Jon Cruddas at Prospect Magazine:

James Bloodworth’s unflinching account of life and work in the towns we have come to know as being “left behind” exposes the mercilessness of the low-wage economy and modern capitalism. Working in a warehouse, a call centre, as a care worker and an Uber driver, he finds insecurity, ruthless discipline, surveillance, atomisation, underpayment and underemployment.

Workers are treated as mere units of production, squeezed for maximum efficiency. Nor does the exploitation end at work: the unscrupulousness of agencies and landlords—one of the rooms he stays in has a cardboard partition—drain any sense of control from the lives of his subjects.

While not romanticising the working class, Bloodworth is critical of some liberals who caricature them as uneducated and intolerant. He exposes how degrading working and living conditions shape how people see their relationships, bodies, diets and other people—not least immigrants and politicians.

Hired is a refreshing antidote to the fashionable post-work theses written from steel-and-ivory towers, which want us to sidestep the political imperative of improving the quality of work in favour of demanding full automation and free money. Bloodworth’s interviews reveal that meaningful work offers a sense of dignity, solidarity, support networks and community identity.

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Armin Rosen at Harper's Magazine:

Since 2003, al-Qassemi has accumulated around 1,000 modern and contemporary works by Arabic-speaking artists or artists of Arab heritage. Under the guidance of three curators, works rotate through his Barjeel Foundation space, a small public gallery inside of a large arts center in al-Qassemi’s home city of Sharjah, about twenty minutes north of Dubai. Between 200 and 300 pieces are lent to museums around the world each year, something from which al-Qassemi derives no financial benefit. The collection, now one of the most important of its kind, is so vast and geographically scattered that there are major pieces al-Qassemi hasn’t actually seen before. At an opening of an exhibition of his works at Washington’s American University in September, he confronted an eerily static blown-up photo of exploding mortar shells by the Lebanese artist Akram Zaatari for the first time, and uttered a long, guttural “wow.”

Until the UAE joined in the Saudi-led boycott of Qatar this past summer, al-Qassemi hosted a show on Al Jazeera’s AJ+ where he walked viewers through collection highlights. He had over 500,000 Twitter followers before he deactivated his account, and was one of Gulf Business’s one hundred most powerful Arabs of 2017, falling within respectable distance of Gigi Hadid.

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Thomas Nagel at the NYRB:

Kwame Anthony Appiah is a writer and thinker of remarkable range. He began his academic career as an analytic philosopher of language, but soon branched out to become one of the most prominent and respected philosophical voices addressing a wide public on topics of moral and political importance such as race, cosmopolitanism, multiculturalism, codes of honor, and moral psychology. Two years ago he even took on the “Ethicist” column in The New York Times Magazine, and it is easy to become addicted to his incisive answers to the extraordinary variety of real-life moral questions posed by readers.

Appiah’s latest book, As If: Idealization and Ideals, is in part a return to his earlier, more abstract and technical interests. It is derived from his Carus Lectures to the American Philosophical Association and is addressed first of all to a philosophical audience. Yet Appiah writes very clearly, and much of this original and absorbing book will be of interest to general readers.Its theme and its title pay tribute to the work of Hans Vaihinger (1852–1933), a currently neglected German philosopher whose masterwork, published in 1911, was called The Philosophy of “As If.” Vaihinger contended that much of our most fruitful thought about the world, particularly in the sciences, relies on idealizations, or what he called “fictions”—descriptions or laws or theories that are literally false but that provide an easier and more useful way to think about certain subjects than the truth in all its complexity would.

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Melissa Dahl in the New York Times:

In the 1960s, a chimpanzee named Washoe learned how to sign. Shortly thereafter, as Byrne tells us in this entertaining and thought-provoking book, she learned how to swear.

Roger Fouts — now a respected primatologist; then a lowly research assistant — was tasked with potty-training Washoe, who lived with researchers almost as if she were a human member of their family. Eventually, Washoe internalized the notion that “dirty” (the sign for feces) was shameful outside of the toilet. Soon, “dirty” became her favorite insult. “Dirty monkey,” she signed at the macaque that scared her. “Dirty Roger,” she signed at Fouts when he refused to let her out of her cage.

The potty-mouthed Washoe may help us understand what happened when early humans learned to lob the idea of excrement at one another instead of the real thing. Swearing, Byrne argues, helped us begin to form stronger societies. Today, a well-placed curse word at work can help colleagues bond; studies have also found that swearing, curiously, often indicates that someone is less likely to become physically violent. Perhaps it’s a little like the way toddlers finally, blessedly, learn to use their words instead of their fists, or their teeth.

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Carl Zimmer in the New York Times:

In less than three years, Dr. Reich’s laboratory has published DNA from the genomes of 938 ancient humans — more than all other research teams working in this field combined. The work in his lab has reshaped our understanding of human prehistory.

“They often answer age-old questions and sometimes provide astonishing unanticipated insights,” said Svante Paabo, the director of the Max Planck Institute of Paleoanthropology in Leipzig, Germany.

Dr. Reich, Dr. Paabo and other experts in ancient DNA are putting together a new history of humanity, one that runs in parallel with the narratives gleaned from fossils and written records. In Dr. Reich’s research, he and his colleagues have shed light on the peopling of the planet and the spread of agriculture, among other momentous events.

In a book to be published next week, “Who We Are and How We Got Here,” Dr. Reich, 43, explains how advances in DNA sequencing and analysis have helped this new field take off.

“It’s really like the invention of a new scientific instrument, like a microscope or a telescope,” he said. “When an instrument that powerful is invented, it opens up all these horizons, and everything is new and surprising.”

More here.

William Hogeland in Lapham's Quarterly:

The rule of law is making news. Representative headlines include “Trump’s All-Out Attack on the Rule of Law” (The Nation), an open door to anarchy: “President Trump Is a Threat to America’s Rule of Law and its National Security” (U.S. News & World Report), and “Trump’s Latest Attack on the Rule of Law” (Washington Post). The revived phrase usefully distills John Adams’ favorite definition of a republic, “a government of laws and not of men.” A government not, that is, arbitrary but regular, with benefits not personal but public, proceeding by written-down precept, not ad hoc impulse, thus sheltering rights from changes of party and whims of personality. Keeping the rule of law in mind can help cut through the Trump administration’s dizzying incoherence to arrive at an underlying fault: total disdain, sometimes barely covert, sometimes brazen, for the restraints legally imposed on the office. Using power to satisfy personal desires, enrich friends and family, put on shows for supporters, and punish enemies and critics sets this administration at odds with values that many Americans, of conflicting political persuasions, have long believed run deeper than political disagreement.

Not that our government has always or even often enough operated according to the rule of law. The current president has taken violation to a degree of heedlessness so grotesque that we can’t be sure he knows he’s violating anything. That degree, it turns out, puts us through the looking glass. We may never have known before how deeply rooted a sense of respect for the concept of the rule of law has been to everything we hope that our government can be. When calling a republic a government of laws and not of men, Adams was paraphrasing seventeenth-century writer James Harrington, whose thinking about tyranny and liberty in the context of England’s Puritan revolution had a powerful influence on the country’s founders. Harrington called the precept “ancient,” by which he meant something like “fundamental to legitimate order.” The American founders, adopting that view, did something Harrington couldn’t. They put the rule of law into practice, forming a new nation explicitly on its basis.

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Legacy

—after George Jackson

Because something else must belong to him,
More than these chains, these cuffs, these cells—
Something more than Hard Rock’s hurt,
More than remembrances of where men
Go mad with craving—corpuscle, epidermis,
Flesh, men buried in the whale of it, all of it,
Because the so many of us mute ourselves,
Silent before the box, fascinated by the drama
Of confined bodies on prime-time television,
These prisons sanitized for entertainment &
These indeterminate sentences hidden, because
We all lack this panther’s rage, the gift
Of Soledad & geographies adorned with state numbers
& names of the dead & dying etched on skin,
This suffering, wild loss, under mass cuffs,
Those buried hours must be about more
Than adding to this surfeit of pain as history
As bars that once held him embrace us.

by Reginald Dwayne Betts
from Bastards of the Reagan Era
Four Way Books, 2015

Steven Poole in The Guardian:

You probably think you have beliefs, desires, fears, a personality, an “inner life”, maybe even a subconscious. Poppycock, says Nick Chater, a behavioural psychologist. All that stuff is folk nonsense. The brain essentially just makes everything up as it goes along – including what we fondly think of as our direct perceptions of the world, which are a patchwork of guesses and reconstructions. There is nothing going on “underneath”; there are no depths. The book could equally have been called “The Mind Is Shallow”, though potential readers might have found that more off-puttingly rude.

This is one of those books that is a superb exposition of scientific findings, from which the author proceeds to draw highly polemical and speculative inferences. There are beautiful discussions of how little we actually see around us: eye-tracking software can show us a page filled with Xs with one word positioned exactly where we are looking , and we have the experience of seeing a full page of text. We can’t even see two or more colours at once but switch between one at a time. In general, our richness of experience seems to be a construct.

Feelings are not much cop, either. Emotions are probably generated when we notice changes in our bodily state (this was William James’s insight in the 19th century), rather than bubbling up from some subconscious to teach us a lesson. Memory is a highly fallible re-creation rather than a retrieval of information, and political affiliations can be influenced by cognitive biases. People commonly report, meanwhile, that a solution to some puzzle pops into their head after they have stopped working on it and taken a walk or a shower. But Chater insists that there is never any “unconscious processing” working on some problem while we do something else. In his view, the brain can attend to only one thing at a time.

More here.

Adithya Rajagopalan in Nautilus:

The first pieces of the brain’s “inner GPS” started coming to light in 1970. In the laboratories of University College London, John O’Keefe and his student Jonathan Dostrovsky recorded the electrical activity of neurons in the hippocampus of freely moving rats. They found a group of neurons that increased their activity only when a rat found itself in a particular location.¹ They called them “place cells.” Building on these early findings, O’Keefe and his colleague Lynn Nadel proposed that the hippocampus contains an invariant representation of space that does not depend on mood or desire. They called this representation the “cognitive map.”² In their view, all of the brain’s place cells together represent the entirety of an animal’s environment, and whichever place cell is active indicates its current location. In other words, the hippocampus is like a GPS. It tells you where you are on a map and that map remains the same whether you are hungry and looking for food or sleepy and looking for a bed. O’Keefe and Nadel suggested that the absolute position represented in the hippocampal place cells provides a mental framework that can be used by an animal to find its way in any situation—be that to find food or a bed.

Over the next 40 years, other researchers—including the husband and wife duo of Edvard and May-Britt Moser—produced support for the idea that the brain’s hippocampal circuitry acts like an inner GPS.³ In recognition of their pioneering work, O’Keefe and the Mosers were awarded the 2014 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine. You’d think that this would mean that the role of the hippocampus in guiding an animal through space was solved. But studying the brain is never that straightforward. Like a match lighting a fuse, the 2014 Nobel Prize set off an explosion of experiments and ideas, some of which have pushed back against O’Keefe and Nadel’s early interpretation. This new work has suggested that when it comes to spatial navigation, the hippocampal circuit represents location information that is relative and malleable by experience rather than absolute. The study of the hippocampus seems to have stumbled into an age-old philosophical argument.

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Adolph Reed, Jr. at nonsite:

The symbiotic relation between antiracist politics and Democratic neoliberalism helps to make sense of the vitriol with which so many antiracist activists have reacted to Sanders and the renewed interest in challenging economic inequality. Notwithstanding copious evocations of the heroic period of black insurgent activism, this politics is not directed toward generating the deep and broad solidarities necessary for building an insurgent political movement. It is an insider, elite-driven interest group politics that is concerned less with reducing inequality than with establishing and maintaining what Kenneth Warren describes as “managerial authority over the nation’s Negro problem.” As West observed regarding the race relations framework’s emergence at the dawn of the twentieth century, claims to speak for black concerns in this politics do not depend on demonstration of accountability to any specific constituencies of black people. From Coates and other pundits to the many random Black Lives Matter activists those who expatiate about black Americans’ lack of interest in social-democratic politics claim interpretive authority based on the mysticism of organic racial representation and, most immediately, recognition by corporate media and elites as authentic voices.

That is a crucial context within which we should understand antiracists’ tendency to align with Wall Street Democrats in denouncing calls for general redistribution and their insistence that Trump’s victory most meaningfully expresses the depth of commitments to white supremacy, sexism, and homophobia particularly among “white working class” voters.

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Jennie Erin Smith at the TLS:

The German forester Peter Wohlleben shares Young’s conviction that animal beh­aviour is often rooted in individual character and choice. In The Inner Life of Animals, a follow-up to his book on trees, Wohlleben’s subjects are woodland creatures: red deer, squirrels, boar, mice and ravens, along with domestic animals he has raised. He has seen courageous fawns, depressed does, conniving roosters. Unlike Young, he is anxious to show that his observations are objectively valid. To give them heft, he highlights findings from the past decade or so, many of them by German and Austrian researchers.

Writing about bees, Wohlleben recalls his experience as a keeper to attest that “there’s a lot more going on inside their little heads” than the conventional wisdom would have it. Bees will attack people who have annoyed them in the past, while allowing trusted ones to approach, he says. He cites research by a Berlin neurobiologist that subverts the old notion that a hive of bees acts as a collective super-organism. In fact, individual bees are capable of a limited form of decision-making and planning, Wohlleben writes, and they are “self-aware”.

more here.

Gaby Wood at the LRB:

What does it mean for a romance to take the shape of a murder investigation? In a Lonely Place, Nicholas Ray’s elegantly bitter film about damaged trust, throws that question at its viewers. If all love stories are inquiries of one kind or another, the movie seems to suggest, perhaps they differ only in their relative violence. When filming began, Ray was married to its female lead, Gloria Grahame; by the time it ended, they were living apart. Ray said it was ‘a very personal film’ – and as parting gifts go, it was both poisonous and immortal.

David Crow in the FT:

Crispr Therapeutics has already applied for permission from European regulators to test its most advanced product, code-named CTX001, in patients suffering from beta-thalassaemia, an inherited blood disease where the body does not produce enough healthy red blood cells. Patients with the most severe form of the illness would die without frequent transfusions.

The Switzerland-based company says it also plans to seek a greenlight from the US Food and Drug Administration this year so it can trial CTX001 in people with sickle cell disease, another inherited blood disorder.

Editas Medicine, Crispr’s US-based rival, says it plans to apply for permission from the FDA in the middle of the year so it can test one of its one of its own Crispr gene-editing products in patients with a rare form of congenital blindness that causes severe vision loss at birth. If the FDA agrees, it should be able to commence trials within 30 days of the application.

If those trials are successful, Crispr, Editas and a third company, Intellia Therapeutics, say they plan to study the technique in humans with a range of diseases including cancer, cystic fibrosis, haemophilia and Duchenne muscular dystrophy.

In China, where regulators have taken a more lenient approach to human trials, several studies are already under way, although they have yet to produce any conclusive data.

More here.

Lenore Palladino in Boston Review:

Executives decide which days to buy back shares and can then sell their own shares at the newly bumped up price. Top executives generally make the majority of their compensation through performance-based pay, which is either directly or indirectly tied to stock prices. Even though the rules of performance-based pay changed under tax reform, it is likely that executives will remain large shareholders.

But the problem with stock buybacks isn’t just frustration with the 1 percent getting even richer. Nor is it just the hypocrisy of how the tax bill was sold by the Republican Party—though there is plenty of that. While Republicans promised the bill would raise worker wages, all of the analyses about the ratio of spending on buybacks to spending on workers tell the same story: massive amounts of money are moving out to shareholders while very little is trickling down to workers. Moreover, Republicans promised improved innovation, but it should surprise no one that corporate investment as compared to profits has declined compared to historical levels—hurting corporate potential in the long-run—just as stock buybacks are on the rise.

Ending stock buybacks could be straightforward. Congress could amend the Securities and Exchange Act to simply make open-market share repurchases illegal. Or it could impose limits on buybacks for companies that aren’t investing in their employees or funding their pension commitments, or it could only allow buybacks when workers also receive a dividend. The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) could also repeal the “safe-harbor” rule, which lets companies spend massively on buybacks, or at the very least make companies justify why buybacks are a good use of corporate cash.

But the current surge of stock buybacks is a symptom of a much larger problem: how deeply corporate leaders are able to manipulate our economy for their own gain, without oversight from those who are supposed to hold them accountable. We’re in the grip of a shareholder primacy ideology, which posits that the purpose of corporate tax reform is to benefit shareholders because shareholders have the only right to the spoils.

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An interview with Isabel Hilton in Jacobin:

Michael Greenberg in the New York Times:

Signe Dean in Science Alert:

Just when we thought octopuses couldn't be any weirder, it turns out that they and their cephalopod brethren evolve differently from nearly every other organism on the planet.

In a surprising twist, in April last year scientists discovered that octopuses, along with some squid and cuttlefish species, routinely edit their RNA (ribonucleic acid) sequences to adapt to their environment.

This is weird because that's really not how adaptations usually happen in multicellular animals. When an organism changes in some fundamental way, it typically starts with a genetic mutation – a change to the DNA.

Those genetic changes are then translated into action by DNA's molecular sidekick, RNA. You can think of DNA instructions as a recipe, while RNA is the chefthat orchestrates the cooking in the kitchen of each cell, producing necessary proteins that keep the whole organism going.

But RNA doesn't just blindly execute instructions – occasionally it improvises with some of the ingredients, changing which proteins are produced in the cell in a rare process called RNA editing.

When such an edit happens, it can change how the proteins work, allowing the organism to fine-tune its genetic information without actually undergoing any genetic mutations. But most organisms don't really bother with this method, as it's messy and causes problems more often that solving them.

More here.

Gábor Egry in Taxis:

In the early 2000s, many Hungarians took out mortgages in Swiss francs. The rates were low and it seemed like a good deal at the time. But when the 2008 financial crisis hit and the Hungarian currency tanked, mortgage holders discovered they owed much more than they had borrowed. Political upheaval ensued after the Hungarian press published a leaked recording of Socialist Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsány recounting how the party had lied repeatedly about the country’s fiscal status and potential. The right-wing conservative opposition swept the next election, and the new prime minister — Viktor Orbán — passed a law that relieved the pressure on Hungarians with mortgages in Swiss francs. But he didn’t stop there: he installed jurists loyal to his party throughout the judiciary and declared that Hungary would follow the example of countries like India, China, Russia, and Turkey in fashioning an “illiberal” state. Hungary’s economic crisis had become a political one.

When I first began to study economic history, it was 1993. I was a teenager, and everything looked simpler. That year I moved from my hometown, run-down, industrial Miskolc, to the more vibrant Budapest where I became a freshman student of history. Hungary was transitioning out of communism, and in that triumphal moment of human rights and economic liberalism, it seemed that East Central Europe was on its way to being firmly anchored in the West. The air of freedom was palpable; I felt that what I thought and did might truly matter. Granted, the government had lost popular support and the country was struggling with the economic and social effects of the transition from communism, but with Hungary headed westward, stability seemed inevitable.

Instead of stabilizing, however, for the next twenty years Hungary descended into a culture war over the legacy of the twentieth century.

More here.