Rachel Rebouche in Boston Review:

Though the 1973 decision in Roe established a constitutionally protected right to abortion, it never guaranteed abortion access. The Supreme Court held only that state criminal laws banning abortion were an infringement of the constitutional right to privacy. Patients, in consultation with their physicians, could elect to have an abortion for any reason during the first trimester of pregnancy. In the second trimester states could regulate abortions in order to protect the pregnant person’s health or the dignity of potential life, but after the second trimester, a state was permitted to ban abortion unless terminating the pregnancy was necessary to preserve the patient’s life or health. This trimester system was abandoned in 1992, when the Court held that states could restrict abortion before viability—around twenty-four weeks of gestation—so long as the regulation did not place a “substantial obstacle in the path of a woman seeking an abortion of a nonviable fetus.” The Court’s decision to reject Roe’s trimester framework nevertheless claimed to preserve “the essential holding of Roe.”

More here.

Justin E. H. Smith in UnHerd:

Philosophers have seldom lived up to the ideal of radical doubt that they often claim as the prime directive of their tradition. They insist on questioning everything, while nonetheless holding onto many pieties. Foremost among these, perhaps, is the commandment handed down from the Oracle at Delphi and characterised by Plato as a life-motto of his master Socrates: “Know thyself.”

While this may seem an unassailable injunction, it is at least somewhat at odds with an equally ancient demand of Western philosophy, which may in fact be offered up in direct response to what the oracle says: “Don’t tell me what to do.” This response gets close to the spirit of the Cynics, who, like Plato, also believed they were following the teachings of Socrates, yet took his philosophy not to require some arduous process of self-examination, but only a simple and immediate decision to conduct one’s life according only to the law dictated by nature.

There are good reasons to defy the oracle beyond simply a distaste for taking orders. For one thing, it is not a settled matter that the commandment to “know thyself” can be followed at all, since it is not clear that there is anything to know. In the end the self may be the greatest “nothingburger” of all; there may simply be nothing there.

More here.

Carl Zimmer in the New York Times:

Ten years ago this week, Jennifer Doudna and her colleagues published the results of a test-tube experiment on bacterial genes. When the study came out in the journal Science on June 28, 2012, it did not make headline news. In fact, over the next few weeks, it did not make any news at all.

Looking back, Dr. Doudna wondered if the oversight had something to do with the wonky title she and her colleagues had chosen for the study: “A Programmable Dual RNA-Guided DNA Endonuclease in Adaptive Bacterial Immunity.”

“I suppose if I were writing the paper today, I would have chosen a different title,” Dr. Doudna, a biochemist at the University of California, Berkeley, said in an interview.

Far from an esoteric finding, the discovery pointed to a new method for editing DNA, one that might even make it possible to change human genes.

“I remember thinking very clearly, when we publish this paper, it’s like firing the starting gun at a race,” she said.

More here.

Kenan Malik in Pandaemonium:

“Birmingham will not tolerate the disrespect of our Prophet… You will have repercussions for your actions.” So claimed a leader of a Muslim protest against the film The Lady of Heaven. There were similar protests in cities from Bradford to London. Fear of “repercussions” led the cinema chain Cineworld to withdraw the film from all its outlets; another chain, Showcase, soon followed.

But who determines that a film is “disrespectful”, and to whom? Who speaks for Muslims? The Muslims who made the film? Or those who feel offended by it?

Whenever there is a protest about a film or a book or a play deemed racist or disrespectful to a particular community, many, particularly on the left, take those claims at face value, especially if that community happens to be Muslim. They take at face value, too, that the protesters are in some sense speaking for “the community” or the faith. Yet what is often called “offence to a community” is often a debate within those communities. And nowhere is this clearer than in the row over The Lady of Heaven.

More here.

Also watch tributes by Samantha Bee, Stephen Colbert, Steve Carell, Bassem Youssaf, Olivia Munn, Jimmy Kimmel and Ed Helms.

Sally Rooney in The Guardian:

When I first read Natalia Ginzburg’s work several years ago, I felt as if I was reading something that had been written for me, something that had been written almost inside my own head or heart. I was astonished that I had never encountered Ginzburg’s work before: that no one, knowing me, had ever told me about her books. It was as if her writing was a very important secret that I had been waiting all my life to discover. Far more than anything I myself had ever written or even tried to write, her words seemed to express something completely true about my experience of living, and about life itself. This kind of transformative encounter with a book is, for me, very rare, a moment of contact with what seems to be the essence of human existence. For this reason, I wanted to write a little about Natalia Ginzburg and her novel All Our Yesterdays. I would like to address myself in particular to other readers who are right now awaiting, whether they know it or not, their first and special meeting with her work.

More here.

Freda Kreier in Nature:

The viruses that cause the tropical diseases Zika and dengue fever can hijack the body odour of their hosts to their advantage, a study shows¹. Both viruses alter how mice smell to make the animals more appetizing to hungry mosquitoes. This tactic could help the viruses to catch a ride to fresh targets, says co-author Gong Cheng, a microbiologist at Tsinghua University in Beijing. Techniques for interrupting this smelly takeover could help to control not only Zika and dengue, but also other mosquito-borne diseases, he says. The research was published on 30 June in Cell.

Researchers have known for decades that some diseases can change how their hosts smell, says James Logan, a disease-control specialist at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. Certain viruses and microorganisms have evolved to use this to their advantage. For instance, plants that are infected with the Cucumber mosaic virus release a molecule that attracts aphids, which the virus uses as a vector to infect new plants². Scientists have also found that parasites that cause malaria advertise their hosts to passing mosquitoes through changes in body odour³.

To see whether the Zika and dengue viruses had also evolved ways to attract mosquitoes’ attention, Cheng and his colleagues infected mice with one or the other. They then placed infected and healthy mice in separate enclosures and wafted their scent into a mosquito-filled chamber that was connected to both enclosures, to see which group the insects preferred. Around 65–70% of the mosquitoes moved towards the enclosure with infected mice, suggesting that these animals smelled more appealing.

More here.

Forbidden

Let me go back to my father
in the body of my mother the day he told her
having black children won’t save you when the revolution comes.
Let me do more than laugh,
like she did.

Let me go back to my mother and do more
than roll my eyes when she tells me,
I think deep down, in a past life, I was a black blues singer.

My mother remembers the convent
where she worked after I was born;
the nuns who played with me while she cleaned.

My father remembers the bedroom window
of their first apartment; his tired body
climbing through. It was best,

they agreed, if she signed the lease alone.

Scholars conclude:
the myths of violence that surround the black male
body protect the white female body

from harm. I conclude:
race was not not a factor in my parents’ attraction.
I am the product of their curiosity, their vengeance, their need.

They rescued each other from stories scripted
onto their bodies. They tasted forbidden and devoured each other
whole.

Let me build a house
where their memories diverge.

by Jamaica Baldwin
from the Smith College Poetry Center, 2008