Philippe Sands in The Guardian:

I was 19 when I first read If This Is a Man, and the book filled a gap created by the shadows cast across an otherwise happy childhood home by Auschwitz and Treblinka: my maternal grandparents, rare survivors of the horrors, never talked about their experiences or those who were disappeared, and in this way Levi’s account spoke directly, and personally, offering a fuller sense of matters for which words were not permitted. His has not been the only such book – there are others, including more recent works such as Thomas Buergenthal’s A Lucky Child, Göran Rosenberg’s A Brief Stop on the Road from Auschwitz, and Marceline Loridan-Ivans’s But You Did Not Come Back – but it was the first. He was a messenger of detail, allowing me to see and feel matters of dread and horror: waiting for a deportation order; travelling in a cattle cart by train; descending a ramp for selection; imagining what it must be like to know you are about to be gassed and cremated; struggling for survival surrounded by people you love and hate. Levi’s voice was especially affecting, so clear, firm and gentle, yet humane and apparently untouched by anger, bitterness or self-pity. If This Is a Man is miraculous, finding the human in every individual who traverses its pages, whether a Häftling (prisoner) or Muselmann (“the weak, the inept, those doomed to selection”), a kapo or a guard.

Levi, a 23-year old chemist, was arrested in December 1943 and transported to Auschwitz in February 1944. There he remained until the camp was liberated on 27 January 1945. He arrived back home in Turin in October, unrecognisable to the concierge who had seen him only a couple of years earlier. This and more I learned from Ian Thomson’s nuanced biography, Primo Levi, which enriches our understanding of the author. On Levi’s return, stories were told and notes prepared, as he went back to work at a paint factory. By February 1946, he had completed a first draft about the last 10 days of his time in the camp, a section that would come to be the book’s last chapter, written “in furious haste”. Ten months later, there was a complete text, worked on “with love and rage”, reflecting a vow “never to forget”.

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Jonathan Guyer and Surti Singh in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

"We find absurd, and deserving of total disdain, the religious, racist, and nationalist prejudices that make up the tyranny of certain individuals who, drunk on their own temporary omniscience, seek to subjugate the destiny of the work of art.” So wrote 37 Egypt-based artists and writers in their 1938 manifesto Long Live Degenerate Art, expressing solidarity with their counterparts in Europe suffering under fascism. This was the beginning of the Art and Liberty Group, an avant-garde movement also known as Egypt’s Surrealists.

“Modern art in Egypt was always a pale copy and a delayed copy,” says the contemporary Egyptian painter Adel El Siwi, “but for the first time in our history, we have this very rare moment where what was going on in Paris was in parallel to other things going on in Cairo.” The Art and Liberty Group forged connections with Surrealists and Trotskyists abroad while shaping their own identity. Working in tandem with their European peers, they also grappled with the circumstances of an increasingly militarized Egyptian capital, where trends in art and publishing remained conservative. They responded to the fault lines of interwar Cairo and were of a piece with them.

By the time of the 1952 Free Officers’ coup in Egypt, which led to the presidency of Gamal Abdel Nasser and the rise of a new Egyptian nationalism and later pan-Arabism, the members of the Art and Liberty Group had been dispersed: many were exiled or imprisoned.

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Hannah Devlin in The Guardian:

Scientists have created a fluid that exhibits the bizarre property of “negative mass” in an experiment that appears to defy the everyday laws of motion.

Push an object and Newton’s laws (and common experience) dictate that it will accelerate in the direction in which it was shoved.

“That’s what most things that we’re used to do,” said Michael Forbes, a physicist at Washington State University and co-author of the paper, which shows that normal intuitions do not always apply to physics experiments. “With negative mass, if you push something, it accelerates toward you.”

Negative mass has previously cropped up in speculative theories, including those suggesting the existence of wormholes, a form of cosmological shortcut between two points in the universe. Just as electric charge can be either positive or negative, matter could, hypothetically, have either positive or negative mass.

For an object with negative mass, Newton’s second law of motion, in which a force is equal to the mass of an object multiplied by its acceleration (F=ma) would be experienced in reverse.

Theoretically, this sounds straightforward, but picturing how this behaviour would work in the real world is bewildering, even for experts.

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Deirdre Coyle in Electric Literature:

For a while, I was seeing a guy who really liked David Foster Wallace. He once forced me to do cocaine by shoving it inside me during sex. He wasn’t the first man to recommend Wallace, but he’s the last whose suggestion I pretended to consider. So while I’ve never read a book by Wallace, I’m preemptively uninterested in your opinion about it.

These recommendations from men have never inspired me to read Wallace’s magnum opus, Infinite Jest, or his essays, or stories, or even to take the path of least resistance and see the Jason Segel movie about him. Said recommendations have, however, festered over such a long period that they’ve mutated into deeply felt opinions about Wallace himself: namely, that he was an overly self-aware genius who needed a better editor and that I’d hate his writing.

Wallace-recommending men are ubiquitous enough to be their own in-joke. New York Magazine notes that “Wallace, too, has become lit-bro shorthand…some women [treat] ‘loves DFW’ as synonymous with ‘is one of those motherfuckers’” (hi, it’s me). When conservative Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch cited Wallace in a hearing, The New Republic asserted that “Wallace is the lingua franca of a certain subset of overeducated, usually wealthy, extremely self-serious (mostly) men.” Onion-esque news outlet Reductress clickbaited me perfectly with “Why I’m Waiting for The Right Man to Tell Me I Should Read ‘Infinite Jest.’” Wallace is on a list of books that literally all white men own.

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David Lewis at Artforum:

FRANCIS PICABIA is famous above all for his flamboyant stylistic and ideological diversity. This diversity has created a legend. The legend has to do with freedom: Picabia is heralded—especially by artists—as the insouciant trickster deity of modernism, the Aquarian hero of artistic self-determinacy in the face of all sorts of orthodoxies, even (especially) the right ones.

The legend is productive and, given the pictorial efficacy of so many of his best works, deserved. It does, however, confuse the central problem of Picabia’s career. It mistakes the symptom (the artist’s matchless stylistic diversity) for the cause, which is philosophical. What made Picabia, among all the artists of the historical avant-garde, so apparently immune to stylistic and ideological coherence and codification? And what, if anything, separates his project from mere decadence (however attractive) or dilettantism?

The fullness, clarity, and informative depth of his recent retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art allowed us to revisit such questions. Picabia, who was born into wealth and privilege, lived in a world in which everything was possible because nothing had any meaning or purpose. He experienced freedom as a curse—the curse of a man falling forever in endless space—and sought desperately to escape it. The curse is best called nihilism, and was diagnosed most famously by Nietzsche, whom Picabia adored: “What does nihilism mean? That the highest values devalue themselves. The aim is lacking; ‘why?’ finds no answer.”

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Cecile Alduy at berfrois:

Babies are hermeneutic subjects par excellence. When they come out of the womb, none of our dichotomies apply, not even outside and inside one’s body, day and night, me and you. And every waking hour they start interpreting the world: noticing patterns (nap then lunch, bath-book-song then sleep), contrasts (wet/dry, mom’s arms/dad’s arms, banging on a small yogurt pot/on a large one), cruxes of signifiers (mom’s endlessly changing facial expression, sounds, movement, versus the mobile above the crib), and reference points that anchor their lives into a recognizable, hospitable, shall we say human world (the doudou, mom’s smell, the blankie, soon something like “home”). As much as we try to read them, they are readers of the world: they approach the most ordinary object as a universe to explore, a mystery to decipher. Not a single object is common, because at first nothing has anything in common with anything else. Before categories exist to sap our enjoyment of the here and now by concealing everything under a name, thus creating the illusion we know them, each thing is a unique instance of just itself. So here they are, navigating a sea of ever changing information, where very little is ever the same for lack of being remembered or even consciously differentiated or apprehended as separate from a magma of other singular experiences, in a learning experiment that spans everything from what air feels like in one’s lung to the difference between liquids and solids, experiencing the world without ever naming it. Quite an immersion program, where no possible translation into any reference language or culture exists, where the very shape of space and time, the boundaries of one’s skin are still fluid. The amount of “newness” in a single minute of a baby’s day is daunting. And the rate of their epistemological adjustment is staggering.

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Jacob Mikanowski at The Atlantic:

Unlike the other long-lived megafauna, Steller’s sea cows, one of the last of the Pleistocene survivors to die out, found their refuge in a remote scrape of the ocean instead of on land. The sea cows were relatives of the manatee and dugong. Unlike those two species, they were adapted to living in frigid Arctic waters. They were also much larger, growing to be as long as 30 feet from tail to snout, versus 10 for a manatee. Before the Ice Age, they seem to have been ubiquitous along the edge of the Pacific, living everywhere from Japan to the Baja Peninsula. By the 18th century, when they were first made known to Western science, the sea cows were confined to waters surrounding two tiny Arctic Islands in the Commander Chain, in between the Aleutians and the Kamchatka Peninsula.

The sea cows were first described by the German naturalist Georg Steller in the 18th century. Steller was part of an expedition organized led by the Danish explorer Vitus Bering. Financed by the Imperial Russian government, its mission was to chart the waters between Siberia and North America, and find a workable route between the two if possible.

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Nathaniel Scharping in Discover:

“Cancer has been cured a thousand times.”

So says Christopher Austin, the director of the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS) at the National Institutes of Health. Austin should know — as the director of NCATS, his focus is on exactly these kinds of groundbreaking laboratory studies. His proclamation comes with a significant caveat that will pop the bubbles in your champagne. Austin is so interested in these studies because they all happened in mice, in a lab. When the hundreds of different drugs that made mouse tumors disappear were carried forward to human trials, they went in and came out without doing what they promised. Or worse, they turned out to be toxic. The failure of drugs and procedures to translate from animal models to humans plagues the entirety of medical research. An astounding 90 percent of drug trials never make it from the first phase of development to FDA approval, and the humble lab mouse shoulders much of the blame. Long held as the standard model for animal research, scientific advances have called the reign of the mouse into question. But should scientists ditch their furry lab model altogether, or can they simply design a better mouse?

Modest Beginnings

Mice were introduced into the lab back in the 1920s, when an ambitious young geneticist named Clarence Cook Little believed he had found the perfect model for studying cancer. Little strongly believed that cancer was an inheritable disease, and mice, short-lived and low maintenance, turned out to be the ideal subjects for his experiments. Little would go on to found The Jackson Laboratory and sold mouse strains to researchers all over the country, even going so far as to secure the mouse as the official animal model for research funded with government grants following the passage of the National Cancer Institute Act in 1937.

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Michael Price in Science:

For women looking to become pregnant through in vitro fertilization (IVF), a diamond petri dish could be a girl’s best friend. That’s one conclusion from a new study, which finds that human sperm cells live longer and move more efficiently on diamond surfaces compared with traditional polystyrene petri dishes. The researchers also discovered that shining a red light on the sperm cells improved their performance. Combining these techniques might significantly increase the chances of IVF success. During IVF procedures, sperm is introduced to an egg in a petri dish. If the egg is successfully fertilized, the resulting zygote is implanted into the woman’s uterus. The critical fertilization stage usually takes place on polystyrene, a plastic from which almost all petri dishes are made. Sperm, like most cells, exude harmful, cell-disrupting molecules known as reactive oxygen species (ROS). Inside the body, these ROS last only fractions of a second and are quickly neutralized as they bind with nearby molecules. But polystyrene naturally forms a thin, gluelike nano-layer of water on its surface, which traps the ROS. “The sperm is stewing in its own ROS,” says Andrei Sommer, a physicist who led the study while working at Ulm University in Germany and who is currently working as an independent scientist. “This longer exposure is highly, highly, highly destructive to the cell.” The upshot is that many sperm cells exposed to polystyrene quickly lose their motility, turning from “guided missiles” into barely moving or immobile cells incapable of fertilizing an egg. Generally, the more highly motile sperm cells a sample contains, the more likely it is that an IVF procedure will result in pregnancy, though a host of other factors like sperm count and egg quality also play a role. (Eggs produce less ROS and therefore are less susceptible to oxidative damage than are sperm cells.)

Building on previous work by his lab, Sommer and colleagues wondered whether keeping sperm cells on a material like diamond, which forms a slick, not sticky, surface layer of water, would protect them from ROS. The researchers coated quartz petri dishes with a superthin layer of diamond less than a micron thick, and put human sperm cells on them. They assigned the cells one of four grades ranging from A (rapidly moving and the most likely to fertilize) to D (completely immobile and incapable of fertilization). Then they did the same thing for sperm cells taken from the same sample but placed on traditional polystyrene petri dishes.

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Mitch Waldrop in National Geographic:

Albert Einstein was already a world-famous physicist when the FBI started keeping a secret dossier on him in December 1932. He and his wife Elsa had just moved to the United States from their native Germany, and Einstein had been very vocal about the social issues of his time, arguing publicly against racism and nationalism.

By the time of Einstein’s death on April 18, 1955, that FBI file would be 1,427 pages long. Agency director J. Edgar Hoover was deeply suspicious of Einstein’s activism; the man was quite possibly a communist, according to Hoover, and was certainly “an extreme radical.”

Einstein himself probably would have laughed out loud at those labels if he’d known about them; he’d heard far worse from the Nazis back home. And he was not at all intimidated by officialdom. “Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth,” he declared in 1901.

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Mark Blyth and Matthias Matthijs in Review of International Political Economy:

Like the Bourbons of old, who learned nothing and forgot nothing, the narrow loss of right-wing populist Norbert Hofer in the Austrian presidential elections, or the defeat of Prime Minister Matteo Renzi's constitutional reforms in Italy just a month after Trump's victory, failed to register as important, let alone connected to prior events. At the time of writing, the spread between German Bunds and French Trésors has steadily widened as financial markets began to price in the real possibility that Marine Le Pen, leader of the extreme-right Front National, may actually win the French Presidential elections in May 2017. Contemporary International Political Economy (IPE) theory has pretty much nothing to say about these events. Sadly, this is nothing new, since it was no different a mere decade before.

Back in early 2007, both scholarly and elite conventional wisdom agreed on the following. The ongoing multilateral Doha round of the World Trade Organization (WTO) was going to take some time to negotiate, but it would be completed in the not too distant future. Unsustainable global macroeconomic imbalances were thought to increase the risk of a US dollar crash. The world economy was blessed by a ‘Great Moderation’ in volatility wrought by the technocratic competence of independent central bankers. The euro was going to be the new international reserve currency of choice and a beacon of monetary stability. Further economic and political integration was still the choice for Europe despite temporary setbacks around the adoption of a proposed constitutional treaty. The IMF looked like it would soon have to shut down its operations because there were no more financial crises lurking around the corner. The ‘BRICs’ were going to substantially increase their overall clout in global economic governance. And finally, international migration flows would only continue to intensify. So what actually happened?

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Alan McIntyre in The Scottish Review:

So why has Trump latched onto the idea that coal mining is an industry that must be saved at all costs? It's for the same reason that he pedals the fantasy of bringing steel mills back to Ohio – a nostalgia for an industrial America that shaped and supported working-class communities and which technological progress is inexorably erasing. The truth, whether it's miners in West Virginia or shipyard workers on the Clyde, is that hard physical work in homogenous communities created social bonds and social capital that isn't easily replaced. Whether those communities are in the remote valleys of Appalachia or the somewhat less remote valleys of South Wales, the closing of a mine wreaks social havoc.

Thirty years on from Arthur Scargill's failed strike, the parallels are clear. It wasn't just about jobs and economics, it was about trying to protect a way of life that, while dirty and dangerous, was also unique. The jobs may eventually be replaced, but loose networks of Uber drivers are unlikely to spawn many male voice choirs, world-class brass bands, or the social and cultural corona that surrounded the pits. A key insight from J D Vance's recent award-winning Appalachian family history, 'Hillbilly Elegy', is that when the social capital anchored in a concentration of traditional jobs gets eroded, whole communities can descend into a purposeless existence in which drug abuse, alcoholism and domestic violence find fertile ground.

The political current that Trump has expertly tapped into is the need for 'meaningful work' rather than just a job.

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John Crowley at the Boston Review:

Inside every utopia is a dystopia striving to get out. World-changing plans to bring all human life and activity under beneficent control devolve inevitably into regimentation and compulsion. Edenic life-affirming communes descend into chaos and waste. Our presently evolving techutopia has barely reached its peak, and yet in it this horror-movie process has already begun: information must be free, and so lies and manipulations proliferate; common human connections are degraded; limits on power and self-dealing erode. Inequality increases with differential access. And all this in less than a single generation.

The utopian promises of the mid-twentieth century (modernism, broadly understood) stayed alive for longer, largely because its projects, which depended on design, manufacturing processes, materials, and city planning, took years or decades to be fully realized, while the world seemed to stay much the same. In 1939 the greater part of America was still a land of Toonerville trolleys, boarding houses, balky mules, door-to-door salesmen, pump handles, iceboxes, A&P’s, nerve tonics, kerosene, two-bit haircuts, hand-rolled cigarettes, incurable diseases, and patched inner-tubes, even as the idea of the future was brought closer with every newsreel and skyscraper and issue of Life or Look.

While older utopias often were predicated on returning to the virtues of an imagined past, a key figure behind this utopia of the new was Norman Bel Geddes, a theatre designer turned industrial designer. Bel Geddes is best known for designing the General Motors Futurama exhibit at the 1939 New York World’s Fair, a huge and hugely celebrated vision of the world of 1960, full of towering modernist skyscrapers in new cities and lots and lots of cars.

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Max Nelson at The Point:

In 1973, the poet Robert Creeley edited a paperback anthology of Walt Whitman’s selected verse. Midway through the introduction to the book, Creeley suggested a respect in which Leaves of Grass had “a very contemporary bearing for American poets”:

It is, moreover, a marked characteristic of American poetry since Whitman, and certainly of the contemporary, to have no single source for its language in the sense that it does not depend upon a “poetic” or literary vocabulary. … An American may choose, as John Ashbery once did, to write a group of poems whose words come entirely from the diction of the Wall Street Journal, but it is his own necessity, not that put upon him by some rigidity of literary taste.

That the American poet was distinctly guided by “his own necessity” rather than by an accepted set of literary standards was a powerful idea for certain mid-century poets and writers. It had a particular hold over the poets based at Black Mountain College, the wildly eclectic North Carolina art school where Creeley sporadically lived and taught between 1954 and 1955. The school would close only two years after he left. Chronically under-enrolled, under-staffed and under-funded, it canceled its last surviving classes near the end of 1956. Its last few years, however, produced a particularly ambitious attempt to define what a specifically American poetry could be.

Creeley had grown up in Massachusetts, did a stint abroad in the American Field Service and took classes at Harvard, from which he never graduated. Beginning in 1950, he kept up a constant correspondence with Charles Olson, the fearsome, bullish poet sixteen years his senior who served as Black Mountain’s last rector and who finally lured Creeley to the school in 1954. (The letters the two poets exchanged between 1950 and 1952 fill ten volumes.) Olson was even more inclined than Creeley to make sweeping assertions about the American poet’s inheritance.

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Eamon Duffy at The New York Review of Books:

The manuscript’s celebrity is at first sight puzzling, since it is an unglamorous, even somewhat shabby object: 234 pages gathered in eighteen “quires,” or foldings, each consisting of between one and six double pages, or “bifolia.” Very unusually for a medieval manuscript, Beinecke MS 408 also includes eleven larger “foldout” pages, containing what appear to be astronomical or astrological diagrams. At some date after the book’s compilation, each folio was numbered in ink on the right-hand opening (technically known as the recto).

The first 130 pages of the volume are taken up with what appears to be an herbal, each page containing a large if somewhat sloppily executed drawing of a plant, depicting root, stem, flowers, and leaves, around which extensive text, in no recognizable language but written in a fluent cursive hand, has been carefully arranged so as to avoid encroaching on any part of the picture. This “herbal” section is followed by a cluster of large foldout pages decorated with circular zodiacal or astrological diagrams, and this in turn gives way to a section of ten folios containing yet more unrecognizable text, interspersed with decidedly unerotic drawings of groups of plump naked women, bathing in pools and conduits of blue or green water, which some students of the manuscript have suggested might be symbolic representations of bodily functions such as reproduction.

After a further group of large foldout pages with more astronomical images, there follows another cluster of “herbal” images. These consist of multiple small drawings embedded in the text of each page, alongside objects in the margin that resemble pharmacological jars, perhaps suggesting that this part of the manuscript refers back to the opening herbal, and was intended as a collection of medical recipes. The book’s closing section consists of twenty-three pages of closely written text without illustration, made up of short paragraphs of just a few lines apiece, each paragraph prefaced by a star or asterisk.

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Nick Romeo in The Christian Science Monitor:

While visiting Cairo in 1850, Gustave Flaubert wrote to a friend, “The old Orient is always young because nothing changes. Here the Bible is a picture of life today.” Flaubert’s cultural arrogance was typical of 19th-century European attitudes. He not only hazarded a vast generalization about a culture he had barely encountered, he also presumed that his inability to perceive change and dynamism meant they were in fact absent. The historian Christopher De Bellaigue’s new book, The Islamic Enlightenment, is a deeply researched riposte to Flaubert’s condescension. Beginning with Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798 and ending with the late 20th century, De Bellaigue shows how the cultural struggles between modernity and tradition unfolded in Istanbul, Cairo, and Tehran. Where Flaubert saw a static biblical tableau, De Bellaigue discovers constant and contested transformation.

One powerful impetus for modernization was Egypt’s military defeat at the hands of the French. A 1798 skirmish that Napoleon dubbed the Battle of the Pyramids lasted only one hour, but 29 French soldiers died while the Egyptians lost roughly 1,000 troops. Napoleon’s expedition was not just a military one; a broad range of scientists and scholars accompanied the troops to collect data and perform dazzling displays of scientific knowledge for local populations. The French used an expropriated palace in Cairo to house an aviary, a botanical garden, and workshops that produced everything from microscopic lenses to sword blades.

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