Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe:

Fiction shines a light on the human condition by putting people into imaginary situations and envisioning what might happen. Science fiction expands this technique by considering situations in the future, with advanced technology, or with utterly different social contexts. Seth MacFarlane’s show The Orville is good old-fashioned space opera, but it’s also a laboratory for exploring the intricacies of human behavior. There are interpersonal conflicts, sexual politics, alien perspectives, and grappling with the implications of technology. I talk with Seth about all these issues, and maybe a little bit about whether it’s a good idea to block people on Twitter.

More here.

Colleen Walsh in The Harvard Gazette:

The mass shootings over the weekend in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, killed at least 31 people and wounded scores more. Those incidents were just the latest such deadly attacks in the United States, which has tallied more than 250 since Jan. 1, according to a new report by Gun Violence Archive. The group defines a mass shooting as one that claims the lives of at least four victims. David Hemenway, professor of  health policy at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, director of the Harvard Injury Control Research Center, and author of the 2006 book “Private Guns, Public Health,” has spent much of his career studying gun violence. He spoke with the Gazette recently about what can be done to stop mass shootings.

GAZETTE: How do other countries, where mass killings are less common, handle gun issues differently?

HEMENWAY: First, it’s important to recognize the other high-income countries start off with many fewer guns and much stronger gun laws. Second, often when there is a mass shooting in another country it’s a time when everyone is thinking about guns, and it becomes an opportunity to think about what kinds of gun laws are needed. Typically it is a time when countries improve their gun laws, making them stronger, not solely to prevent mass shootings but to also to help prevent other firearm-related problems, such as homicides, suicides, gun robbery, gun intimidations, and gun accidents.

More here.

Rachel Connolly at The Baffler:

But there is a catch. This groundbreaking research is relevant mostly to people of European descent. In short: white people. While every GWAS uses a vast amount of genetic data, it is often of European origin only. And while it is well known that findings from the genetic data of one ethnic group cannot be easily generalized to another population, the practice persists. This is acknowledged as a flaw by researchers in almost every study I consulted, and yet none had taken steps to mitigate it. Additionally, the disparity has hardly been reported on.

In the second paragraph of the July anorexia study, the researchers state plainly that only genetic data of European origin was used—but not one of the mainstream news outlets celebrating this groundbreaking scientific advance included any mention of this. It wasn’t in the Guardian, which ran a selection of letters and news pieces on the study, or in the Wall Street Journal.

more here.

Richard Carwardine at Literary Review:

Frederick Douglass – runaway slave, radical activist, brilliant orator and writer, tireless advocate for his race, political office-holder – lays claim to being the most influential African-American of all time. Certainly, no other black American life has been more remarkable or significant, and few other lives, black or white, have lent themselves, as did Douglass’s, to the publication of three separate and bestselling autobiographies, each of them an essential source for a biographer. In his mid-twenties, newly established as an abolitionist celebrity, he wrote Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, a dramatic account in simple but vivid prose of his twenty years as a Maryland slave; further autobiographies, published in 1855 and 1881, stylishly recorded his activities as a campaigner for emancipation and racial equality both during the civil war that secured black freedom and in its aftermath, when the halting steps towards black civil rights faltered.

more here.

Emma Taggart in My Modern Met:

Today, many science books are full of detailed photos that reveal the intricate parts of plant life, but prior to the invention of photography (and macro photography), it was up to botanical illustrators and researchers to record the fascinating forms of flora and fauna. One scientist who recorded his findings with drawings is Ernst Heinrich Haeckel, a German biologist, naturalist, philosopher, and physician.

Made during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, his brilliantly colorful and highly stylized drawings, watercolors, and sketches reveal how different forms of plant life appear under the microscope. Although each hand-drawn organism looks like something from a science fiction book, Haeckel’s body of work sheds light on the incredible hidden intricacies of real, natural forms that inhabit the Earth.

Born in Germany in 1834, Ernst Haeckel studied medicine at the University of Berlin and graduated in 1857. While he was a student, his professor Johannes Müller, took him on a summer field trip to observe small sea creatures off the coast of Heligoland in the North Sea, sparking his life-long fascination for natural forms and biology. In 1859, when Haeckel was 25, he traveled to Italy where he spent time in Napoli discovering his artistic talent. In the same year, he went to Messina where he studied the structures of radiolarians (microscopic protozoa that produce intricate mineral skeletons). He published 59 scientific illustrations between 1860 and 1862, along with the original microscope slides.

More here. (Note: Thanks to dear friend Bim Bissel)

Sudip Bose at The American Scholar:

During the three years that Billy Budd took shape, Britten and Forster occasionally disagreed about just how brazen the piece should be. In one instance, Forster complained that one of Claggart’s arias was just not hot-blooded enough. “I want passion—love constricted, perverted, poisoned, but nevertheless flowing down its agonising channel; a sexual discharge gone evil,” Forster wrote. “Not soggy depression or growling remorse.” Britten—who had largely been circumspect about his own homosexuality, publicly avoiding the subject of his long relationship with the tenor Peter Pears—strongly disagreed, and as a consequence, a rift opened up between librettist and composer, the one a daring idealist, the other a more cautious realist.

For the most part, Billy Budd faithfully adheres to Melville’s story, though it differs from the novella in a few prominent ways. One of these has to do with the character of Captain Vere, a prudent, intelligent figure in the novella who ultimately condemns Billy despite his paternal fondness for him.

more here.

Emma Yasinsky in The Scientist:

This past April, Mount Sinai oncologist Joshua Brody and his team announced a clinical trial that delivers immune modulators directly to the tumor environment that stimulate a patient’s immune system to treat several types of cancer. The approach is called in situ vaccination, and it can take many forms such as a virus or targeted radiation. What they all have in common is that they are delivered directly into a tumor to help the immune system recognize and attack the malignancy and then, ideally, other cancer cells that have metastasized throughout the body.

Along with the clinical trial announcement, Brody and his team published preliminary data showing that 8 out of 11 patients with lymphoma saw their treated tumors shrink, and in three patients even distant, untreated tumors dwindled in response to the in situ vaccine. Brody says that although he knew the treatment was “supposed to work” based on his preclinical work, after administering it to the first few people in the study, he was “surprised how profound the tumor regressions were . . . and how long lasting some of them have been.” One patient had a complete response lasting more than four years and a patient with a partial response is still in ongoing remission six months after treatment. Brody adds that since the data were published, another patient has been treated and is also in continued remission six months later.

More here.

“They are the ones who broke the law, they are the ones who endangered their own children on their trek. The United States on the other hand, goes to extraordinary lengths to protect them while the parents go through a short detention period.”
– Jeff Sessions

excerpt from “Cajas/Boxes of Zero Tolerance”

They are the ones who were told their children
were taken to bathe—and not returned. They

are the ones whose nursing babies and toddlers
were forced to wean and left in wet diapers.

And their other young ones also cried
for mami, for papá, for tía, for ____

and were told they were an orchestra without
a conductor. And enough in this country

elected the conductor with his fist
in the air, without music, without ocean,

without moon, without the very earth. He
was the one and she another and he yet

another who said they’d be taking her child
the next day and said “Happy Mother’s Day.”

by Emmy Pérez
from Split This Rock

Christopher Benfey in the New York Review of Books:

In a glass case at the Musée Rodin, displaying preparatory studies, my attention settled on a terra-cotta fragment identified as “The Thinker’s Right Foot.” His foot! Suddenly, I had a completely different feel for The Thinker. And I found myself wondering whether Rodin, too, had felt that the success of the sculpture might depend in some crucial way on getting the feet right. In one of his two major statements on The Thinker, when he recalled moving from his original concept of Dante in earflaps to something more universal, Rodin wrote: “I conceived another thinker, a naked man; seated upon a rock, his feet drawn under him, his fist against his teeth, he dreams.” The sequence here—the rock, the feet, the fist, the teeth, the dream—implies that thinking, as Rodin conceived of it, emerges from the feet and moves upward and inward. I looked carefully at the Thinker’s right foot, how the big toe slides under the adjacent, sheltering toe to get a better grip.

I half-remembered an essay Georges Bataille wrote on “The Big Toe,” in which he noted that man, “though the most noble of animals… has feet, and these feet independently lead an ignoble life.” Bataille touches here on what one might call the cultural history of feet. Feet are base; they are in touch with dirt, everything that humans, in their vanity, wish to rise above.

More here.

Jean-Pierre Dupuy in Inference Review:

DANIEL ELLSBERG is well known for releasing the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times and the Washington Post. Their publication led indirectly to the Watergate scandal and the downfall of Richard Nixon. Less well known is that in 1961, while working for the RAND Corporation as an economist specializing in rational choice theory, Ellsberg was seconded to the White House and the Pentagon to work alongside Robert McNamara drawing up plans for a nuclear war. This period is the subject of Ellsberg’s new book.

When he left RAND in January 1970, Ellsberg made copies of all the documents in his safe, not only those pertaining to the Vietnam War.¹ It seemed obvious to him that making known the horrifying risks involved in American nuclear strategy was much more important than denouncing the Vietnam scandal. Upon reflection, Ellsberg elected to release the Vietnam papers first. At the beginning of the book, he explains this decision in pragmatic terms, namely the urgency of ending an absurd war. But the remainder of the book suggests another, deeper reason: a feeling of helplessness. Despite the inherent dangers of nuclear weapons, it seemed to Ellsberg that the world remained “blind to apocalypse,” as Günther Anders has put it.²

The Doomsday Machine is a fantastic book, albeit one with an extraordinary omission: the index contains no entry for “deterrence,” a concept that is usually integral to any discussion about nuclear warfare.

More here.

C.J. Polychroniou in Truthout:

Noam, what are some of the tangible and intangible factors that seem to be pushing the country — socially, politically and economically — backward rather than forward?

Noam Chomsky: Trump’s diatribes successfully inflame his audience, many of whom apparently feel deeply threatened by diversity, cultural change, or simply the recognition that the White Christian nation of their collective imagination is changing before their eyes. White supremacy is nothing new in the U.S. The late George Frederickson’s comparative studies of white supremacy found the U.S. to be almost off the chart, more extreme even than Apartheid South Africa. As late as the 1960s the U.S. had anti-miscegenation laws so extreme that the Nazis refused to adopt them as a model for their racist Nuremberg laws. And the power of Southern Democrats was so great that until ‘60s activism shattered the framework of legal racism — if not its practice by other means — even New Deal federal housing programs enforced segregation, barring Black people from new housing programs.

It goes back to the country’s origins. While progressive in many ways by the standards of the day, the U.S. was founded on two brutal racist principles: the most hideous system of slavery in human history, the source of much of its wealth (and England’s too), and the need to rid the national territory of Native Americans, whom the Declaration of Independence explicitly describes as “the merciless Indian savages,” and whom the framers saw as barring the expansion of the “superior” race.

More here.

Richard Lea at The Guardian:

Born in an Ohio steel town in the depths of the Great Depression, Morrison carved out a literary home for the voices of African Americans, first as an acclaimed editor and then with novels such as The Bluest Eye, Song of Solomon and Beloved. Over the course of a career that garnered honours including the Pulitzer prize, the Nobel prize, the Légion d’Honneur and a Presidential Medal of Freedom presented to her in 2012 by her friend Barack Obama, her work became part of the fabric of American life as it was woven into high school syllabuses up and down the country.

The house where Morrison was born in 1931 stands about a mile from the gates of the Lorain steel factory in Ohio – the first of a series of apartments the family lived in while her father added odd jobs to his shifts at the plant to make the rent. He defied his supervisor and took a second unionised job so he could send his daughter to college. After studying English at Howard University and Cornell, she returned to Washington DC to teach, marrying the architect Howard Morrison and giving birth to two sons.

more here.

Francis Gooding at the LRB:

‘We have already exited the state of environmental conditions that allowed the human animal to evolve in the first place,’ Wallace-Wells writes, ‘in an unsure and unplanned bet on just what that animal can endure. The climate system that raised us, and raised everything we now know as human civilisation, is now, like a parent, dead.’ He is not a climate scientist, so is perhaps less circumspect than he might be: the data here is designed to scare us. ‘I am alarmed,’ he writes. Who isn’t? We know exactly where we are, despite the continuous chatter of doubt and denial. Wallace-Wells is scathing about the oil industry, whose disinformation clogs public discourse and waylays political processes: ‘A more grotesque performance of corporate evilness is hardly imaginable, and, a generation from now, oil-backed denial will likely be seen as among the most heinous conspiracies against human health and well-being as have been perpetrated in the modern world.’

How on earth are we supposed to think about all this horror? How do we plan for the future or raise children knowing what we know? The magnitude and implications of climate change short-circuit the imagination. Wallace-Wells cites the novelist Amitav Ghosh, who has suggested that we fail to put climate change into proper perspective because we don’t yet have the stories to comprehend it.

more here.

Jenny Uglow at the TLS:

The laughter of Morrison’s characters disguises pain, deprivation and violation. It is laughter at a series of bad, cruel jokes. The real joke in naming Sula’s neighbourhood “The Bottom”, when it perches on barren Ohio uplands is that, in many senses it really is “the bottom” after all. Nothing is what it seems; no appearance, no relationship, can be trusted to endure.

The two earlier novels, although they anticipate the complicated and wide-ranging concerns of Song of Solomon, explore in particular the process of growing up black, female and poor. Avoiding generalities, Toni Morrison concentrates on the relation between the pressures of the community, patterns established within families (especially the models provided by mother and grandmother), and the developing sense of self. The central figures in Sula are childhood friends Sula Peace and Nel Wright, who share all their experiences until, following the death of her mother and Nel’s marriage, Sula leaves. She returns ten years later, having grown to reject convention while Nel has moulded herself into respectable domesticity; their “magical” reunion is followed by long years of bitterness.

more here.

The Most of it

He thought he kept the universe alone;
For all the voice in answer he could wake
Was but the mocking echo of his own
From some tree-hidden cliff across the lake.
Some morning from the boulder-broken beach
He would cry out on life, that what it wants
Is not its own love back in copy speech,
But counter-love, original response.
And nothing ever came of what he cried
Unless it was the embodiment that crashed
In the cliff’s talus on the other side,
And then in the far distant water splashed,
But after a time allowed for it to swim,
Instead of proving human when it neared
And someone else additional to him,
As a great buck it powerfully appeared,
Pushing the crumpled water up ahead,
And landed pouring like a waterfall,
And stumbled through the rocks with horny tread,
And forced the underbrush—and that was all.

by Robert Frost
from A Book of Luminous Things
Harvest Books, 1996

Meera Subramanian in Nature:

Crawford Lake is so small it takes just 10 minutes to stroll all the way around its shore. But beneath its surface, this pond in southern Ontario in Canada hides something special that is attracting attention from scientists around the globe. They are in search of a distinctive marker buried deep in the mud — a signal designating the moment when humans achieved such power that they started irreversibly transforming the planet. The mud layers in this lake could be ground zero for the Anthropocene — a potential new epoch of geological time.

This lake is unusually deep for its size so its waters never fully mix, which leaves its bottom undisturbed by burrowing worms or currents. Layers of sediment accumulate like tree rings, creating an archive reaching back nearly 1,000 years. In high fidelity, it has captured evidence of the Iroquois people, who cultivated maize (corn) along the lake’s banks at least 750 years ago, and then of the European settlers, who began farming and chopping down trees more than five centuries later. Now, scientists are looking for much more recent, and significant, signs of upheaval tied to humans. Core samples taken from the lake bottom “should translate into a razor-sharp signal”, says Francine McCarthy, a micropalaeontologist at nearby Brock University in St Catherines, Ontario, “and not one blurred by clams mushing it about.” McCarthy has been studying the lake since the 1980s, but she is looking at it now from a radical new perspective.

Crawford Lake is one of ten sites around the globe that researchers are studying as potential markers for the start of the Anthropocene, an as-yet-unofficial designation that is being considered for inclusion in the geological time scale.

More here.