Ryu Spaeth in The New Republic:

There is a certain kind of liberally inclined writer who sees Donald Trump’s America as a nation in crisis. At every turn, in every tweet, she is confronted by the signs of an ongoing catastrophe, from which it may be too late to escape. An ugly, vicious intolerance spread on social media; the collapse of norms once considered sacred; a crass narrow-mindedness surreally celebrated by some of this country’s most powerful institutions—these are all elements in the gathering storm of a new, distinctly American fascism. The twist is that this crisis has its source, she contends, not in the person of Trump, but in his frothing-mouthed opposition: the left.

That, roughly speaking, is the thesis of a group of writers who, since Trump’s election in 2016, have chastised the left for its supposedly histrionic excesses. Their enemies extend well beyond the hashtag resistance, and their fire is aimed, like a Catherine wheel, in all directions, hitting social justice warriors, elite universities, millennials, #MeToo, pussy hat–wearing women, and columnists at Teen Vogue. Everyone from Ta-Nehisi Coates down to random Facebook commenters is taken to task, which makes for a sprawling, hard-to-define target. These writers might call their bugbear “woke culture”: a kind of vigilance against misogyny, racism, and other forms of inequality expressed in art, entertainment, and everyday life.

More here.

Thomas Moller Nielsen in The Philosophical Salon:

In the appendix to an article recently published on The Philosophical Salon website, Slavoj Žižek offers a response to the accusations of racism, repetition, reactionaryism and charlatanism that I made against him in an article published last month in the journal Current Affairs.

Arguably, what is most noteworthy about Žižek’s response is not what it says, but what it omits. In particular, Žižek offers no defense of – or apology for – his racist suggestion that pedophilia is “a key constituent of the very identity” of “Pakistani Muslim youth”; he offers no defense of his preposterous preference for “the worst of Stalinism [over] the best of the liberal-capitalist welfare state”; he provides no rationalization of his ridiculous claim that all forms of political Islam ultimately reduce to fascism or Wahhabi-Salafism; he offers no justification for his outrageous suggestion of the acceptability of Western state terrorism and the permissibility of “violat[ing] elementary moral norms”; he supplies no further buttressing of his flimsily-defended assertion of why he believes “right-wing chaos” is a necessary precursor to progressive political change; he offers no attempt to render consistent his belief that US President Donald Trump will provide such “right-wing chaos” with his view that Trump is also a “pretty ordinary centrist liberal”[i]; he provides no explanation for why he advocated abstention in the Macron vs Le Pen 2017 French Presidential election, given his (Žižek’s) professed belief that Le Pen is an “anti-immigrant populist” who represents “the principal threat to Europe”; he makes no admission of, or apology for, the fact that his 2018 book Like a Thief in Broad Daylight was deceptively marketed as a book about technology’s impact on human affairs, when in fact the book was largely about sex; he makes no attempt to clarify what he means by “dialectical materialism”, or to render the dozen or so (often amusingly) distinct definitions he has previously offered of the term consistent; he offers no defense or retraction of his ridiculous assertion that the world (according to quantum mechanics) is a “positively charged void, and that particular things appear when the balance of the void is disturbed”; and, finally – and perhaps somewhat forgivably – he offers no attempt to explain what on earth (e.g.) animal sex has to do with Hegelian interpretations of quantum mechanics.

More here.

Michael Crowley in Spiked:

It’s the year of John Ruskin. 2019 is the bicentennial of his birth and there continues to be events to mark it. Perhaps the celebrations will prove to be a turning point for him. For though during his lifetime, and for a generation or so afterwards, Ruskin was hugely influential, his achievements have now been neglected for decades. His collected works run to 39 volumes; he wrote around 250 books during his long life. As an author he commanded international respect, attracting praise from figures as varied as Tolstoy, George Eliot, Proust and Ghandi. He was cited as an influence by Clement Atlee and the founders of the National Trust. His ideas helped found the Labour Party and the welfare state. Gladstone wanted to make him poet laureate. Yet most of his books are now out of print. While you might see books about him, you would be lucky to find his work even in secondhand bookshops. Few artists have experienced such a decline in reputation. There are many factors in this steep descent, both personal and professional, and they began mid-way through Ruskin’s career. Chief among the personal is Ruskin’s failed marriage to Effie Gray, which was annulled on the grounds of impotency. Effie subsequently married Ruskin’s friend, the Pre-Raphaelite artist John Everett Millais, and the scandal at the time was injurious to both parties. The affair is dramatised in Emma Thompson’s 2014 film Effie Gray.

Four years after the annulment, at the age of 39, Ruskin became infatuated with one of his drawing pupils, 10-year-old Rose La Touche. When she was 18 and he 47, he proposed marriage and Rose refused. The situation was complicated because Rose’s mother had designs on Ruskin. Three years later, Rose died – possibly of anorexia – which broke Ruskin’s own vulnerable mental health. There was no suggestion of any impropriety and this second romantic disaster was not as public at the time as his annulled marriage, but both episodes have subsequently got in the way of his work to the degree that he is too neglected by some and completely dismissed by others. His work fell foul of censorious opprobrium 150 years ago, and is doing so again in an age when artists are rarely judged for their work alone.

More here.

Archa Fox in The Scientist:

I have a clear memory of presenting my initial results about a “failed” protein at a lab meeting with my postdoctoral advisor Angus Lamond at the University of Dundee in Scotland and the rest of his group. It was the summer of 2000, and for the first few months of my postdoc I had been fusing green fluorescent protein with novel proteins that had recently been identified by mass spectrometry as residing in the nucleolus. I engineered HeLa cells to produce copious amounts of these fusion proteins, and watched where they went. Most migrated to the nucleolus, as expected, but one protein steadfastly refused. Instead, it formed nuclear dots that were much smaller than the large and obvious nucleoli. I was really worried about the messiness of this result, but also intrigued. To my relief, instead of being disappointed that the protein was not doing what we had expected, Angus and my lab mates encouraged me to explore it further. The group had access to antibodies against many cellular structures, so I quickly established that these nuclear dots were different from any known nuclear bodies. But having generated much of my data with overexpressed protein, it was critical to make sure that the endogenous form of the protein also localized to the same nuclear dots, and that what I had seen were not simply artifacts of my approach.

We created an antibody against the protein and incubated it with HeLa cells. It was an incredibly nerve-wracking moment looking down the microscope to see what the antibody had stained. Thankfully, it worked. I was ecstatic when I saw that it had picked out the same small nuclear dots that I had identified with GFP. In 2002, I published a manuscript introducing the scientific community to paraspeckles— orbs of protein and nucleic acid 360 nanometers in diameter, squeezed next to the more famous and larger structures called nuclear speckles. Since then, paraspeckles have become an established part of cell biology; there are more than 250 articles on them, and they have already found their way into some textbooks. We now know they are membraneless organelles seeded by a long noncoding RNA (lncRNA), formed through a well-characterized physical phenomenon known as liquid-liquid phase separation, and composed of numerous proteins and RNA molecules. We also know that they can alter gene regulation when cells get stressed, an important mechanism for maintaining cell homeostasis and one that appears to be disrupted in many diseases.

More here.