George Monbiot in The Guardian:

What do we believe? This is the crucial democratic question. Without informed choice, democracy is meaningless. This is why dictators and billionaires invest so heavily in fake news. Our only defence is constant vigilance, rigour and scepticism. But when some of the world’s most famous crusaders against propaganda appear to give credence to conspiracy theories, you wonder where to turn.

The Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) last month published its investigation into the chemical weapons attack on the Syrian town of Khan Shaykhun, which killed almost 100 people on 4 April and injured around 200. After examining the competing theories and conducting wide-ranging interviews, laboratory tests and forensic analysis of videos and photos, it concluded that the atrocity was caused by a bomb filled with sarin, dropped by the government of Syria.

There is nothing surprising about this. The Syrian government has a long history of chemical weapons use, and the OPCW’s conclusions concur with a wealth of witness testimony. But a major propaganda effort has sought to discredit such testimony, and characterise the atrocity as a “false-flag attack”.

This effort began with an article published on the website Al-Masdar news, run by the Syrian government loyalist Leith Abou Fadel. It suggested that either the attack had been staged by “terrorist forces”, or chemicals stored in a missile factory had inadvertently been released when the Syrian government bombed it.

More here. [Thanks to Idrees Ahmad.]

John R. Bradley in Spectator:

Until last weekend, the Ritz-Carlton in Riyadh’s exclusive Diplomatic Quarter was colloquially known as the Princes’ Hotel. It was a luxurious retreat from the heat, where royals could engage in the kind of wheeling and dealing with the global business elite that had made them millionaires on the back of the 1970s oil boom. No deal could be brokered without paying a bribe to at least one prince. Last Saturday that era of boundless opportunity and total impunity came to a dramatic end. The VIP guests were booted out, the front doors were shuttered, and heavily armed security forces took up positions around the perimeter. A Saudi who lives nearby sent me a message about what he thought was an unfolding terrorist incident. That’s one way of describing the extraordinary, chaotic events. We have seen a mini-wave of terror orchestrated by the all-powerful 32-year-old heir to the throne, Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman, who has been given day-to-day control of the kingdom’s affairs by his ailing father, King Salman, 81. Bin Salman’s ascent and methods now promise to change Saudi Arabia forever.

Despite his youth and inexperience, he has risen rapidly through the ranks, amassing previously unimaginable powers for a single royal. This, and his refusal to govern through consensus — as is customary — has caused deep resentment, jealousy and anger. His most prominent critics and rivals were therefore carted off on corruption charges to the Ritz-Carlton, turning it into the world’s most luxurious prison. Eleven senior princes were among them, as well as dozens of businessmen, and current and former ministers and provincial governors. Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal — the wealthiest Arab tycoon who holds significant stakes in Citigroup, Twitter and countless other companies — got caught up in the dragnet. At least he is still alive. Mansour bin Muqrin, deputy governor of the Asir region bordering Yemen, hailed from a rival branch of the ruling family sidelined after King Abdullah’s death in 2015. He boarded a helicopter with seven senior advisers, and amid speculation that he had instructed the pilot to head for a foreign country. Then his helicopter was blown from the sky, killing all on board. No official cause was given, fueling conspiracy theories. However baseless, the incident must have given further pause for thought in these febrile times to anyone then thinking of trying to flout the blanket travel ban. The country’s Attorney General says that this was only the first phase of mass arrests, and that trials would soon get under way. The front-page headline of the newspaper Al Jazirah a day after the purge encapsulated the new reality: ‘No place for traitors in the age of Salman.’ Welcome to the new Saudi Arabia.

More here.

Katie Langin in Science:

Consider the hamburger. Producing this staple of the U.S. diet takes 25 kilograms of animal feed, 25 square meters of land, and about 220 liters of water—all for four patties. Statistics like those have persuaded some scientists and environmental activists that eating less meat could have a big impact on carbon and other greenhouse gas emissions. But what would happen if every American made the switch to a plant-only diet? According to a new study, a nation of 320 million vegans would reduce greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture by some 28%, far less than the amount now produced by the livestock industry. The authors claim the switch could also lead to deficiencies in key nutrients—including calcium and several vitamins.

“Our logic was to start at the extreme scenario [and work backward from that],” says Robin White, the study’s lead author and an animal sciences researcher at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in Blacksburg. She and fellow animal sciences researcher Mary Beth Hall, of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Dairy Forage Research Center in Madison, began by estimating the impact of converting all land now used by the livestock industry to cropland for human food. That would increase the amount of agricultural waste—corn stalks, potato waste, and other inedibles now fed to livestock—and eliminate the animals that now eat much of it. Burning the excess waste would add some 2 million tons of carbon to the atmosphere, they estimate. Fertilizer demands would also go up while the supply of animal manure dwindled. That would mean making more artificial fertilizer, adding another 23 million tons of carbon emissions per year. As a result, although animals now make up some 49% of agricultural emissions in the United States, a vegan nation would eliminate far less than that. Annual emissions would drop from 623 million tons to 446 million tons a year, the team reports today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

More here.

Joel Meyerowitz at The Paris Review:

A few years ago, during a visit to Cézanne’s studio in Aix-en-Provence, I experienced a flash of insight about the artist that I saw as intrinsic to his becoming the father of modern painting. Once having seen it, it inspired me to move in a new direction in my own work.

Cézanne painted his studio walls a dark gray with a hint of green. Every object in the studio, illuminated by a vast north window, seemed to be absorbed into the gray of this background. There were no telltale reflections around the edges of the objects to separate them from the background itself, as there would have been had the wall been painted white. Therefore, I could see how Cézanne, making his small, patch-like brush marks, might have moved his gaze from object to background, and back again to the objects, without the familiar intervention of the illusion of space. Cézanne’s was the first voice of “flatness,” the first statement of the modern idea that a painting was simply paint on a flat canvas, nothing more, and the environment he made served this idea. The play of light on this particular tone of gray was a precisely keyed background hum that allowed a new exchange between, say, the red of an apple and the equal value of the gray background. It was a proposal of tonal nearness that welcomed the idea of flatness.

more here.

T.J. Clark at the LRB:

Malevich is hard to stop writing about. Partly this is because of the man’s impenetrable life and character, but mainly, I think, because of his work’s authority. None of the mysteries and ironies attached to him would matter if the paintings on the walls did not look down on us with such unique naive power. For those who would like to detach that authority from the dialogue with Leninism, let alone from the catastrophe of collectivisation, there are many get-outs. ‘Form is form’ is an undying one. Or there is the Izaak Brodsky answer: look again at Brodsky’s 1928 portrait of Stalin, which was certainly one of the most brilliant and fully realised works in the Royal Academy show, as appalling and persuasive as Ingres toadying to Napoleon. And don’t artists invariably bow down to tyrants? Wasn’t Duchamp right when he said that the main problem for artists in bourgeois society was that at least in the age of autocracies patrons had been ‘aussi sots, mais moins nombreux’? Are not the black-cube Lenin of 1924, and the later promise to put the proletariat before the footlights, just two more versions of what pageant masters (providers of visual services) always say and do?

I don’t think so. I don’t think the charge of simple time-serving comes close to capturing what we see taking place, in the choice of works Malevich made for his 1932 exhibit, and the decisions about how they were to be hung. It doesn’t begin to get us on terms with what Malevich and Punin seem to have believed was at stake in the installation, the risks they were prepared to take to build it.

more here.

Elizabeth Kolbert at The New Yorker:

But everyone I spoke with, including the most fervent advocates for carbon removal, stressed the huge challenges of the work, some of them technological, others political and economic. Done on a scale significant enough to make a difference, direct air capture of the sort pursued by Carbon Engineering, in British Columbia, would require an enormous infrastructure, as well as huge supplies of power. (Because CO₂ is more dilute in the air than it is in the exhaust of a power plant, direct air capture demands even more energy than C.C.S.) The power would have to be generated emissions-free, or the whole enterprise wouldn’t make much sense.

“You might say it’s against my self-interest to say it, but I think that, in the near term, talking about carbon removal is silly,” David Keith, the founder of Carbon Engineering, who teaches energy and public policy at Harvard, told me. “Because it almost certainly is cheaper to cut emissions now than to do large-scale carbon removal.”

beccs doesn’t make big energy demands; instead, it requires vast tracts of arable land. Much of this land would, presumably, have to be diverted from food production, and at a time when the global population—and therefore global food demand—is projected to be growing.

more here.

Faye Flam at Bloomberg:

Which would you choose, sneaked or snuck? My first instinct when faced with this question was to worry about which was correct. While sneaked sounds vaguely more grammatically correct, snuck sounds natural.

The person who posed the question to me wasn’t a grammarian but a computational biologist named Joshua Plotkin. And he wasn’t concerned with right or wrong. To him, this was a nice example of language evolution in action — and if he’s right in a recent analysis, that process is like biological evolution in ways people hadn’t previously recognized.

Languages, like living things, were not designed, and yet in both cases, through their evolution, structure, utility and beauty emerge. In the 1860s, soon after Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection was published, linguist August Schleicher defended it by pointing to the already known evolution of language.

“Analogies between language change and evolution literally go back to Darwin, though originally in the opposite direction — Darwin invoked language change to explain biological evolution,” Harvard linguistics and psychology professor Stephen Pinker told me, commenting on the study by email. “So this paper is a debt repaid.”

This kind of analysis is likely to give grammatical purists food for thought, and may even help explain why today’s watered-down use of the word “awesome” refuses to die.

More here.

John Rennie and Lucy Reading-Ikkanda in Quanta:

Intelligence is not a quality to attribute lightly to microbes. There is no reason to think that bacteria, slime molds and similar single-cell forms of life have awareness, understanding or other capacities implicit in real intellect. But particularly when these cells commune in great numbers, their startling collective talents for solving problemsand controlling their environment emerge. Those behaviors may be genetically encoded into these cells by billions of years of evolution, but in that sense the cells are not so different from robots programmed to respond in sophisticated ways to their environment. If we can speak of artificial intelligence for the latter, perhaps it’s not too outrageous to refer to the underappreciated cellular intelligence of the former.

Under the microscope, the incredible exercise of the cells’ collective intelligence reveals itself with spectacular beauty. Since 1983, Roberto Kolter, a professor of microbiology and immunobiology at Harvard Medical School and co-director of the Microbial Sciences Initiative, has led a laboratory that has studied these phenomena. In more recent years, it has also developed techniques for visualizing them. In the photographic essay book Life at the Edge of Sight: A Photographic Exploration of the Microbial World (Harvard University Press), released in September, Kolter and his co-author, Scott Chimileski, a research fellow and imaging specialist in his lab, offer an appreciation of microorganisms that is both scientific and artistic, and that gives a glimpse of the cellular wonders that are literally underfoot. Imagery from the lab is also on display in the exhibition World in a Drop at the Harvard Museum of Natural History. That display will close in early January but will be followed by a broader exhibition, Microbial Life, scheduled to open in February.

More here. [Thanks to Ali Minai.]

Julia Felsenthal in Vogue:

“I am quite convinced,” writer Clifton Fadiman once observed, “that our culture makes it difficult, if not impossible, for children ever really to know their parents.”

If you’re not familiar (and if you’re anywhere close to my age, chances are you’re not), Fadiman was the Brooklyn-born son of immigrants who rose meteorically from humble origins to become, in the middle part of the 20th century, an essayist, critic, editor, public intellectual, radio personality, peerless wit, and something of a household name. At 28, he was the editor in chief of Simon & Schuster; at 29, the book critic of The New Yorker; at 34, the host of Information Please, an NBC radio quiz show that at its height drew 15 million listeners (at a time when that was roughly one in 10 Americans). Later he was a cofounder and longtime judge of the Book of the Month Club; a serial editor of anthologies; a prolific writer of forewords and afterwords, prefaces and introductions, essays and articles; author of a children’s book, a guide to world literature, and an encyclopedic tome for oenophiles. So devoted was he to the written word that his New York Times obituary—he died at 95 in 1999 from pancreatic cancer, after going effectively blind in his late 80s—charmingly dubbed him a “bookworm’s bookworm.”

He was also the father of three children, among them a daughter, Anne Fadiman, a bookworm and author in her own right, best known for The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, a journalistic account of the devastating clash between Western medical practice and Hmong spiritual belief as it played out in the unfortunate case of an epileptic toddler whose refugee family resettled in California’s Central Valley in the 1980s. The Spirit Catches You, published in 1997, won the National Book Critics Circle Award and became an unlikely cult favorite, a touchstone for a generation of social scientists, teachers, doctors, and journalists (including this one).

More here.

Mehdi Hasan in The Intercept:

Kudos to Germany's spooks. Back in December 2015, the German foreign intelligence agency, BND, distributed a one-and-a-half-page memoto various media outlets titled: “Saudi Arabia — Sunni regional power torn between foreign policy paradigm change and domestic policy consolidation.” The document was pretty astonishing, both in its undiplomatic bluntness and remarkable prescience.

“The current cautious diplomatic stance of senior members of the Saudi royal family will be replaced by an impulsive intervention policy,” the memo warned, focusing on the role of Mohammed bin Salman, who had been appointed as deputy crown prince and defense minister at the age of 30 earlier that year.

Both MBS, as he has come to be known, and his elderly father King Salman, the BND analysts wrote, want Saudi Arabia to be seen as “the leader of the Arab world” with a foreign policy built on “a strong military component.” Yet the memo also pointed out that the consolidation of so much power in a single young prince’s hands “harbors a latent risk that in seeking to establish himself in the line of succession in his father’s lifetime, he may overreach,” adding: “Relations with friendly and above all allied countries in the region could be overstretched.”

And so it has come to pass.

More here.

Amy Harmon in The New York Times:

As one of the exceedingly rare members of her species to live beyond age 110, Goldie Michelson had divulged her secrets to longevity countless times before dying last year at 113. “Morning walks and chocolate,” the Gloucester, Mass., resident and onetime oldest living American told the steady stream of inquisitors that marked her final years. Unlike the growing ranks of nonagenarians and centenarians, those who breach a 12th decade, known as supercentenarians, rarely face protracted illness or disability before they die, a boon that many of them have ascribed to personal habits. “I try to live the truth,” said Shelby Harris, who threw out the first pitch of the local minor league baseball team’s 2012 season a few months before he died at 111 in Rock Island, Ill. Emma Morano of Verbania, Italy, still cooking her own pasta until a few years before she died last April at 117, prescribed raw eggs, and no husband. But even as they indulged the notion that exceptionally healthy longevity can be explained by lifestyle, each agreed to donate DNA to a private effort to find the secrets in supercentenarian genes. The full genetic sequences of Ms. Michelson, Mr. Harris and Ms. Morano are among some three dozen genomes of North American, Caribbean and European supercentenarians being made available this week by a nonprofit called Betterhumans to any researcher who wants to dive in.

…The rare cache of supercentenarian genomes, the largest yet to be sequenced and made public, comes as studies of garden-variety longevity have yielded few solid clues to healthy aging. Lifestyle and luck, it seems, still factor heavily into why people live into their 90s and 100s. To the extent that they have a genetic advantage, it appears to come partly from having inherited fewer than usual DNA variations known to raise the risk of heart disease, Alzheimer’s disease and other afflictions. That is not enough, some researchers say, to explain what they call “truly rare survival,” or why supercentenarians are more uniformly healthy than centenarians in their final months and years. Rather than having won dozens of hereditary coin tosses with DNA variations that are less bad, scientists suggest, supercentenarians may possess genetic code that actively protects them from aging. But the effort to find that code has been “challenged,” as a group of leading longevity researchers put it in a recent academic paper, in part by the difficulties in acquiring supercentenarian DNA.

More here.