Jim Robbins in The New York Times:

ELY, Nev. — A crew of five wildlife biologists wearing overalls, helmets and headlamps walked up the flanks of a juniper-studded mountain and climbed through stout steel bars to enter an abandoned mine that serves as a bat hibernaculum.

The swinging white light of the headlamps probed cracks and crevices in the walls of the long dark and narrow tunnel, as the team walked half a mile into the earth. When they spied a bat, they gently plucked the mouse-sized, chestnut brown mammal — Townsend’s long eared and Western small footed are the two most abundant species here — off the walls and deposited them in white cloth bags. A lone big brown bat was also gathered. At one point a bat, disturbed by the scientific ruckus, fluttered by, the headlamps illuminating its membranous, négligée-thin wings. During the survey in November, the bats were in their pre-hibernation phase, clinging to the gray rock wall with tiny grappling hook-like feet, gently breathing. They are in full hibernation mode now. “They are biologically interesting,” said Catherine G. Haase, a postdoctoral researcher from Montana State University, as she affectionately handled a docile bat. “And they are really cute.”

Cute, interesting and facing a deeply uncertain future. This foray is part of a continentwide effort, from Canada to Oklahoma, to plumb mines and caves in hopes of figuring out how a virulent and rapidly spreading invasive fungal bat disease called white-nose syndrome, which is bearing down on the West, will behave when it hits the native populations here. “White-nose syndrome represents one of the most consequential wildlife diseases of modern times,” wrote the authors of one recent paper published in mSphere, a journal of the American Society for Microbiology. Since 2006, “the disease has killed millions of bats and threatens several formerly abundant species with extirpation or extinction.” White-nose syndrome, caused by the fungus Pseudogymnoascus destructans (Pd), is named for the fuzzy spots that appear on bats’ noses and wings.

More here.

Garrett Felber in Boston Review:

More than fifty years after his death, Malcolm X remains a polarizing and misunderstood figure. Not unlike the leader he is too often contrasted with—Martin Luther King, Jr.—he has been a symbol to mobilize around, a foil to abjure, or a commodity to sell, rather than a thinker to engage. As political philosopher Brandon Terry reminded us in these pageson the fiftieth anniversary of King’s death this year, “There are costs to canonization.” The primary vehicle of canonization in Malcolm’s case has been The Autobiography of Malcolm X, which has been translated into thirty languages and has been widely read—by students and activists alike—across the United States and abroad.

…There have long been rumors of three missing chapters among scholars; some think Haley cut them from the book following Malcolm’s assassination because their politics diverged or the book had transformed during his tumultuous last year. Whatever the reasoning, “The Negro” is a fragment of the book Malcolm intended to publish—a book that would be virtually unrecognizable to readers of his autobiography today. We will never fully know that book, of course, but “The Negro” chapter forces us, finally, to engage with it.

…In “The Negro,” he called Democrats and Republicans “labels that mean nothing” to black people. Elsewhere he noted how in the United Nations, there are those who vote yes, those who vote no, and those who abstain. And those who abstain often “have just as much weight.” A sign of political maturity, he believed, was to first register black people, then organize them, and vote only when a candidate represented their interests.

This analysis culminated in one of Malcolm’s most famous addresses, “The Ballot or the Bullet.” Delivered in April 1964 shortly after breaking with the Nation of Islam and forming his independent organization Muslim Mosque, Inc., Malcolm told a Cleveland audience, “A ballot is like a bullet. You don’t throw your ballots until you see a target, and if that target is not within your reach, keep your ballot in your pocket.” Many historians have seen the speech as Malcolm’s first ideological break from the Nation of Islam, an index of his developing political thought. “The Negro,” by contrast, shows this thought as an extension of the Nation of Islam’s political development rather than a departure. Even the title of his speech may have been borrowed from the pages of Muhammad Speaks; in 1962, a front-page story about the struggle in Fayette County, Tennessee, to register black voters was subtitled: “Fayette Fought For Freedom With Bullets and Ballots.”

More here.  (Note: Throughout February, we will publish at least one post dedicated to Black History Month)

Patricia Lockwood in the London Review of Books:

A few years ago, when it suddenly occurred to us that the internet was a place we could never leave, I began to keep a diary of what it felt like to be there in the days of its snowy white disintegration, which felt also like the disintegration of my own mind. My interest was not academic. I did not care about the Singularity, or the rise of the machines, or the afterlife of being uploaded into the cloud. I cared about the feeling that my thoughts were being dictated. I cared about the collective head, which seemed to be running a fever. But if we managed to escape, to break out of the great skull and into the fresh air, if Twitter was shut down for crimes against humanity, what would we be losing? The bloodstream of the news, the thrilled consensus, the dance to the tune of the time. The portal that told us, each time we opened it, exactly what was happening now. It seemed fitting to write it in the third person because I no longer felt like myself. Here’s how it began.

*

She opened the portal, and the mind met her more than halfway. Inside, it was tropical and snowing, and the first flake of the blizzard of everything landed on her tongue and melted.

Close-ups of nail art, a pebble from outer space, a tarantula’s compound eyes, a storm like canned peaches on the surface of Jupiter, Van Gogh’s Potato Eaters, a chihuahua perched on a man’s erection, a garage door spray-painted with the words ‘STOP NOW! DON’T EMAIL MY WIFE!’

More here.

Samantha Page in Cosmos:

Michael E Mann is one of two climate scientists who have been awarded the 2019 Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement.

Mann, a professor of atmospheric science at Penn State University in the US and one of the most famous climate scientists in the world, is the man behind the infamous “hockey stick” graph, which came out in 1998 and for many became the first piece of understandable data that showed the effect humans were having on the climate.

The graph and Mann himself became lightning rods for climate sceptics and fossil fuel backers, thrusting him into a role of public persuader. For the past 20 years, he has tangled with politicians, Twitter users, and the occasional Russian hacker to help explain what, exactly, is happening to our climate.

More here.

M. J. Rosenberg in The Nation:

One thing that should be said about Representative Ilhan Omar’s tweet about the power of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (more commonly known as AIPAC, or the “Israel lobby”) is that the hysterical reaction to it proved her main point: The power of AIPAC over members of Congress is literally awesome, although not in a good way. Has anyone ever seen so many members of Congress, of both parties, running to the microphones and sending out press releases to denounce one first-termer for criticizing the power of… a lobby?

Somehow, I don’t think the reaction would have been the same if she had tweeted that Congress still supports the ethanol subsidy because the American Farm Bureau and other components of the corn/ethanol lobby spend millions to keep this agribusiness bonanza going (which they do). Or that if she had opposed the ethanol subsidy, she would have been accused of hating farmers.

That’s American politics; the only difference between all the domestic lobbies that essentially buy support for their agenda is that AIPAC is working for a foreign government, a distinction but not much of a difference when the goal is to maintain a status quo that is not necessarily in the national interest.

More here.

Linus Blomqvist in The Breakthrough:

For decades, environmentalists have been rightly concerned about the environmental impact of humanity’s food systems. Often, this has meant advocating for shifting diets — in particular, away from meat, given its outsized environmental impact.

A recent, much-publicized example is the EAT-Lancet Commission’s new report, whose flexitarian dietary guidelines include some, but not much, meat. But what’s often been missed in the discussion of these guidelines is that in terms of environmental impacts, how much meat you eat might matter less than what kind of meat you eat. What if shifting from one type of meat (beef) to another (monogastrics, like pork and poultry) offered environmental benefits at least as large as simply reducing meat consumption across the board?

As this figure shows, beef is simply much, much worse for the environment than all other forms of food, due mainly to enteric methane and the large amount of land required to feed cattle. The most meaningful distinction isn’t animal vs. plant — it’s beef (and other ruminants like sheep and goat) vs. everything else.

More here.

Rachel Wetzler in The Baffler:

SATIRES OF THE ART WORLD written by incredulous outsiders are often damned before they begin: there’s virtually no absurdist caricature a screenwriter could invent that could suitably exaggerate its pretentiousness or barely concealed venality—these character flaws are played out daily in earnest. In 2015, a mentally ill attendee at Art Basel Miami Beach stabbed another visitor with an X-Acto knife; it took onlookers a few minutes to realize that the blood was real. At the ARCO Madrid art fair in 2007, members of the more-or-less uncategorizable art organization e-flux—under the heading unitednationsplaza—gathered an international gang of artists, curators, and critics to participate in a self-flagellating mock trial whose charges included colluding with the “new” bourgeoisie. The artist Santiago Sierra has, on several occasions, paid drug addicts and sex workers to tattoo black lines across their backs; Damien Hirst sold a skull encrusted with fourteen million British pounds’ worth of diamonds for fifty million pounds to a consortium of buyers that included himself; Tracey Emin transplanted her unmade bed into the Tate Modern. Art-world satire, in other words, tends to feel ham-fisted because it’s all such low-hanging fruit: it doesn’t take much effort to make contemporary art sound dumb—it’s already dumb, and no inflection is needed.

The newest entry into the canon of bad art-world satires is director Dan Gilroy’s Velvet Buzzsaw, which premiered on Netflix last weekend. All the familiar grotesques are here: greedy gallerists, ruthlessly ambitious assistants, tax-dodging collectors, a critic so accustomed to churning out self-serving aesthetic pronouncements that he can’t help but bitchily opine about a dead colleague’s casket. There are also architectural black outfits, Tom Ford eyeglasses, and capital-h Haircuts marching through sterile white galleries and pristine midcentury houses; people airkiss, backstab, and mistake a pile of trash on the floor for a revolutionary new artwork.

But Gilroy adds a genre twist: in Velvet Buzzsaw, the art bites back, taking supernatural revenge on those who would debase it for profit.

More here.