Tania Lombrozo in Nautilus:

Last November Chinese scientist He Jiankui announced the birth of twin babies whose germline he claimed to have altered to reduce their susceptibility to contracting HIV. The news of embryo editing and gene-edited babies prompted immediate condemnation both within and beyond the scientific community. An ABC News headline asked: “Genetically edited babies—scientific advancement or playing God?”

The answer may be “both.” He’s application of gene-editing technology to human embryos flouted norms of scientific transparency and oversight, but even less controversial scientific developments sometimes provoke the reaction that humans are overstepping their appropriate sphere of influence. The arrival of the first IVF baby in 1978, for example, was denounced as playing God with human reproduction¹; more than 8 million “IVF-babies” have been born since.² As we face a global climate crisis, an article at Religion News Service questions whether proposed climate fixes based on geoengineering are playing God with the climate system.³ For many, the idea that mere humans can or should interfere in lofty natural or human domains, whether it’s the earth’s climate or human reproduction, is morally repugnant.

Where does this aversion to playing God come from? And might it present an obstacle to scientific and technological advance?

More here.

From here.

Generations

people who are going to be
in a few years
bottoms of trees
bear a responsibility to something
besides people
…………………. if it was only
you and me
sharing the consequences
it would be different
it would be just
generations of men
…………………. but
this business of war
these war kinds of things
are erasing those natural
obedient generations
who ignored pride
………………………. stood on no hind legs
………………………. begged no water
………………………. stole no bread
did their own things

and the generations of rice
of coal
of grasshoppers

by their indivisibility
denounce us

love rejected
hurts so much more
than love rejecting;
they act like they don’t love their country
no
what it is
is they found out
their country don’t love them.

Lucille Clifton
from Good Woman: Poems and Memoir 1969-1980
University of Massachusetts Press, 1980

Ari Shapiro at NPR:

It’s the stuff of a Hollywood blockbuster: Five hundred years ago, a son of Christopher Columbus assembled one of the greatest libraries the world has ever known. The volumes inside were mostly lost to history. Now, a precious book summarizing the contents of the library has turned up in a manuscript collection in Denmark.

The newly discovered manuscript is “an absolutely gorgeous thing,” says Edward Wilson-Lee, author of The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books — a biography of Columbus’ son Hernando Colón. “It’s about the size of a coffee table book. It’s almost a foot thick. It’s 2,000 pages long in beautifully, beautifully clear handwriting.”

The reference volume, called the Libro de los Epítomes, was designed to help a user find books in the enormous library.

Colón was “looking for the Google algorithm of print,” Wilson-Lee explains: “How to take vast amounts of information and make something usable out of it.”

More here.

From Phys.org:

How do you observe a process that takes more than one trillion times longer than the age of the universe? The XENON Collaboration research team did it with an instrument built to find the most elusive particle in the universe—dark matter. In a paper to be published tomorrow in the journal Nature, researchers announce that they have observed the radioactive decay of xenon-124, which has a half-life of 1.8 X 10²² years.

“We actually saw this decay happen. It’s the longest, slowest process that has ever been directly observed, and our dark matter detector was sensitive enough to measure it,” said Ethan Brown, an assistant professor of physics at Rensselaer, and co-author of the study. “It’s an amazing to have witnessed this process, and it says that our detector can measure the rarest thing ever recorded.”

The XENON Collaboration runs XENON1T, a 1,300-kilogram vat of super-pure liquid xenon shielded from cosmic rays in a cryostat submerged in water deep 1,500 meters beneath the Gran Sasso mountains of Italy.

More here.

Conor Friedersdorf in The Atlantic:

For more than 30 years, the critic Camille Paglia has taught at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. Now a faction of art-school censors wants her fired for sharing wrong opinions on matters of sex, gender identity, and sexual assault.

“Camille Paglia should be removed from UArts faculty and replaced by a queer person of color,” an online petition declares. “If, due to tenure, it is absolutely illegal to remove her, then the University must at least offer alternate sections of the classes she teaches, instead taught by professors who respect transgender students and survivors of sexual assault.” Regardless, the students behind the petition want her banned from holding speaking events or selling books on campus. In their telling, her ideas “are not merely ‘controversial,’ they are dangerous.”

Others believe that the student activists are trying to set a dangerous precedent that would undermine freedom of expression and free academic inquiry. “The effort to remove her for expressing her *opinions* strikes me as political correctness run amuck,” a faculty member emailed. “Instead of discussing and debating, they attempt to shame and destroy. This is pure tribalism. It is exactly what Donald Trump does when he encounters something he doesn’t like.” Most at the institution seem to hold positions somewhere in between.

More here.

Ian Dreiblatt at The Believer:

For a concrete demonstration, consider comedian Yakov Smirnoff, careening at Spuds Factor 10. Today, Smirnoff’s cultural activities have largely been quarantined to the town of Branson, Missouri, but in the 1980s, he was everywhere, including in numerous TV commercials, all of them repellent. For Miller Lite, he cashed in his Russian origins to go full “party-finds-you.” His Amoco commercials are like a fart that makes you go to the doctor. In his Best Western spots, one can regularly see his soul exiting his body. A 1988 Plymouth commercial is a journey to the wavering edge of human comprehension. Throughout, Smirnoff glows with an exuberance so phony it practically melts the screen. It overwhelms the commercial’s sacramental function, if anything pushing us farther away from ecstatic symbological unity with Best Western. This is life at Spuds Factor 10.

more here.

Suzy Hansen at Lapham’s Quarterly:

For some, the Grand Bazaar, with its remnants of Ottoman behaviors and designs and artisanal crafts, might suggest itself as Turkey’s most authentic self, but in Turkey the quest for authenticity often leads you further and further away from how life is actually lived. Since even before the founding of the Turkish Republic in 1923, Turks have seen the Grand Bazaar eclipsed many times: first by the European-style shopping boulevard, then by the stand-alone shopping mall, then by the stand-alone luxury shopping mall and apartment and office complex, and then most recently—in one of neoliberalism’s uglier incarnations—by the luxury shopping mall that invades and occupies what was once a fine nineteenth-century building on a beloved European boulevard. (See: the Demirören mall on İstiklal Street, itself a commercial and artistic center during the Ottoman and modern eras.) Turkey’s cities have also expanded tenfold—Istanbul is roughly four times London’s physical size—and bazaars and pedestrianized shopping streets now serve every neighborhood, each of them microcities with their own microeconomies, their own bakkal (corner shop) and manav (greengrocer) and kasap (butcher), which are as faithfully patronized as they would have been a century ago. By now every neighborhood also has its own mall. The Galleria belongs to the neighborhood of Ataköy, Forum Istanbul belongs to Bayrampaşa, Zorlu Center to Gayrettepe, Kanyon to Levent, İstinye Park to İstinye. There is even a Mall of Istanbul—though it should be called the Mall of Başakşehir, where it is actually located. I would never go there, for example, because it is an hour and fifteen minutes away by public transportation. The Mall of Istanbul belongs to another Istanbul entirely.

more here.

Daisy Hay at the TLS:

Not all readers will agree with the claims Miller makes for L.E.L.’s significance, but it is hard to dispute that the very ephemerality of L.E.L.’s work makes her a peculiarly appropriate spokeswoman for a literary age marked by artifice. L.E.L. came to maturity just as the voices of Shelley, Keats and Byron faded away and her life was over by the time the dominant figures of the Victorian novel made their names. Her nearest literary contemporaries were Edward Bulwer, Lady Blessington and the young Disraeli, all of whose early work shared in the neglect accorded to hers. From the late 1820s, the whiff of scandal attached to L.E.L. barred her from more respectable drawing rooms; the majority of her acquaintances were drawn from the raffish circles surrounding the Bulwers and a small circle of equally shady figures. Mary Anne Wyndham Lewis, who subsequently married Disraeli and courted scandal herself, gave her dresses and jewellery, and the art critic Samuel Carter Hall abetted her relationship with Jerdan. Jerdan himself never acknowledged the central role L.E.L. played in his emotional life, and, throughout the period in which she conceived and bore his children, he remained with his wife and legitimate children, escorting his mistress to parties before returning to the family home while she sought sanctuary in attic lodgings nearby.

more here.

Ben Ehrenreich in The Guardian:

Not far from the monstrous checkpoint at Qalandia – the main gateway through which the Israeli military controls the passage of human beings between Ramallah and Jerusalem – is a small, outdoor, stonecutters’ workshop, one of hundreds scattered throughout the West Bank. Whatever may be happening at the checkpoint, at least one worker can usually be seen standing in the stone-cutters’ yard, his face, hair and clothes caked with the same white dust that covers the high concrete wall and the watchtower, where it mixes with the black smoke and char from burning tyres and the molotov cocktails that local youths, on particularly bad days, hurl at the checkpoint and barrier that confine them.

When visitors to the region write about stones, they tend to focus on the ones that Palestinian youth fling at armed and armoured soldiers. And on the more deadly projectiles the soldiers shoot back. It’s easy to get lost in that melee. Andrew Ross is neither distracted nor enthralled by such emblematic scenes. He is more interested in the stone-cutter who usually remains outside the photo’s frame. Through him and others like him, Ross examines the unseen structures of expropriation and exploitation that undergird the occupation as effectively as all those walls and guns. Stone Men can be dry, lithic even, but it consistently provides insights into the troubled and troubling relationships between Israelis and Palestinians that are hard to come by elsewhere. Above all, it is a history of labour. Palestine sits on reserves of high-quality limestone valued at $20bn, and the business of quarrying, cutting and dressing it provides more private sector jobs than any other industry in the West Bank.

More here.

Laura van Straaten in Smithsonian:

Conceived by John D. Rockefellear, Jr.—fortunate son of the oil magnate—as a city within a city, Rockefeller Center was to be a “mecca for lovers of art,” as he put it, in the heart of New York. He commissioned the installation of more than 100 permanent sculptures, paintings and textiles around his 22-acre real estate development in midtown Manhattan. Since it opened in 1933, artworks like the sculptures of Prometheus and Atlas have become landmarks and photogenic destinations on par with the popular skating rink in its core. Now through June 28, following a nearly 20-year tradition of mounting one-offs of monolithic, crowd-pleasing contemporary artwork, Rockefeller Center is hosting its most expansive and daring exhibition yet: 20 diverse artworks at once from 14 contemporary artists from around the world. The two-month exhibition marks the New York debut for Frieze Sculpture, an import from the United Kingdom with major contemporary art cred. And the artworks, some commissioned specifically for this show, create a palpable tension with the more permanent artworks installed more than 80 years prior.

Although the exhibition has no unifying theme, a number of artworks are pointedly political, addressing power and inequality by being what Frieze Sculpture’s curator Brett Littman describes as “about speech, about freedom of expression, about media, about the idea of images and then the propagation of images, particularly historical images.” That pointedness is a radical move in a spot that teems with tourists 24/7 and during the workweek heaves with crowds of corporate types who work for the financial, legal, and other commercial institutions that occupy Rockefeller Center’s skyscrapers.

More here.

Ali Bhutto in The Guardian:

Abdullah the Cossack”, the antihero of HM Naqvi’s follow-up to the award-winning Home Boy, is the personification of Karachi’s decaying soul. The 70-year-old revels in nostalgia at the Sunset Lodge, the crumbling family estate he is at risk of losing. His was a Karachi defined by jazz quartets, Goan rockers, cabarets, theosophists, landmark synagogues and drinking Soviet delegates under the table. A self-styled intellectual, he has in the twilight of his life decided to document aspects of society ignored by historians. He notes, for instance, that in contrast to the emphasis on mourning at funerals, the death anniversaries of Sufi saints are “commemorated with song and dance until daybreak”. His observations, compiled and edited by former protege Bosco, form the narrative of Naqvi’s new novel, The Selected Works of Abdullah the Cossack. Through his protagonist, Naqvi sheds light on an older and more enlightened Karachi.

The Cossack’s deteriorating physical condition is a reflection of the city’s body politic and the problems that plague it. However, the arrival in his life of potential love interest Jugnu marks a physical and mental revival. The relationship breaks class and gender taboos: while it is clear to some of the other characters that Jugnu is transgender, Abdullah remains oblivious. Like the romance of old Karachi, which is selective in its portrayal of the past, Abdullah sees in Jugnu what he chooses.

Bosco, the grandson of a legendary local jazz trumpeter, represents the new Karachi – vulnerable and in need of a father figure, which he finds in the Cossack. Characteristic of life in the city, various escapades, such as a sojourn in rural Sindh or a rendezvous with gangsters, happen on a whim and end inconclusively. Just as Karachi’s identity and heritage are threatened by the omnipresent land mafia, so too is Abdullah at odds with his siblings over the sale of the family estate.

More here.

David Mason at First Things:

Les Murray, who died at age 80 on April 29, has been called Australia’s greatest poet, but such an encomium meant little to him.

Murray grew up in dire poverty on a farm with no electricity or running water, and always felt exiled from the privileged classes. Largely self-educated, at university he was so poor he ate the scraps he found on plates in the cafeteria. Profoundly asocial, he once called himself “a bit of a stranger to the human race.” He also suffered at times from debilitating depression, and was bullied in school for being bookish and fat. Yet he transformed his sense of personal injury to a poetic voice of rigor and flexibility, humor and empathy, and enormous formal range. He was a generous anthologist and editor as well as an essayist, poet, and verse novelist. “It was a very great epiphany for me,” he once said, “to realize that poetry is inexhaustible, that I would never get to the end of its reserves.”

more here.

Kate Aronoff at Bookforum:

Wallace-Wells stresses that these scenarios are the signs not of a new normal, but of a world in which “normal” ceases to be a useful framework for understanding an environment that is constantly changing, and almost always for the worse. “By 2040, the summer of 2018 will likely seem normal,” he writes. “But extreme weather is not a matter of ‘normal’; it is what roars back at us from the ever-worsening fringe of climate events. This is among the scariest features of rapid climate change: not that it changes the everyday experience of the world, though it does that, and dramatically; but that it makes once-unthinkable outlier events much more common, and ushers whole new categories of disaster into the realm of the possible.”

The biggest “known unknown” (a phrase Wallace-Wells cribs from Donald Rumsfeld) is how quickly humans will choose to acknowledge and address what’s coming. Whether we like it or not, the author points out, we are bound up with nature and what happens to it. The era in which a small subset of humanity has sought to dominate the earth and its resources is a blip in the history of this planet.

more here.

Freya Johnston at the LRB:

To read his life in his work – to see that work as bearing the imprint of an existence that was, in Johnson’s words, ‘radically wretched’ as well as triumphant – is to attempt the kind of biographical criticism at which Johnson himself excelled, which he might indeed be said to have invented in the Lives of the Poets. He might also be said, posthumously, to have suffered from it, since the grip of Boswell’s vivid and brilliantly idiosyncratic account of his friend on readers’ imaginations was so immediate and so tenacious that it quickly came to seem bigger and more compelling than the work itself. The astonishing range of that work is fairly represented in David Womersley’s selection: poetry (in Latin and English), fiction, sermons, lectures, journalism, literary criticism, political pamphlets, a fairy tale, a travelogue, biographies, an edition of Shakespeare’s plays, and the dictionary. By giving each of them due weight, this superb new edition – a slab of a book – suggests a way of putting Johnson’s life and his writing back together again. In the first few pages, we find four schoolboy translations of Horace put alongside an early poem called ‘Festina Lente’, thirty lines of verse on the doomed hopes of ‘The Young Author’, and one of the little prose memorials he occasionally composed to soothe himself, this one recording his mother’s ‘difficult and dangerous labour’. Womersley’s positioning of these texts, based on attested dates of composition rather than publication, possesses biographical and critical coherence, providing the reader with a sense of Johnson’s exceptional versatility in public and private life.

more here.

Richard Conniff in Scientific American:

It is one of the great dilemmas of climate change: We take such comfort from air conditioning that worldwide energy consumption for that purpose has already tripled since 1990. It is on track to grow even faster through mid-century—and assuming fossil-fuel–fired power plants provide the electricity, that could cause enough carbon dioxide emissions to warm the planet by another deadly half-degree Celsius. A paper published Tuesday in the Nature Communications proposes a partial remedy:  Heating, ventilation and air conditioning (or HVAC) systems move a lot of air. They can replace the entire air volume in an office building five or 10 times an hour.  Machines that capture carbon dioxide from the atmosphere—a developing fix for climate change—also depend on moving large volumes of air.  So why not save energy by tacking the carbon capture machine onto the air conditioner?

This futuristic proposal, from a team led by chemical engineer Roland Dittmeyer at Germany’s Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, goes even further. The researchers imagine a system of modular components, powered by renewable energy, that would not just extract carbon dioxide and water from the air. It would also convert them into hydrogen, and then use a multistep chemical process to transform that hydrogen into liquid hydrocarbon fuels.  The result: “Personalized, localized and distributed, synthetic oil wells” in buildings or neighborhoods, the authors write. “The envisioned model of ‘crowd oil’ from solar refineries, akin to ‘crowd electricity’ from solar panels,” would enable people “to take control and collectively manage global warming and climate change, rather than depending on the fossil power industrial behemoths.”

More here.

Gratitude to Old Teachers

When we stride or stroll across the frozen lake,
We place our feet where they have never been.
We walk upon the unwalked. But we are uneasy.
Who is down there but our old teachers?

Water that once could take no human weight—
We were students then— holds up our feet,
And goes on ahead of us for a mile.
Beneath us the teachers, and around us the stillness.

by Robert Bly
from Poetry 180
Random House, 2003

Cecilia Heyes in Aeon:

The idea that humans have cognitive instincts is a cornerstone of evolutionary psychology, pioneered by Leda Cosmides, John Tooby and Steven Pinker in the 1990s. ‘[O]ur modern skulls house a Stone Age mind,’ wrote Cosmides and Tooby in 1997. On this view, the cognitive processes or ‘organs of thought’ with which we tackle contemporary life have been shaped by genetic evolution to meet the needs of small, nomadic bands of people – people who devoted most of their energy to digging up plants and hunting animals. It’s unsurprising, then, that today our Stone Age instincts often deliver clumsy or distasteful solutions, but there’s not a whole lot we can do about it. We’re simply in thrall to our thinking genes.

This all seems plausible and intuitive, doesn’t it? The trouble is, the evidence behind it is dubious. In fact, if we look closely, it’s apparent that evolutionary psychology is due for an overhaul. Rather than hard-wired cognitive instincts, our heads are much more likely to be populated by cognitive gadgets, tinkered and toyed with over successive generations. Culture is responsible not just for the grist of the mind – what we do and make – but for fabricating its mills, the very way the mind works.

More here.

John Lanchester in the New York Times:

Climate change is the greatest challenge humanity has collectively faced. That challenge is, to put it mildly, practical; but it also poses a problem to the imagination. Our politics, our societies, are arranged around individual and group interests. These interests have to do with class, or ethnicity, or gender, or economics — make your own list. By asserting these interests, we call out to each other so that as a collective we see and hear one another. From that beginning, we construct the three overlapping, interacting R’s of recognition, representation and rights.

The problem with climate change, as an existential challenge to humanity, is that the interest-based model of society and politics doesn’t work. Most of the people in whose interest we are demanding action aren’t here. They haven’t been born yet. And because the areas first and most affected by climate change are the poorest regions of earth, we are talking about the least seen, least represented group on our planet. We have to imagine these people into being, and then grant them rights, and then take unprecedented, society-wide action on that basis.

More here.