understandably so. Many of the metaphysical and epistemological questions that have come to dominate philosophy since the early twentieth century are expressed, quite beautifully and some for the first time, in his works. But plausible claims to the title could also be made on behalf of Thomas Hobbes, Francis Bacon or (several decades earlier) Michel de Montaigne, all of whom made original and significant, but very different, contributions to what A. C. Grayling refers to as “the modern mind”. On the other hand, we might want to save the founder’s honour for some figure later than Descartes, someone whose thought seems more familiar to us, less influenced by Scholasticism and less informed by theological assumptions and ostensible religious motivations – say, John Locke, with his radically empiricist theory of knowledge; or Baruch Spinoza, the most iconoclastic thinker of his time; or, even later, the sceptical atheist David Hume.

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William Nicholson in The Guardian:

In 1882 Emily Dickinson was living as a recluse in the family home in Amherst, Massachusetts, guarded by her sister, Vinnie, when her brother, Austin, began an adulterous affair with Mabel Todd. Mabel was an Amherst College faculty wife, half his age. Austin was the college treasurer. They needed a safe place to conduct their secret liaison. They chose Emily’s house. What did she think of this? We know a great deal about Austin and Mabel’s affair, because both left diaries and letters, which are now kept in Yale’s Sterling Memorial Library. We know nothing of Emily’s view of the affair. We know that she and Mabel never met. We know that Mabel became fascinated by Emily’s poems. And we know that it was Mabel who championed the poems after Emily’s death in 1886 and nagged the publishers Roberts Brothers of Boston to print a small edition in 1890. That edition, reprinted 11 times in the first year, made Dickinson famous.

Since then her fame has grown to legendary proportions. Even in her lifetime she was known in Amherst as “the Myth”. She lived a nun-like existence, wearing only white, seeing no one but her sister, writing poems that almost no one saw, poems of astonishing prickly power. What was going on? It’s all too tempting to speculate, and the speculations have come thick and fast ever since. Did she suffer from acute social anxiety, or epilepsy, or bipolar disorder? Was she lesbian, a proto-feminist, a religious radical, a sexual pioneer? The poems support almost every theory and feed almost every taste. She is the poet of nature – “Inebriate of air am I / And debauchee of dew … ” The poet of loneliness – “The soul selects her own society / Then shuts the door … ” The poet of adventure – “Exultation is the going / Of an inland soul to sea … ” The poet of passion – “Wild nights! Wild nights! / Were I with thee / Wild nights should be / Our luxury!” And famously the poet of death – “Because I could not stop for death / He kindly stopped for me … ” We who love her poems find in them a voice that seems to speak our own secret thoughts. Each of us creates and takes ownership of our own Dickinson, half believing that she went into seclusion in order to make herself our very own secret friend. The result is a steady flow of works about the poet, some biographical, some fictional, that tell startlingly different stories. She was once revered as a priestess of renunciation, while one recent incarnation has given us Dickinson as a sexual predator, having passionate sex with her handyman. After all, didn’t she write “My life had stood – a loaded gun”?

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Ewen Callaway in Nature:

It may not be the most appetizing way to extend life, but researchers have shown for the first time that older fish live longer after they consumed microbes from the poo of younger fish. The findings were posted to the bioRxiv.org preprint server on 27 March¹ by Dario Valenzano, a geneticist at the Max Planck Institute for Biology of Ageing in Cologne, Germany, and his colleagues. So-called ‘young blood’ experiments that join the circulatory systems of two rats — one young and the other old — have found that factors coursing through the veins of young rodents can improve the health and longevity of older animals. But the new first-of-its-kind study examined the effects of 'transplanting' gut microbiomes on longevity. “The paper is quite stunning. It’s very well done,” says Heinrich Jasper, a developmental biologist and geneticist at the Buck Institute for Research on Aging in Novato, California, who anticipates that scientists will test whether such microbiome transplants can extend lifespan in other animals.

Life is fleeting for killifish, one of the shortest-lived vertebrates on Earth: the fish hits sexual maturity at three weeks old and dies within a few months. The turquoise killifish (Nothobranchius furzeri) that Valenzano and his colleagues studied in the lab inhabits ephemeral ponds that form during rainy seasons in Mozambique and Zimbabwe. Previous studies have hinted at a link between the microbiome and ageing in a range of animals. As they age, humans² and mice³ tend to lose some of the diversity in their microbiomes, developing a more uniform community of gut microbes, with once-rare and pathogenic species rising to dominance in older individuals⁴. The same pattern holds true in killifish, whose gut microbiomes at a young age are nearly as diverse as those of mice and humans, says Valenzano. “You can really tell whether a fish is young or old based on its gut microbiota.”

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Daniel Evans Pritchard in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

The eponymous opening sequence of Martín Espada’s most recent collection, Vivas to Those Who Have Failed, is a paean to the countless brutalized bodies that overflow the white spaces of history. “Joan of Arc of the Silk Strike,” a teenage mill girl, stalks the picket lines and “[chases] a strikebreaker down the street, yelling in Yiddish the word for shame.” An innocent bystander is shot by a careless police officer: “His body, pale as the wings of a moth, lay beside his big-bellied wife.” An Italian cloth dyer raises his red raw hand to mock “the red flag of anarchy” that yellow journalists swore would come — a premonition of frantic Fox News hosts who would rant and squeal about Obama’s socialism a century later.

The 1913 Paterson Silk Strike, which rallied 25,000 workers, would fail. But these workers’ sacrifices, along with the demands and efforts of others like them, would come to underwrite social structures like the minimum wage, safety regulations, child labor laws, and especially the eight-hour work day, which have allowed Americans to live meaningful, prosperous lives for nearly a century.

“Vivas to those who have failed,” Espada writes, borrowing from Whitman, “for they become the river.” It’s not a false note — but in the weeks and months after the 2016 presidential election, sentiments of hope feel unrealistic. While liberals, progressives, and radicals fractured and fought among themselves, other hidden streams gathered into a torrent. The forces of white nationalism have their own barricades, their own honored dead, their own violent history and moral arc. History offers little solace: dictators so often die in their beds of old age.

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Erica Klarreich in Quanta:

Partisan gerrymandering — the practice of drawing voting districts to give one political party an unfair edge — is one of the few political issues that voters of all stripes find common cause in condemning. Voters should choose their elected officials, the thinking goes, rather than elected officials choosing their voters. The Supreme Court agrees, at least in theory: In 1986 it ruledthat partisan gerrymandering, if extreme enough, is unconstitutional.

Yet in that same ruling, the court declined to strike down two Indiana maps under consideration, even though both “used every trick in the book,” according to a paper in the University of Chicago Law Review. And in the decades since then, the court has failed to throw out a single map as an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander.

“If you’re never going to declare a partisan gerrymander, what is it that’s unconstitutional?” said Wendy K. Tam Cho, a political scientist and statistician at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

The problem is that there is no such thing as a perfect map — every map will have some partisan effect. So how much is too much? In 2004, in a rulingthat rejected nearly every available test for partisan gerrymandering, the Supreme Court called this an “unanswerable question.” Meanwhile, as the court wrestles with this issue, maps are growing increasingly biased, many experts say.

Even so, the current moment is perhaps the most auspicious one in decades for reining in partisan gerrymandering. New quantitative approaches — measures of how biased a map is, and algorithms that can create millions of alternative maps — could help set a concrete standard for how much gerrymandering is too much.

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Tezcan Gumus in The Conversation:

The Turkish people will vote in a momentous constitutional referendum on April 16. If adopted, the proposals would drastically alter the country’s political system.

The ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) introduced the 18 proposed changes to the constitution, with the support of the far-right Nationalist Movement Party (MHP). Together they secured the minimum 330 parliamentary votes required to launch a public referendum.

Though constitutional referendums are not uncommon in Turkey’s political history, this particular one is extremely important in terms of the very nature of the country’s political regime. The proposed amendments would take Turkey away from its current parliamentary system. In its place, the country would have an executive presidency “a la Turka”.

Despite the arguments of the AKP government, the amendments will not strengthen democracy. Quite the opposite.

In the most basic terms, the referendum presents a choice between parliamentary democracy (as weak as it has been in Turkey) and legally institutionalising single-man rule.

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Jerry Saltz at New York Magazine:

James Rosenquist was a first-generation, first-rank Pop Artist. He got there first and fast. In 1960, Rosenquist, a former sign-painter (as was Warhol and backdrop painter Gerhard Richter), was making neo-Dada semi-abstraction. He got fed up, saying, “Whatever I did, my art wasn’t going to look like everyone else’s.” In a sensational stylistic turnaround, and the equivalent of inventing fire, Rosenquist went from his generic nonrepresentational work to making, in one try, the seven-by-seven foot black-and-white, photographically based realist painting Zone. Even today you can see how it was a new visual-painterly being on earth. A fragmented painted collage of what looks like a woman from advertising and a cut-up grid of some drips or liquid, Zone looks absolutely like advertising, and at the same time, it is not advertising. Thus it is neither a known idea of advertising or of painting. Zone becomes what Donald Judd referred to as aspecific object — it is neither one thing or another, but something new.Whatever he did, Rosenquist’s work appeared brand-new back then as it does now. He influenced several generations of artists who looked to popular culture and employed other-than-art techniques.

In this way, Rosenquist emerged instantaneously and fully formed from the culture. Along with other Pop Artists like Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein — and before them Rauschenberg and Johns — Rosenquist blew the doors off art history. All of these artists showed with super-gallerist Leo Castelli — who had only opened five years before.

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Paula Kupfer at Harper's Magazine:

The drive from Panama City to Colón is a fast hour thanks to a new highway, completed in 2012, which provided a much-needed alternative to the congested old Transístmica road. The freeway runs more or less parallel to the Panama Canal and is flanked by thick rainforest until signs of the metropolis begin to appear the closer you get to the Pacific coast. Toward the historic center of Colón, the highway leads you past the enormous, pastel-hued shopping complex of Cuatro Altos onto an overpass that descends gently and merges into Colón’s main avenue. This thoroughfare, a wide two-way street with a tree-lined center path known as Avenida Bolívarand further along as Paseo del Centenario, is flanked by colorful buildings, cheap stores, and sidewalks dotted with street vendors. People walk in every direction; young men wash cars with water from dirty buckets on the side of the road; old men sell lottery tickets outside the market; local ladies offer manicures in makeshift outdoor setups. The once-elegant edifices lining the main road are still attractive, though more in the way of a sour ruin-porn fantasy. (In a 2008 James Bond film, Colón was used as a stand-in for Haiti).

One afternoon, Joel Ceras, a local architect and expert in restoring historical buildings, took us to see the rehabilitation of the Cinco de Noviembre park, where a group of young, tattooed men in reflective orange vests were at work with shovels in hand. Occupying a full block next to the city’s historic cathedral (itself on the last leg of a formidable renovation), the park is known locally as “La Concha” for its shell-shaped performance stage. During its renovation, workers discovered colorful tiles of the original fountain at the center of the park, dating to 1942. The young men at work were all part of the Barrios Seguros initiative.

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Sean Guillory at Bookforum:

Then there's the second question: whether we are in a new Cold War. You can find the Cold War meme at work both among Russia's friends, such as The Nation's Stephen Cohen, and its foes, such as Edward Lucas of The Economist. Like the "Who lost Russia?" question, the ghost of a new Cold War has been haunting us pretty much since the end of the old Cold War. In every dust-up between the US and Russia of the past two decades, one or both sides have charged the other with having a "Cold War mentality" in order to shame and caution them against further escalation. It's a favorite insult, intended to point out the other side's backwardness. Sadly, it's lately begun to feel like rather less of a laughable throwback. The idea of a replay of the Cold War expresses itself as both trauma and desire. A new Cold War is scary because in theory it places the entire world at the mercy of US-Russia relations. By the same token, it's weirdly consoling for both sides, even offering a certain measure of nostalgia. Both powers were at their peak during the Cold War's tensest periods, and both understood the rules of engagement—the Cold War framing restores a sense of familiar, binary order in a rapidly changing world. We shouldn't entirely discount the subconscious appeal a return to that greatness and simplicity might offer, especially at a time when the US and Russia are both experiencing internal shocks, newer powers are on the rise, and there are signs of utter chaos elsewhere.

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Fleur MacDonald in The Economist:

In 2012, two years after Instagram launched, photojournalists Peter DiCampo and Austin Merrill started Everyday Africa, a feed on the photo-sharing application. On assignment in the Ivory Coast, which was recovering from its second civil war, they posted the photos that newspaper and magazine editors wouldn’t commission: images of an Africa where disease, poverty and war weren’t the focus. The idea took off. The account, which has posted over 3,500 photos, has 300,000 followers; the hashtag #EverydayAfrica has been used more that 179,000 times; and offshoots of the project have sprung up in Asia, India and Latin America. Think-pieces about the project have been published in the very publications that initially spurned such pictures.

The success of Everyday Africa is partly down to the quality of its images. A select group of 30 professional and amateur photographers have the password to the account and permission to post images they’ve taken with their mobile phones. But it also aspires to democratise the dissemination of information through social media – a hope that was particularly prevalent in 2012, when the Arab spring was still fresh in people’s minds – and taps into the widespread belief that the news media only runs negative stories (the hashtag #theafricathemedianevershowsyou has also hit a nerve). Now DiCampo and Merrill have put together a book of images from the project. “Everyday Africa: 30 Photographers Re-picturing a Continent” is square, like an Instagram post. The photographs – of children playing, teenagers flirting, people working and old women gossiping – depict scenes of daily life that will be familiar to everyone, whether African or not. While the book is not as completist as its title makes out – this Africa excludes much of North Africa, as well as Zimbabwe, Chad, Tanzania and Cape Verde – these photographs do give a different impression of a place that has too often been misrepresented by the media.

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Matthew Hutson in Scientific American:

People mislead themselves all day long. We tell ourselves we’re smarter and better looking than our friends, that our political party can do no wrong, that we’re too busy to help a colleague. In 1976, in the foreword to Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene, the biologist Robert Trivers floated a novel explanation for such self-serving biases: We dupe ourselves in order to deceive others, creating social advantage. Now after four decades Trivers and his colleagues have published the first research supporting his idea. Psychologists have identified several ways of fooling ourselves: biased information-gathering, biased reasoning and biased recollections. The new work, forthcoming in the Journal of Economic Psychology, focuses on the first—the way we seek information that supports what we want to believe and avoid that which does not.

In one experiment Trivers and his team asked 306 online participants to write a persuasive speech about a fictional man named Mark. They were told they would receive a bonus depending on how effective it was. Some were told to present Mark as likable, others were instructed to depict him as unlikable, the remaining subjects were directed to convey whatever impression they formed. To gather information about Mark, the participants watched a series of short videos, which they could stop observing at any intermission. For some viewers, most of the early videos presented Mark in a good light (recycling, returning a wallet), and they grew gradually darker (catcalling, punching a friend). For others, the videos went from dark to light. When incentivized to present Mark as likable, people who watched the likable videos first stopped watching sooner than those who saw unlikable videos first. The former did not wait for a complete picture as long as they got the information they needed to convince themselves, and others, of Mark’s goodness. In turn, their own opinions about Mark were more positive, which led their essays about his good nature to be more convincing, as rated by other participants.

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Raymond H. Anderson in the New York Times:

Yevgeny Yevtushenko, an internationally acclaimed poet with the charisma of an actor and the instincts of a politician whose defiant verse inspired a generation of young Russians in their fight against Stalinism during the Cold War, died on Saturday in Tulsa, Okla., where he had been teaching for many years. He was 83.

His death, in a hospital, was confirmed by a close friend, Mikhail Morgulis, with the TASS news agency. It said he had been admitted late Friday in “serious condition,” but the cause of death was not specified. His wife, Maria Novikova, and their two sons, Dmitry and Yevgeny, were reportedly with him when he died.

Mr. Yevtushenko’s poems of protest, often declaimed with sweeping gestures to thousands of excited admirers in public squares, sports stadiums and lecture halls, captured the tangled emotions of Russia’s young — hope, fear, anger and euphoric anticipation — as the country struggled to free itself from repression during the tense, confused years after Joseph Stalin’s death in 1953. In 1961 alone Mr. Yevtushenko gave 250 poetry readings.

He became, as one writer described him, “a graying lion of Russian letters” in his later years, teaching and lecturing at American universities, including the University of Tulsa, and basking in the admiration of succeeding generations before and after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

But it was as a tall, athletic young Siberian with a spirit both hauntingly poetic and fiercely political that he established his name in 20th-century literature.

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