Justin E. H. Smith in his Substack Newsletter:

The show will be airing once a month, and I already have several episodes recorded. I am always interested in hearing pitches for new episodes, with guests who either have some weighty credentials in a given area (e.g., a biochemist who wants to address with me the question “What is life?”), or who have some demonstrable ability to speak about a topic in a compelling way (e.g., I’m recording an episode on friendship with someone whose credentials in this area are that he is my old old friend and I know him to be an excellent raconteur). [3QD Editor’s Note: the friend mentioned here happens to be yours truly—S. Abbas Raza]

I could say a great deal more about this project, but I think it’s enough to state that it is really fun and weird and a departure from the persona you might think you know through my writing. I’m not saying I can do anything like a good Terri Gross, but my goal in each of the dialogues is, to the extent possible, to “passer la parole”, to let the other person speak —ideally at least two-thirds of the time—, and otherwise just to enjoy the art of conversation while also leaving a record of it. The show will no doubt evolve in unexpected ways, and the first episodes will surely have a rough quality to them (that’s me playing the opening line on guitar, for example). But I gather no one listens to podcasts for their production value —if you want that you can listen to Rachel Maddow or whatever—, and I think I read somewhere that the number of “umms” and “uhhs” in a person’s speech is directly proportional to their intelligence. So I hope you will be generous in your listening. And please, do tell a friend. And please, again, listen to my first episode with the great Agnes Callard talking about philosophy!

More here.  [And click the link at the end of the paragraph above to listen to the first episode, “What is philosophy?”]

Megan Scudellari in Nature:

The coronavirus sports a luxurious sugar coat. “It’s striking,” thought Rommie Amaro, staring at her computer simulation of one of the trademark spike proteins of SARS-CoV-2, which stick out from the virus’s surface. It was swathed in sugar molecules, known as glycans.

“When you see it with all the glycans, it’s almost unrecognizable,” says Amaro, a computational biophysical chemist at the University of California, San Diego.

Many viruses have glycans covering their outer proteins, camouflaging them from the human immune system like a wolf in sheep’s clothing. But last year, Amaro’s laboratory group and collaborators created the most detailed visualization yet of this coat, based on structural and genetic data and rendered atom-by-atom by a supercomputer. On 22 March 2020, she posted the simulation to Twitter. Within an hour, one researcher asked in a comment: what was the naked, uncoated loop sticking out of the top of the protein?

Amaro had no idea. But ten minutes later, structural biologist Jason McLellan at the University of Texas at Austin chimed in: the uncoated loop was a receptor binding domain (RBD), one of three sections of the spike that bind to receptors on human cells (see ‘A hidden spike’).

More here.

Ken Roth in Foreign Affairs:

Over the past decade, autocrats around the world have perfected the technique of “managed” or “guided” democracy. In Belarus, Egypt, Russia, Uganda, Venezuela, and elsewhere, authoritarian leaders have held periodic elections to enhance their legitimacy but monopolized the media, restricted civil society, and manipulated state institutions and resources to ensure that they remained in power.

Such methods are never foolproof, however, and their effectiveness has diminished as citizens have wised up and learned to operate within rigged systems. A growing number of autocrats have thus been forced to rely on ever starker forms of repression: they still hold periodic elections since their people have come to expect them, but they do not even pretend that these empty rituals are free or fair. The result has been the proliferation of what might be called “zombie democracies”—the living dead of electoral political systems, recognizable in form but devoid of any substance.

More here.

Sam Mills in Aeon:

The pack: that’s what they called it. A secret guide, discreetly passed to literary authors in need of money to sustain their ‘real’ art. Compiled by such an author, happy to share their experience of publishing erotica on Amazon, it offered advice to avant-garde writers keen to turn their hand to this lucrative genre. According to the pack, popular topics included:

ABDL /diaper stuff – if you’ve got the stomach for it, I would recommend writing things in this genre for immediate gratifying sales.

Gender swap/mind swap/transformation/etc – these are kind of like a teenage boy’s fantasy. Usually a man waking up in a woman’s body. These do really well.

Shifters – sort of the same as above, but more about people changing into bears/werewolves/etc – these do very well, but are quite story-led and you’d probably need to do a series to start getting some good sales.

Billionaire stuff – a dominant ridiculous billionaire and a trembling submissive hero or heroine.

Orgies/threesomes/ménage.

Historical – these sell like hot cakes! A strict baron or Lord, disciplining a servant girl or stable-hand.

The list was both reassuring and nerve-wracking. Which genre should I pick? I weighed up my own predilections versus the need to sell as many, as quickly, as I could. People tend to think authors are either loaded (with J K Rowling as the norm) or very poor. My income had been a rollercoaster over the years; now, in summer 2019, having enjoyed a luxurious view, I was zooming downwards, winds of warning hissing through me, stomach lurching with fear of the future.

More here.

Carl Zimmer in The New York Times (2011):

Vladimir Nabokov may be known to most people as the author of classic novels like “Lolita” and “Pale Fire.” But even as he was writing those books, Nabokov had a parallel existence as a self-taught expert on butterflies. He was the curator of lepidoptera at the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University, and he collected the insects across the United States. He published detailed descriptions of hundreds of species. And in a speculative moment in 1945, he came up with a sweeping hypothesis for the evolution of the butterflies he studied, a group known as the Polyommatus blues. He envisioned them coming to the New World from Asia over millions of years in a series of waves.

Few professional lepidopterists took these ideas seriously during Nabokov’s lifetime. But in the years since his death in 1977, his scientific reputation has grown. And over the past 10 years, a team of scientists has been applying gene-sequencing technology to his hypothesis about how Polyommatus blues evolved. Last week in The Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, they reported that Nabokov was absolutely right.

“It’s really quite a marvel,” said Naomi Pierce of Harvard, a co-author of the paper.

Nabokov inherited his passion for butterflies from his parents. When his father was imprisoned by the Russian authorities for his political activities, the 8-year-old Vladimir brought a butterfly to his cell as a gift. As a teenager, Nabokov went on butterfly-hunting expeditions and carefully described the specimens he caught, imitating the scientific journals he read in his spare time. Had it not been for the Russian Revolution, which forced his family into exile in 1919, Nabokov said that he might have become a full-time lepidopterist.

In his European exile, Nabokov visited butterfly collections in museums. He used the proceeds of his second novel, “King, Queen, Knave,” to finance an expedition to the Pyrenees, where he and his wife, Vera, netted more than a hundred species. The rise of the Nazis drove Nabokov into exile once more in 1940, this time to the United States. It was there that Nabokov found his greatest fame as a novelist. It was also there that he delved deepest into the science of butterflies.

Nabokov spent much of the 1940s dissecting a confusing group of species called Polyommatus blues. He developed forward-thinking ways to classifying the butterflies, based on differences in their genitalia. He argued that what were thought to be closely related species were actually only distantly related.

More here.

Ferris Jabr in The New York Times:

Imagine the Angels of Bread

This is the year that squatters evict landlords,
gazing like admirals from the rail
of the roof deck
or levitating hands in praise
of steam in the shower;
this is the year
that shawled refugees deport judges
who stare at the floor
and their swollen feet
as files are stamped
with their destination;
this is the year that police revolvers,
stove-hot, blister the fingers
of raging cops,
and nightsticks splinter
in their palms;
this is the year
that darkskinned men
lynched a century ago
return to sip coffee quietly
with the apologizing descendants
of their executioners.

This is the year that those
who swim the border’s undertow
and shiver in boxcars
are greeted with trumpets and drums
at the first railroad crossing
on the other side;
this is the year that the hands
pulling tomatoes from the vine
uproot the deed to the earth that sprouts the vine,
the hands canning tomatoes
are named in the will
that owns the bedlam of the cannery;
Read more »