Catherine Offord in The Scientist:

As a grad student in cell biology, Shaeri Mukherjee was always on the lookout for new ways to fiddle with cells’ internal structures. It was the early 2000s, and Mukherjee was working in Dennis Shields’s lab at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, studying how cells organize the internal transport of proteins and other cargo. She was particularly interested in the Golgi apparatus, a cluster of membrane-bound compartments that help coordinate this trafficking, and spent much of her time manipulating the organelle’s activity to try to better understand how it works. Genetics methods could slow down or alter the organelle’s structure in days; certain pharmacological agents made it disintegrate in less than half an hour. But in 2008, Mukherjee stumbled across a new and much faster way to cause intracellular mayhem.

More here.

Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker:

What exactly is an “oral history,” and why would we need one? Most history begins and ends with personal witness, and even written documents, after all, were very often once spoken memories, with many of the best histories depending on recollected conversation, from Boswell’s life of Dr. Johnson to the court memoirs of Saint-Simon. Yet the term has become so much a part of our book culture that it tells us to expect something very specific: a heavily edited chain of first-person recollections, broken into distinct related bits, about a place or a system or an event. Although the contemporary version has roots in the oral histories compiled by the W.P.A. in the nineteen-thirties, it seems to derive, in form, from documentary films of the sixties like those of D. A. Pennebaker and Richard Leacock, in which testimony is offered in sequential counterpoint, without explicit commentary.

The significant promise of oral history, as opposed to the obviously written kind, is that the parade of first-person witnesses, unimpeded by editorial interference, might, at last, tell it like it is. Though oral history from below produced blue-collar pop masterpieces in Studs Terkel’s “Hard Times” and “Working,” the genre now mostly amplifies history very much from above. So, after Jean Stein and George Plimpton’s fine oral history “American Journey” (1971), a chorus of voices speaking on the train bringing home Bobby Kennedy’s body, their subsequent and even more successful one, “Edie” (1982), was devoted to the Warholite-socialite Edie Sedgwick.

More here.

Gabrielle Schwarz at Artforum:

HERE IS WHAT WE KNOW: In 1979, Ana Mendieta, a young, up-and-coming artist fresh off a solo show at the feminist co-op A.I.R. Gallery, met the older, more famous Carl Andre, a so-called founding father of Minimalism. The artists embarked on a romantic and, by several accounts, tempestuous relationship. In 1985, Mendieta died after falling from the window of Andre’s thirty-fourth-floor apartment in New York’s Greenwich Village. He was tried, and acquitted, for her murder. Now eighty-seven, Andre—still living, somewhat astoundingly, in that same apartment—has carried on with his career, exhibiting regularly in museums and galleries throughout the world. Yet not everyone is convinced of his innocence, as we hear in Death of an Artist, a six-episode podcast from writer-curator Helen Molesworth. In addition to offering a précis on the defects of the US justice system, the series reframes abiding questions about art through the lens of Mendieta’s case: Are artists’ lives—and deaths—relevant when discussing their work? What about when we suspect that they have committed a terrible crime? Who benefits from silence, and from speaking up?

more here.

Freya Johnston at Literary Review:

Children do not tend to feature prominently in the satirical works of the ‘Prince of Caricatura’, James Gillray. As someone professionally committed to excoriating the politicians and celebrities of his day, he was paid to train his eye on the grown-ups. One exception to this rule comes in A March to the Bank, a vast, elaborate print of 1787. It was published in the wake of the anti-Catholic Gordon Riots in London and reflects the city’s outrage at the subsequent military crackdown on public disorder. Gillray blends straight portraiture with lurid exaggeration in his etching: an absurdly dandified, impossibly skinny officer goosesteps over a mob of Londoners, who lie crushed and abandoned in various states of disarray. At the centre of the picture, with the officer’s foot daintily poised on her midriff, lies the grotesque, ungainly figure of a fishwife, still grasping a basket of eels, her hefty legs splayed wide open. A fragment of cloth barely covers her genitals. Next to her lies a baby boy, perhaps her son, who is naked from the waist down and spread-eagled on the edge of the pavement. An impassive-looking soldier has placed the tip of his boot squarely on the child’s face.

more here.

Joshua Sokol in The New York Times:

Orli Snir, a biologist at the Rockefeller University in New York, couldn’t keep her ants alive. She had plucked pupae from a colony of clonal raider ants, where the sesame seed-size offspring that looked like puffed rice cereal were being fussed over by both younger larvae and older adult ants. Then she had isolated each pupa into a tiny, dry test tube. And every time, they drowned. More specifically, each pupa was leaking so much watery, golden-tinted fluid it was struggling to breathe. But they lived when Dr. Snir whisked the fluid away with a capillary tube. Her humble observation led down a strange path of experiments toward a bizarre but inescapable conclusion: This mysterious ant goo functions a lot like milk.

Not just one ant species uses this milk, either. Perhaps all ants do, according to a paper led by Dr. Snir that was published Wednesday in the journal Nature. It adds ants among other unexpected creatures like pigeons, spiders and beetles that feed each other milk-like fluids. And much like milk in mammals, it knits together ants of different generations — and the larger ant society, too. After first noticing the strange secretions, Dr. Snir scanned through the scientific literature and it seemed that her ant pupae were oozing something that was mostly unknown to science. She shared what she had found with her co-author, Daniel Kronauer, who leads a research group on ant evolution at Rockefeller. “My first thought was, ‘This is crazy,’” he said.

More here.

Sigal Samuel in Vox:

For over a decade, scientists have been grappling with the alarming realization that many published findings — in fields ranging from psychology to cancer biology — may actually be wrong. Or at least, we don’t know if they’re right, because they just don’t hold up when other scientists repeat the same experiments, a process known as replication. In a 2015 attempt to reproduce 100 psychology studies from high-ranking journals, only 39 of them replicated. And in 2018, one effort to repeat influential studies found that 14 out of 28 — just half — replicated. Another attempt found that only 13 out of 21 social science results picked from the journals Science and Nature could be reproduced.

This is known as the “replication crisis,” and it’s devastating. The ability to repeat an experiment and get consistent results is the bedrock of science. If important experiments didn’t really find what they claimed to, that could lead to iffy treatments and a loss of trust in science more broadly. So scientists have done a lot of tinkering to try to fix this crisis. They’ve come up with “open science” practices that help somewhat — like preregistration, where a scientist announces how she’ll conduct her study before actually doing the study — and journals have gotten better about retracting bad papers. Yet top journals still publish shoddy papers, and other researchers still cite and build on them.

This is where the Transparent Replications project comes in.

More here.

Brittany’s Tattoo

—The Haven House for homeless Women and Children

… Her tattoo is no stone-cold Lady Justice—
Tattered blindfold, sword, scales in balance—

… just the ink-black cursive word
Justice cutting over the upward

… thrust of her jugular—
from her throat to the jug band

… of her heart to the ovation
of her brain stretches that thin, blue tether.

………… Only Justice
…… because when Brittany needs to believe
the word’s wine-red truth, she presses

… that wormy vein to feel blood
thunder beneath her fingers.

by Lauren Marie Schmidt
from Filthy Labors
Curbstone Books 2017

From the website of the BFI:

In 1952, the Sight and Sound team had the novel idea of asking critics to name the greatest films of all time. The tradition became decennial, increasing in size and prestige as the decades passed.

The Sight and Sound poll is now a major bellwether of critical opinion on cinema and this year’s edition (its eighth) is the largest ever, with 1,639 participating critics, programmers, curators, archivists and academics each submitting their top ten ballot. What has risen up the ranks? What has fallen? Has 2012’s winner Vertigo held on to its title? Find out below.

More here.

Gabi Laske in The Conversation:

The magma that comes out of Mauna Loa comes from a series of magma chambers found between about 1 and 25 miles (2 and 40 km) below the surface. These magma chambers are only temporary storage places with magma and gases, and are not where the magma originally came from.

The origin is much deeper in Earth’s mantle, perhaps more than 620 miles (1,000 km) deep. Some scientists even postulate that the magma comes from a depth of 1,800 miles (2,900 km), where the mantle meets Earth’s core.

Earth’s crust is made up of tectonic plates that are slowly moving, at about the same speed as a fingernail grows. Volcanoes typically occur where these plates either move away from each other or where one pushes beneath another. But volcanoes can also be in the middle of plates, as Hawaii’s volcanoes are in the Pacific Plate.

More here.

Kitty Drake in The Guardian:

In this provocative book, Rebecca Giblin and Cory Doctorow argue that, today, every working artist is a bond servant. Culture is the bait adverts are sold around, but artists see almost nothing of the billions Google, Facebook and Apple and make off their backs. We have entered a new era of “chokepoint capitalism”, in which businesses snake their way between audiences and creatives to harvest money that should rightfully belong to the artist.

An early chapter sketches the growth of Amazon, a relatively straightforward example of the phenomenon. First the company got publishers hooked on its site by offering them great rates. Once it became apparent they couldn’t survive without it, Amazon reduced their cut of the cover price. The image of the chokepoint that recurs throughout this book is an evocatively gruesome one. There is just one pipeline through which authors can access their readers, and Amazon is squeezing it, dictating exactly which books make it to the other side, and at what price.

More here.