John Cassidy in The New Yorker:

What does it say about the state of America when the most powerful response to another awful gun massacre comes not from a politician or a public commentator but a late-night comic? On a dismal Monday, during which the N.R.A. captives who are running the country had nothing more to offer than bromides and prayers, it was left to Jimmy Kimmel, at a television recording studio on Hollywood Boulevard, to register a cry for humanity, and a protest at the failing U.S. political system. “Well, hello, everyone, in the aftermath of another terrible and inexplicable, shocking and painful tragedy, this time in Las Vegas, which happens to be my home town,” Kimmel said in a shaky voice at the start of his opening monologue. After citing the number of dead and injured, he went on: “We wonder why, although there’s probably no way to ever know why a human being would ever do something like this to other human beings who are at a concert having fun, listening to music . . . It’s the kind of thing that makes you want to throw up, or give up. It’s too much to even process.” Kimmel is paid handsomely to send people to bed with smiles on their faces. On Monday, many of his viewers were probably tuning in to escape the round-the-clock news coverage of the Las Vegas shooting. But, rather than looking for laughs, Kimmel chose to state some harsh truths and name names.

“I’ve been reading comments from people saying this is terrible, but there is nothing we can do about it,” he said. “But I disagree with that intensely, because of course there’s something we can do about it. There are a lot of things we can do about it. But we don’t. Which is interesting, because when someone with a beard attacks us, we tap phones, we invoke travel bans, we build walls—we take every possible precaution to make sure it doesn’t happen again. But when an American buys a gun and kills other Americans, then there’s nothing we can do about that. Second Amendment, I guess. Our forefathers wanted us to have AK-47s is the argument, I assume.” If that was meant to be a joke, Kimmel wasn’t laughing. Noting that President Trump had offered prayers for the victims’ families, and that Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, had said that this wasn’t the time for political debate, he went on: “We have fifty-nine innocent people dead. It wasn’t their time, either. So I think now is the time for political debate.” He reminded his audience that, in February, Trump had signed a bill that made it easier for people with mental illness to buy guns. “The Senate Majority Leader, Mitch McConnell, the Speaker of the House, Paul Ryan, a number of other lawmakers who won’t do anything about this because the N.R.A. has their balls in a money clip, also sent their thoughts and their prayers today. Which is good. They should be praying. They should be praying for God to forgive them for letting the gun lobby run this country.”

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Lorraine Boissoneault in Smithsonian:

John Berger in Literary Hub:

A few days after our return from what was thought of, until recently, as the future state of Palestine, and which is now the world’s largest prison (Gaza) and the world’s largest waiting room (the West Bank), I had a dream.

I was alone, standing, stripped to the waist, in a sandstone desert. Eventually somebody else’s hand scooped up some dusty soil from the ground and threw it at my chest. It was a considerate rather than an aggressive act. The soil or gravel changed, before it touched me, into torn strips of cloth, probably cotton, which wrapped themselves around my torso. Then these tattered rags changed again and became words, phrases. Written not by me but by the place.

Remembering this dream, the invented word landswept came to my mind. Repeatedly. Landswept describes a place or places where everything, both material and immaterial, has been brushed aside, purloined, swept away, blown down, irrigated off, everything except the touchable earth.

There’s a small hill called Al Rabweh on the western outskirts of Ramallah, it’s at the end of Tokyo street. Near the top of this hill the poet Mahmoud Darwish is buried. It’s not a cemetery.

The street is named Tokyo because it leads to the city’s Cultural Centre, which is at the foot of the hill, and was built thanks to Japanese funding.

It was in this Centre that Darwish read some of his poems for the last time—though no one then supposed it would be the last. What does the word last mean in moments of desolation?

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Alvin Powell in the Harvard Gazette:

Three years ago, when Harvard biologist Jonathan Losos settled in at the Geological Lecture Hall for a talk by fellow scientist Richard Lenski, he was toying with the idea of writing a book on evolution. When the lecture was over, he was done toying.

Losos, an evolutionary biologist and the Monique and Philip Lehner Professor for the Study of Latin America, said the work described by Michigan State’s Lenski filled in a picture partly painted by experiments Losos already knew about — some of which he had conducted himself, with lizards from the genus Anolis, commonly called anoles, on islands in the Caribbean.

Lenski’s research approximated what the late Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, who wrote extensively about evolution, might have described as “replaying the tape of life,” Losos said.

“Gould had suggested that if we could somehow replay the tape — start evolution over again from the same starting point, then we get a very different outcome,” Losos said. But Gould also knew that the project he was describing was impossible, strictly “a thought experiment,” as Losos put it.

“But Lenski showed that you can replay the tape, at least in the lab using microorganisms,” he said. “By starting 12 populations of E. coli that were initially identical and subjecting them all to the same natural selection pressures, he was actually replaying the tape, not going back in time, but letting the tape replay side by side in his 12 experimental replicates.

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Katherine Ellen Foley in Quartz:

It’s often said that of all the published scientific research on climate change, 97% of the papers conclude that global warming is real, problematic for the planet, and has been exacerbated by human activity.

But what about those 3% of papers that reach contrary conclusions? Some skeptics have suggested that the authors of studies indicating that climate change is not real, not harmful, or not man-made are bravely standing up for the truth, like maverick thinkers of the past. (Galileo is often invoked, though his fellow scientists mostly agreed with his conclusions—it was church leaders who tried to suppress them.)

Not so, according to a review published in the journal of Theoretical and Applied Climatology. The researchers tried to replicate the results of those 3% of papers—a common way to test scientific studies—and found biased, faulty results.

Katharine Hayhoe, an atmospheric scientist at Texas Tech University, worked with a team of researchers to look at the 38 papers published in peer-reviewed journals in the last decade that denied anthropogenic global warming.

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Sue Hubbard at Artlyst:

We are awash with prizes across the arts. From the Man Booker, to the National Poetry Competition, from the John Moores to the Jerwood Drawing Prize. There are probably also copious music prizes and dance prizes that I know nothing about. And yet does this hunger for X-Factor style winners and losers really make any sense? If there’d been a Turner Prize in late 20th century Paris who would have won? Picasso or Braque? And would the runner up have been seen as an also-ran, one who slipped from view into the murky shallows of art history? It’s worth asking what these prizes are really measuring? It’s like comparing sardines with toffee apples. You wouldn’t want either of them all the time. But each has their value. How can a film be better than a painting, a video than an installation?

But we live in a consumerist age. Competitions provide razzmatazz and bruhaha that have little to do with the winner being the ‘best’. The public (and much of the art world) rely on the seal of approval that a prize bestows to know who to watch, which horse (so to speak) to put their money on. Having said that, it is an improvement that the proceedings now take place in different cities and that the event isn’t so metropolitan centric. And, probably, it’s a good thing that it’s open to older artists. But in the end what’s being judged is never quite clear, even though the official line it that it’s ‘a prize awarded to British artists and artists based in Britain for outstanding exhibitions and projects presented over the past year…[that] bring new developments in contemporary art to a wider public and…encourage debate around art made today’.

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Christian Lorentzen at Literary Review:

The Rub of Time, Martin Amis’s new collection of literary essays and journalism from the past three decades, sits in a broad valley of subject matter, between the Olympus governed by the ghost of Vladimir Nabokov and the chintzy glass and brass of Trump Tower. The word for such a collection is ‘uneven’, though in this case it’s less a matter of the writer’s performance than of the worthiness of his subject. Suitability of writer to subject matter is another question, but celebrity novelists will write about whatever they want, and we’ll follow them as long as the glossies can afford the plane fare.

And I’ll happily follow Amis into lowlife territory – to Las Vegas, where he promptly strikes out at the World Series of Poker, and to Pornoland, where he learns which sex acts require acting and which bring out a performer’s personality naturally. The porn piece, written for Tina Brown’s short-lived Talk in 2000, is now dated, the industry and writing about it having become both wilder and more banal due to online proliferation. Amis’s inhibitions – he doesn’t like seeing pricks on screen – have a retro charm. The poker essay, from 2006, suffers like many of Amis’s post-9/11 writings from gratuitous references to Islam. Las Vegas is ‘un-Islamic’ (he means anti-puritanical) and with so much vice around, the ‘Taliban would have warm work to do’ there (so would the passengers on the Mayflower).

The tic was present in a more amusing form before 9/11. In a 1997 New Yorker essay on adaptations of Austen for the screen, Amis blames Ayatollah Khomeini for the fact that he couldn’t walk out of Four Weddings and a Funeral after twenty minutes: he was sitting next to Salman Rushdie, whose security detail kept them in place for the film’s duration.

more here.

Fiona MacDonald in Science Alert:

It's been 20 years since Australia rolled out nation-wide gun law reform. And now an analysis of more than four decades of data on violence in the country has come up with a conclusion: it worked.

The study found there have been no fatal mass shootings since April 1996 – despite experiencing one every two to three years in the decades leading up to the changes. There's also been an overall drop in the number of people killed by guns.

"If you take away the means of committing a mass killing with firearms, you don't have mass killings for the next 20 years," lead researcher Simon Chapman from the University of Sydney told ABC. "That's been our experience here [in Australia]."

The results come at a time when the US is reeling after its most deadly mass shooting ever, and experts are predicting that around 30,000 people will be killed – or kill themselves – with guns in the country this year.

But last week, the US Senate rejected four proposals to tighten gun laws, amid arguments that gun control takes away personal freedoms, and won't necessarily stop humans from killing each other.

To figure out whether or not that was the case, a team of Australian researchers looked at government stats on gun deaths between 1979 and 2013, as well as media reports of mass shootings – which is classified as an event where five or more people are killed by gunshot wounds.

More here.

James Fallows in The Atlantic:

Here’s the other dark truth about America that today’s shooting reminds us of. The identity of the shooter doesn’t affect how many people are dead or how grievously their families and communities are wounded. But we know that everything about the news coverage and political response would be different, depending on whether killer turns out to be “merely” a white American man with a non-immigrant-sounding name. That’s who most mass-shooters turn out to be, from Charles Whitman at the University of Texas tower back in 1966 onward. And from Whitman onward, killers of this sort are described as “deranged” or “disturbed” or “resentful,” their crimes a reflection of their own torment rather than any larger trend or force. They are “troubled” youths, like the white teenaged boy who shot up classmates in West Paducah, Kentucky, in 1997, or the two white teenaged boys who shot up classmates in Columbine, Colorado, two years later, or the white teenaged boy who carried out the atrocity in Newtown, Connecticut. Or troubled older people, like the white man in his 60s who shot up the congressional baseball game this summer, or (on initial reports) the white man in his 60s who murdered so many people today. A report on the congressional-baseball shooter described his “descent into rage.”

These people are indeed deranged and angry and disturbed, and the full story of today’s killer is not yet known. It is possible that he will prove to have motives or connections beyond whatever was happening in his own mind (as Graeme Wood explains). But we know that if the killers were other than whites with “normal” names, the responsibility for their crime would not be assigned solely to themselves and their tortured psyches.

• If they had Arab-sounding names, this would be a new episode of jihad. How often has Donald Trump invoked “San Bernardino” in his speeches, as shorthand for the terrorist threat in our heartland?
• If they were Mexican, they would demonstrate the perils of immigration, and that Mexico is “not sending its best people.”
• If they had been illegal immigrants, they’d dramatize the need to crack down harder, right now.
• And if they had been black, I shudder to imagine the consequences.

* * *

This is who we are.

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