Daniel Pollack-Pelzner in The New Yorker:

On a six-hour drive from San Francisco to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival a few years ago, the playwright Lauren Gunderson raised a question: What does American theatre need? “It was ridiculously presumptuous,” Gunderson told me recently, over the phone, “but it’s the conversation everyone is having.” Gunderson was travelling with her friend Margot Melcon, a former literary manager, who reminded her that every theatre needs a holiday show: something clever, heartwarming, and family-friendly enough to entice an audience inured to “A Christmas Carol.” Gunderson recalled their idea: “You know what people love? Jane Austen. You know what people really love? Christmas and Jane Austen.” By the time they finished the drive, they had outlined a script on Starbucks napkins: a holiday reunion for the Bennet sisters, from “Pride and Prejudice,” with a courtship plot for Mary, the pedantic middle sister, who emerges as a surprising feminist heroine. (Mary and her beau spark over a copy of Lamarck’s “Zoological Philosophy”; Gunderson calls Mary an emblem of “geek chic.”) “Miss Bennet: Christmas at Pemberley” is now a regional-theatre hit.

Increasingly, theatres are banking on Gunderson, who, at thirty-five, has already had more than twenty of her works produced: among them witty historical dramas about women in science (“Emilie,” “Silent Sky,” “Ada and the Engine”), giddy political comedies (“Exit, Pursued by a Bear,” “The Taming,” “The Revolutionists”), and wildly theatrical explorations of death and legacy (“I and You,” “The Book of Will”). According to American Theatre magazine’s annual survey, released last month, Gunderson will be the most produced playwright in the country for the 2017–18 season.

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Ed Yong in The Atlantic:

Imagine if a word in a book—say, bubble—had the ability to magically copy itself, and paste those copies elsewhere in the text. Eventually, you might bubble end up bubble bubble with bubble bubble bubble sentences bubble bubble bubble bubble like these.

This is exactly what happens in our genomes. There are genes known as retrotransposons that can copy themselves and paste the duplicates in other parts of our DNA, creating large tracts of repetitive gobbledygook. Around half of the human genome consists of these jumping genes. And a quarter of a cow’s DNA consists of one particular jumping gene, known as BovB. It, and its descendants, have bloated out the cow genome with thousands of copies of themselves.

This jumping gene seems to have entered the cow genome from the unlikeliest of sources: snakes and lizards.

Retrotransposons typically jump around within a single genome, but sometimes they can travel further afield. Through means that scientists still don’t fully understand, they can leave the DNA of one species and enter that of another. And so it is with BovB. No one knows the animal in which it originated. But from that mystery source, it has jumped into the DNA of snakes and cows, elephants and butterflies, ants and rhinos.

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Santiago Zabala in Al Jazeera:

This is a difficult year for Spain. First, the prime minister, Mariano Rajoy, had to appear in courtbecause of corruption charges levelled against his party; then Barcelona suffered a bloody terrorist attack; and now a referendum for the independence of Catalonia has plunged the nation into a political crisis that led to Spanish police beating up voters and Madrid threatening to revoke Catalonia's autonomy.

Article 155, which enables the central government to do so, is rather vague. We still do not know whether applying it entails the dissolution of the Catalan government, taking control of the public security or calling for regional elections. But the imprisonment of two pro-Catalan independence leaders earlier this week indicates we are heading for serious trouble.

What is important to understand now is that there is more than just blind nationalism in the Catalan impasse, despite what Madrid and Brussels want us to believe. The Catalan call for independence should not be discredited; it is the rightful demand of millions of Catalans. But one must wonder why most articles about this crisis focus exclusively on the historical roots of Catalonian statehood, free citizens' democratic right to vote, and the inclusive character of Catalonia's nationalism, which is open to foreigners.

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Meg Schoerke at the Hudson Review:

Although Lowell was justly celebrated throughout his life as one of the most innovative poets of his generation, his reputation took a nosedive five years after his death, with the 1982 publication of Ian Hamilton’s demonizing biography, in which Lowell comes off not as subject to biochemical forces, but as crazy and cruel, imperious and arrogant—oblivious to how terribly his words and actions lacerated everyone unfortunate enough to be drawn into his orbit during his manic phases. Although Paul Mariani published a longer, more balanced biography, Lost Puritan, in 1994, by then the damage was done. More workmanlike, and less sensational than Hamilton’s book, Lost Puritan was not as widely reviewed, and Hamilton’s interpretation of Lowell’s life stuck, as hard to rub off as the remains of the burst bubble in Lowell’s analogy. In detailing Lowell’s manias, Hamilton depicts him as a spoiled child on a spree, or as a petty, sadistic dictator (reflecting Lowell’s rapturous obsessions, when manic, with Hitler, Napoleon, Mussolini, and Roman tyrants like his nick-namesake Caligula). Although the biography was valuable for its inclusion of drafts of poems and generous quotations from Lowell’s then-unpublished letters, Hamilton’s view of the poetry was largely negative: with the exception of well-known poems like “The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket,” he repeatedly dismisses Lowell’s early work as overwritten and unintelligible, then goes on to condemn Life Studies and Lowell’s later books as sloppy and narcissistic. He also cedes more space—or gives the last word—to friends and reviewers who criticize Lowell’s poetry rather than praise it. Thus a quotation from Elizabeth Bishop, in which she admires the new, autobiographical Life Studies poems, is followed by a two-paragraph warning from Allen Tate, which begins: “all the poems about your family, including the one [“Man and Wife”] about you and [second wife] Elizabeth [Hardwick], are definitely bad. I do not think you ought to publish them.” Following Tate’s lead, Hamilton links Lowell’s “bad poems” to bad behavior, suggesting that Lowell was losing control of both his poetry and himself: “To others, Tate was putting his objections even more forthrightly: these loose, self-centered poems made him wonder if Lowell wasn’t on the brink of another manic episode.” That he was, indeed, on the brink of a manic episode serves, in Hamilton’s framing, as proof positive that the poetry was somehow suspect.

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Sebastiaan Faber at Public Books:

La gran ilusión is an original and penetrating take on the last decade of mounting tensions between Catalonia and Spain, tensions that have now culminated in Spain’s deepest political crisis since the late 1970s. Guillem Martínez’s reporting leads him to a straightforward conclusion: Catalonia is real; the independence process, not so much.

For those of us who watch Spain from afar, few things are more baffling than the enormous distance separating Madrid from Barcelona. Even the laws of physics don’t seem to apply in quite the same way in both places. A burden that in Barcelona weighs a ton might in Madrid feel light as a feather.

This helps explain the ease with which Catalan deputies Joan Tardà and Gabriel Rufián move around in Spain’s Parliament. In their frequent interventions on behalf of their party, the anti-monarchist, pro-independence Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya (ERC, Republican Left of Catalonia), they leap and pirouette over difficult topics like slaphappy astronauts on the moon. As outsiders with no investment in Spain’s national institutions, they are free from the taboos that weigh down the other deputies, limiting what is mentionable aloud. Tardà and Rufián can afford to tell the truth—something seen so rarely in the Spanish Congress that it strikes everyone else as scandalous.

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Jeffrey Zuckerman at The Quarterly Conversation:

Sentences that soar and sink, that resemble journeys, that hint at being “nowhere near here”: this is the strange magic that Yuri Herrera’s three short novels—Signs Preceding the End of the World, The Transmigration of Bodies, and now Kingdom Cons—offers his readers as they wend through realms of dispossessed peoples, where law and order have been disordered and every character is seemingly at the mercy of all the others. The wilderness of Herrera’s prose is thoroughly intentional; it mirrors the world it describes, a world of “smug cut grass” and “walls dripping with dark sweat.” But there is an undeniable beauty to the King’s court of Kingdom Cons, where Lobo momentarily believes he has been welcomed into a paradise.

It is a paradise that Herrera’s readers might well expect. Throughout these three volumes, particular details have hinted at a mythos akin to Dante’s Divine Comedy. And just as “the private little inferno” mentioned on the first page of The Transmigration of Bodies points toward the book’s positioning within the trilogy, so does the border-crossing theme of Signs Preceding the End of the World render visible Herrera’s vision of purgatory. The paradise proposed in Kingdom Cons, though, is grittier than the transcendent one that Dante envisioned, and the Girl granted to the Artist is no Beatrice. People still die here, often in gruesome ways, and the King himself is not immune to the outside forces that subsequently force the Artist back out into the real world and into his old persona.

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Lorraine Boissoneault in Smithsonian:

Linda Chavez in The New York Times:

President Trump’s delay in reaching out to the families of four American soldiers killed in Niger earlier this month, and the ensuing discussion among Gold Star families about his actions, recalls an earlier controversy involving Khizr Khan, the father of a fallen soldier, who spoke at the 2016 Democratic National Convention. On the final night of the convention, Khan took the stage with his wife, Ghazala, and in an electrifying moment, he pulled from his pocket a small copy of the Constitution. “Donald Trump, you are asking Americans to trust you with our future,” he said. “Let me ask you: Have you even read the U.S. Constitution? I will gladly lend you my copy.” The crowd exploded in applause. Few people had ever heard of Khan or knew of the sacrifice he and his wife had made for their adopted country before the couple took the stage. Their son Army Capt. Humayun Khan was killed by a car bomb in Iraq in 2004, and Hillary Clinton’s campaign highlighted Captain Khan’s life and death in a short film that played before his father spoke. But the point was not just to honor the tragic loss of yet another brave American soldier; it was to repudiate the bigotry that had been spewing from Donald Trump’s mouth from the moment he announced his candidacy for president. Whether his target was Muslims or Mexicans, Trump had been insulting, taunting and threatening groups he disagreed with for more than a year, pledging to ban all Muslims from entering the United States and calling Mexicans “rapists.”

Khan had had enough. A Pakistani-born and Harvard-trained lawyer, a Muslim, but, most important, a patriotic, naturalized American citizen, Khizr Khan revered the Constitution. He came to Philadelphia to teach Donald Trump a lesson. Trump’s response was to pick on Khan’s wife, questioning why she was just “standing there” with “nothing to say,” adding that the Clinton campaign had probably written Khan’s speech for him. With his moving memoir, “An American Family,” Khizr Khan has disproved that calumny. “An American Family: A Memoir of Hope and Sacrifice” is as much the universal story of the immigrant experience in America as it is the story of one particular family’s struggles and sacrifice. Like most immigrants, Khan came to America seeking opportunity, in his case the chance to advance his education. When he arrived in Houston in 1979, Khan didn’t expect to stay beyond the time it would take him to earn and save enough to attend Harvard, which had accepted him for a master of law degree but whose tuition he couldn’t yet afford.

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Laura Elkin in The Guardian:

A writer of JM Coetzee’s stature needs no preamble, and Late Essays does not offer one, plunging the reader directly into the literary criticism that the novelist has accumulated over the past 11 years. Some are expanded versions of his articles for the New York Review of Books; others are published introductions to works of great literature, from Daniel Defoe’s Roxana to Leo Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich.

Introductions to classic novels comprise an interesting genre of criticism, with its own formal mechanisms. I don’t mean critical pieces prepared by scholars, but “prestige” essays, written by famous writers with a fondness for the book at hand. Yet is there any form of writing more ripe for reinvention? While they are revealing about the culture in general, such introductions rarely tell us anything worthwhile about the text or the acclaimed author’s work. Coetzee’s essays are different; this book emerges as an engaging series of master classes in novel writing, from which we might distil a selection of dos and don’ts.

First, know why you’re writing. Coetzee tells us that Ford Madox Ford wrote a number of mediocre novels before The Good Soldier, when he was finally able “to plumb the obscure, more personal sources of his urge to write”. The answer may be the question mirrored back to you. According to Coetzee, Samuel Beckett, across books and languages, asks who is writing and “why whoever it is that is writing goes on writing”.

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Catrine Jarman in The Conversation:

Few places on earth are as well known for their so-called mysteries as Easter Island, also known as Rapa Nui. For a tiny island of 64 square miles, with its nearest neighbours some 1,300 miles away, it has seen more than its fair share of controversy.

For a long while it wasn’t clear whether the island’s native population originated in Polynesia or South America. And how can we explain its apparent paradox: the design, construction and transport of giant “moai” stone statues, a remarkable cultural achievement yet one carried out on a virtually barren island, which seemingly lacked both the resources and people to carry out such a feat?

Anthropologists have long wondered whether these seemingly simple inhabitants really had the capacity for such cultural complexity. Or was a more advanced population, perhaps from the Americas, actually responsible – one that subsequently wiped out all the natural resources the island once had?

Recently, Rapa Nui has become the ultimate parable for humankind’s selfishness; a moral tale of the dangers of environmental destruction. In the “ecocide” hypothesis popularised by the geographer Jared Diamond, Rapa Nui is used as a demonstration of how society is doomed to collapse if we do not sit up and take note. But more than 60 years of archaeological research actually paints a very different picture – and now new genetic data sheds further light on the island’s fate. It is time to demystify Rapa Nui.

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Patrick Honner in Quanta:

Imagine fighting a war on 10 battlefields. You and your opponent each have 200 soldiers, and your aim is to win as many battles as possible. How would you deploy your troops? If you spread them out evenly, sending 20 to each battlefield, your opponent could concentrate their own troops and easily win a majority of the fights. You could try to overwhelm several locations yourself, but there’s no guarantee you’ll win, and you’ll leave the remaining battlefields poorly defended. Devising a winning strategy isn’t easy, but as long as neither side knows the other’s plan in advance, it’s a fair fight.

Now imagine your opponent has the power to deploy your troops as well as their own. Even if you get more troops, you can’t win.

In the war of politics, this power to deploy forces comes from gerrymandering, the age-old practice of manipulating voting districts for partisan gain. By determining who votes where, politicians can tilt the odds in their favor and defeat their opponents before the battle even begins.

In 1986, the Supreme Court ruled extreme partisan gerrymanders unconstitutional. But without a reliable test for identifying unfair district maps, the court has yet to throw any out. Now, as the nation’s highest court hears arguments for and against a legal challenge to Wisconsin’s state assembly district map, mathematicians are on the front lines in the fight for electoral fairness.

Simple math can help scheming politicians draw up districts that give their party outsize influence, but mathematics can also help identify and remedy these situations.

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Adrien Bosc at Tablet Magazine:

Call him Melville. He picks his way through the rubble, skirts along charred walls, climbs over a roof beam here, steps on a windowpane there, bits of glass scraping underfoot like the screak of winter snow. He moves through interconnecting alleyways as through the maze of a Moroccan souk, sheer-sided as a prison perimeter, buttressed by fire-blackened metal uprights. A ladder much too short to scale a particular wall leans its lacquered wood against the pitted limestone, scored and scraped by tortured ghosts. A vacant lot in the 13th arrondissement, it looks from above like a concrete maze ringed by three- and four-story buildings. The surrounding dilapidation, the washing hung from the windows, mark the precincts of his “cobbler’s stall,” as he liked to call his movie studio.

Only the outer defenses of the fortress are left, tracing the rue Jenner and the rue Jeanne d’Arc, a ghost town of 12,000 square feet looking just like something from a modern western, between the elevated Chevaleret Métro stop and La Pitié-Salpêtrière hospital. A corner of America, a fantasy drawn straight from a Sinatra song, the streets are lined with fences that hide vacant lots and shadowy dealings. Debris collects in pyramids, boards, broken furniture, segments of doors, tangled with lengths of twisted metal. His Ford Mustang is parked in front of the local bar, its state-of-the-art cassette player oozing Miles Davis, a car sequence from Elevator to the Gallows.

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Kevin Laskey at Music and Literature:

The ways in which Ayler and Coleman obliquely reference and evoke John Coltrane’s musical style, without becoming subservient to it, can be conceived of as a two-way conversation between the living and the legacy of the deceased—a form of virtual signifyin(g). As Henry Louis Gates, Jr. describes in it his seminal book The Signifying Monkey, “signifyin(g)” is an African-American rhetorical trope that plays the semantic meaning and spoken inflection of words off each other for a particular effect. A classic example is the use of a negative word with a positive inflection, as a kind of compliment. That kind of interaction is deeply embedded in jazz performance and culture, particularly in the ways through which different musicians interact with each other, simultaneously trying to fit in with the other players while still articulating a unique personal voice.

Not only do the evocations of Coltrane’s musical style in Ayler’s and Coleman’s improvisations show these soloists commenting on Coltrane’s music; rather, they also show Coltrane “actively” commenting back on them. In Coleman’s performance, for instance, the way he introduces the sheets-of-sound idea and motivic development, seemingly out of nowhere, creates the sense that Coleman and Coltrane are playing together and feeding off each other. Both players are trading licks back and forth, constantly responding to and commenting on what has just been played. During the especially Coltrane-esque moments of Coleman’s improvisation, one can imagine him responding to a particularly potent Trane lick, attempting to fend off the musical barb and pull the group improvisation back toward more congenial blues-inflected territory.

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Michael Saler at the TLS:

Once upon a time science seemed destined to replace religion as the source of all explanations. Today, however, “story” has become the master metaphor that we use to interpret experience, including the mysteries of God and Nature. This recourse to story-talk is everywhere, uniting the two cultures, the arts and sciences. It is thus not surprising to find the astrophysicist Sean Carroll endorsing Muriel Rukeyser’s line of poetry, “The universe is made of stories, not of atoms”. Carroll used it to support his own brief for the “poetic naturalism” of science: “That is absolutely correct. There is more to the world than what happens; there are the ways we make sense of it by telling its story”.

This cultural turn from metaphysics to metafictions helps to explain why so many readers, young and older, have greeted Philip Pullman’s La Belle Sauvage as if it were the Second Coming. A forthright atheist, Pullman has made the secular balm of stories one of his principal themes, finding in them the “capacity to enchant, to excite, to move, to inspire”. This holds true for “science stories” as well, assuaging our fear that science repudiates wonder for analysis, prescriptive morals for descriptive accuracy. Pullman insists that scientific narratives can be as marvellous as fairy tales, and as ethical as a chivalric quest. The key is that “we have to behave honestly towards them and to the process of doing science in the first place”.

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Jerome Groopman in The New Yorker:

Sleep, according to the Sunday Style section of the Times, is a new status symbol, a sign of prosperity and control in a frenetic world. And, as if to confirm that sleep science is an important, even trendy field, this year’s Nobel Prize in Medicine went to three researchers who deciphered the genes responsible for regulating our circadian rhythms. Still, although we may know more about sleep than ever before, it remains one of the most enigmatic phenomena in our daily lives. “Why do all forms of life, from plants, insects, sea creatures, amphibians and birds to mammals, need rest or sleep?” Meir Kryger asks in his new book, “The Mystery of Sleep” (Yale). Kryger, a professor at Yale Medical School, is a leader in the field of sleep medicine, and has treated more than thirty thousand patients with sleep problems during a career that spans four decades. He draws on this voluminous clinical experience in his book, which is an authoritative and accessible survey of what is known, what is believed, and what is still obscure about normal patterns of sleep and the conditions that disrupt it. As he readily admits, “No one has been able to declare with certainty why all life forms need sleep.”

…Reiss writes that his book’s “guiding spirit and lead witness” is Henry David Thoreau. Thoreau suffered from insomnia, and his retreat, in 1845, to a simple cabin at Walden Pond was, in part, driven by a desperate need for rest. Thoreau attributed his nightly struggles to the fact that railroads and other industrial changes had disturbed the natural environment around Concord. Reiss believes that we are victims of “the same environmentally devastating mind-set that Thoreau decried: an attitude of dominion over nature (including our own bodies) through technology and consumerism.” As the opposite of Thoreau, emblematic of everything he was reacting against, Reiss gives us Honoré de Balzac, who, while Thoreau was in Walden, was fuelling his writing with twenty to fifty cups of coffee a day, often on an empty stomach. Balzac believed that, with caffeine, “sparks shoot all the way to the brain,” and “forms and shapes and characters rear up; the paper is spread with ink.” Balzac typically wrote between fourteen and sixteen hours a day for two decades, producing sixteen volumes of “La Comédie Humaine” within six years. Thoreau rejected coffee as an artificial stimulant and suggested that communion with nature offered a superior high: “Who does not prefer to be intoxicated by the air he breathes?”

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