Video length: 9:28

Elizabeth Pennisi in Science:

Weighing in at 200,000 kilograms and stretching the length of a basketball court, the blue whale is the biggest animal that’s ever lived. Now, scientists have figured out why they and other baleen whales got so huge. “It’s a cool study,” says Jakob Vinther, an evolutionary paleobologist at the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom. "I’m going to send it to my students." Biologists have long debated why some whales became the world’s biggest animals. Some have proposed that because water bears the animal’s weight, whales can move around more easily and gulp in enough food to sustain big appetites. Others have suggested that whales got big to fend off giant sharks and other megapredators. Researchers have also argued about when these animals got so huge. In 2010, Graham Slater, an evolutionary biologist currently at the University of Chicago in Illinois, argued that cetaceans—a term that includes whales and dolphins—split into different-sized groups very early in their history, perhaps 30 million years ago. Dolphins remained the shrimps of the cetacean world, filter-feeding baleen whales became the giants, and predatory beaked whales stayed in the middle size-wise, with the descendants in those three groups sticking within those early established size ranges.

However, Nicholas Pyenson, a whale expert at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., was skeptical. So a few years ago, the two decided to tap the museum’s vast cetacean fossil collection to settle the dispute. Pyenson had already surveyed living whale proportions and determined that the size of the whale correlated with the width of its cheek bones. So Pyenson measured or obtained these data from skulls of 63 extinct whale species and of 13 modern species and plotted them on a timeline that showed the whale family tree. The data showed that whales didn’t get really big early on, as Slater had suggested. Nor did they gradually get big over time. Instead they become moderately large and stayed that way until about 4.5 million years ago, Slater, Pyenson, and Jeremy Goldbogen at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, report today in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B. Then baleen whales went “from relatively big to ginormous,” Slater says. Blue whales today are 30 meters long, where until 4.5 million years ago, the biggest whales were 10 meters long.

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Neal Gabler in billmoyers.com:

Fox News creator and former chief Roger Ailes, who died at 77 last week from complications after a fall in his Florida home, may have been the most significant political figure of the last 35 years — which isn’t necessarily a compliment to those of us who believe media mavens shouldn’t also be political operatives. Ailes clearly thought differently. He simultaneously changed the contours both of American politics and American media by melding them, and in doing so changed the contours of fact and objectivity as they once were understood before the era of post-fact.

It seems a lot to put on one man, but Roger Ailes destroyed the idea of media objectivity in the name of media objectivity, the way a phony evangelist might destroy virtue in the name of virtue. Things have never been the same since. Ailes was a political acolyte of Richard Nixon, and Nixon was a media acolyte of Ailes. It was a perfect and powerful alliance — two outcasts seeking retribution. Nixon’s great contribution to American politics was to take his personal umbrage, a lifetime of slights, and nationalize it. Like so many among the aggrieved, he aspired to be an insider and was tormented by not being admitted to their ranks. In anger, he took them on, especially those he regarded as haughty elites — accused spy Alger Hiss, who was the personification of the Ivy-educated aristocrat and on whose takedown Nixon built his career; John Kennedy, who was everything Nixon wanted to be and wasn’t; and the entire liberal establishment, which would denigrate and denounce him as he rose through the political ranks. He became the avatar for every person who had suffered the same disdain and abuse, and he turned Republicanism into a therapeutic movement of social vengeance.

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Heather Ewing at The Brooklyn Rail:

In 1969 a young artist in Turin named Giulio Paolini took as his personal motto the Latin inscription—itself a quotation from Nietzsche—at the foot of an early Giorgio de Chirico self-portrait: Et quid amabo nisi quod ænigma est [And What Shall I Love If Not the Enigma]. He made the phrase into his own business card and transformed it into a public manifesto by placing it on an enormous banner hung across the main piazza in Como. This was his contribution to Campo Urbano, the public art intervention staged that year by Luciano Caramel in collaboration with Ugo Mulas and Bruno Munari, which invited artists out of their studios and galleries to engage directly with the urban environment, the spaces of daily life. For Paolini, it was the beginning of a decades-long fascination with de Chirico’s oeuvre, which Paolini has referenced, cited, and interrogated in his conceptual practice—artwork that is now the subject of the fourth season at the Center for Italian Modern Art (CIMA), which places paintings spanning much of de Chirico’s career together with works by Paolini from the 1960s to today.

This phrase “And What Shall I Love If Not the Enigma” was a touchstone as well for Philip Guston—Dore Ashton said he quoted it all his life; and it was a prompt for Sylvia Plath, too, who wrote several poems inspired by de Chirico paintings, as did Mark Strand, John Ashbery, and others (Ashbery also translated parts of de Chirico’s surrealist novelHebdomeros). I love that Louise Bourgeois and her husband, the art historian Robert Goldwater, together dedicated themselves to translating some of de Chirico’s writings. De Chirico’s work has beguiled and bedeviled a surprising number of artists and writers.

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Edwidge Danticat at Literary Hub:

The republic of Port-au-Prince, as it is often called, is a city of survivors. Even those who would like to see the country decentralized or have the capital moved elsewhere talk about creating another Port-au-Prince, a different one for sure, but an improved version of the old one. Still, Port-au-Prince is also a heartbreaking city. It is a city where a restaurant that charges over 20 American dollars for a steak might stand inches from some place where others are starving. It is a city where the dead can lie in a morgue for weeks as the family clamors for money to pay for the burial.

It is also a city where paintings line avenue walls, where street graffiti curses or praises politicians, depending on who has paid for them. It is a city of so much traffic that it has become a city of back roads, short cuts that rattle your body through hills, and knolls that at first don’t seem passable. It’s a city of motto taxis, which are better fitted for such roads. It is also a city of cell phones, where conversations often end abruptly because someone’s prepaid cards have run out of minutes. It is a city, as one of Haiti’s most famous novelists, Gary Victor, has written, where people who might run toward bullets will flee the rain, because the rain can reconfigure roads in an instant and can take more lives in a few minutes than a gun.

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Hugh Gough at the Dublin Review of Books:

Madame de Staël has attracted the attention of historians and biographers alike, not only because of her flamboyant lifestyle and unwavering sense of self importance but also because of her sheer energy and impressive literary output. Her life had all the characteristics of a romantic novel, launched as she was into the privileged world of Parisian salons before revelling in the turmoil of the French Revolution, spending years of exile in the family château near Geneva, and travelling through central and eastern Europe before finally returning to France in the early years of the Bourbon restoration. Her interests straddled the Enlightenment and early Romanticism and she was one of the few French-language authors of the late eighteenth century to immerse herself in both German and Italian culture. She met Goethe and Schiller in Weimar, was a close friend of the philosopher and founder of the University of Berlin Wilhem von Humboldt, and had her children educated by the romanticist and orientalist Auguste Wilhelm von Schlegel. Her novels Delphine (1802) and Corinne (1807) have enjoyed lasting success and De l’Allemagne, published between 1810 and 1813, was a highly original analysis of the literature, history and philosophy of a culture that her nemesis, Napoleon Bonaparte, briefly dominated but never understood.

She was a lady born into wealth and privilege, and now has a society dedicated to her memory which publishes her complete works, encourages research and hosts annual meetings in the château in Coppet which has been the home of the Necker family since the eighteenth century. Her political ideas are less well known than her novels but she was an intelligent and reflective commentator on the twists and turns of events in France until Napoleon finally sent her into exile.

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Wolfgang Streek at the New Left Review:

By the end of the 1980s at the latest, neoliberalism had become the pensée unique of both the centre left and the centre right. The old political controversies were regarded as obsolete. Attention now focused on the ‘reforms’ needed to increase national ‘competitiveness’, and these reforms were everywhere the same. They included more flexible labour markets, improved ‘incentives’ (positive at the upper end of the income distribution and negative at the bottom end), privatization and marketization both as weapons in the competition for location and cost reduction, and as a test of moral endurance. Distributional conflict was replaced by a technocratic search for the economically necessary and uniquely possible; institutions, policies and ways of life were all to be adapted to this end. It follows that all this was accompanied by the attrition of political parties—their retreat into the machinery of the state as ‘cartel parties’ [4] —with falling membership and declining electoral participation, disproportionately so at the lower end of the social scale. Beginning in the 1980s this was accompanied by a meltdown of trade-union organization, together with a dramatic decline in strike activity worldwide—altogether, in other words, a demobilization along the broadest possible front of the entire post-war machinery of democratic participation and redistribution. It all took place slowly, but at an increasing pace and developing with growing confidence into the normal state of affairs.

As a process of institutional and political regression the neoliberal revolution inaugurated a new age of post-factual politics. [5] This had become necessary because neoliberal globalization was far from actually delivering the prosperity for all that it had promised. [6] The inflation of the 1970s and the unemployment that accompanied its harsh elimination were followed by a rise in government debt in the 1980s and the restoration of public finances by ‘reforms’ of the welfare state in the 1990s. These in turn were followed, as compensation, by opening up generous opportunities for private households to access credit and get indebted. Simultaneously, growth rates declined, although or because inequality and aggregate debt kept increasing. Instead of trickle-down there was the most vulgar sort of trickle-up: growing income inequality between individuals, families, regions and, in the Eurozone, nations.

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Dominic Green at The New Criterion:

The relation of Ulysses to literary realism is one question, its relation to reality another. By the “realness” of Ulysses, we usually mean Joyce’s representation of the inner lives of Leopold Bloom, Molly Bloom, and Stephen Dedalus, from the micturant scent of grilled kidneys in the morning to the affirmations with which Molly ends Bloom’s day. No writer in English since Sterne had unpicked the layers of language and consciousness so carefully; perhaps only Henry James had woven them together with as sharp an eye for detail. Yet our focus on Joyce’s method reflects more than hisself-conscious technique and sophistication. It also reflects the distances between the novel’s conception and its composition, and between its composition and its reception.

Joyce wrote Ulysses between 1914 and 1921, in self-exile from Ireland. Sylvia Beach of Shakespeare & Co. published Ulysses in Paris on February 2, 1922, Joyce’s fortieth birthday. Notoriously, the subsequent journey of Ulysses to acceptance in the English-speaking world took longer than the original Ulysses’s return from Troy. Censorship controversies on both sides of the Atlantic turned Ulyssesinto one of those smutty books whose function is to register the tidemarks of artistic license. Meanwhile, the cultural distance between Dublin and the literary metropoles of Paris, London, and New York grew.

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James McWilliams at the Paris Review:

Still, it’s hard not to feel perplexed about Walt’s reputation as technology and scholarly fortitude converge to hone in on his secret work. When I read The Life and Adventures of Jack Engle, it seemed obvious why Whitman had published it anonymously. The novel is essentially a formulaic blend of period-piece tropes and Horatio Alger moralizing. In terms of a literary contribution, it adds nothing. It was the bland stuff that newspapers paid for, payments that Whitman needed to underwrite poetry that would transform poetry. (Leaves of Grass was self-published on July 4, 1855.) Whitman edited his life as if it were a poem. As much as he would have preferred to burn the work he didn’t want others to see—as did his self-censorious contemporaries Melville, Hawthorne, and Dickinson—he had to publish it and trust that newsprint would hold his secrets. For more than 150 years, it did—a good run.

Literary scholars and historians exist in part to demythologize the past; it’s our job. As much as I wish there were a decent argument to prevent Turpin and others from using technology to knock the myth off of Whitman, there’s not. But, since it’s out there now,read the unearthed Whitman novel yourself. You might find that the satisfaction of knowing the full truth about Whitman is rapidly ephemeral.

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Yung In Chae in Avidly:

You may remember the “Romans Go Home” scene from Monty Python’s Life of Brian. In the dead of the night, a centurion catches Brian painting the (grammatically incorrect) Latin slogan Romanes eunt domus on the walls of Pontius Pilate’s house. Revolutionary graffiti should spell the end of Brian—except, it doesn’t, because the centurion is angry about neither the medium nor the message but the grammar, and he makes Brian write the correct version, Romani ite domum, one hundred times as punishment. By sunrise, anti-Roman propaganda covers the palace. In 2017, The Handmaid’s Tale painted another Latin phrase, nolite te bastardes carborundorum, on the walls of the Internet, and once again the centurion became the butt of the joke by not getting it. “Aha,” at least one “think piece”/centurion said, “the famous phrase from Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale is grammatically incorrect!” He then explained that while nolite and te are okay, bastardes is a bastardized (ha) word, and carborundorum comes from an older, gerundive-like name for silicon carbide (carborundum). This, he concluded, reveals a greater truth about the book and Hulu show, one so obvious that he doesn’t question what it is. You don’t have to be a classicist, or know Latin, in order to figure out that nolite te bastardes carborundorum is fake. You can just read The Handmaid’s Tale, which makes no pretension to its authenticity. Roughly two hundred pages in, the Commander informs Offred, who has discovered the phrase carved into her cupboard, “That’s not real Latin […] That’s just a joke.” Atwood herself told Elisabeth Moss the same thing in Time.

As for why it’s fake, history supplies the facts, or more accurately, fun facts. Does The Handmaid’s Tale reveal anything this time? “It’s sort of hard to explain why it’s funny unless you know Latin,” the centurion—I mean, Commander—says. Oh. Maybe he wanted to add, fun fact never means fun for everyone. After all, the Commander’s revelation horrifies Offred: “It can’t only be a joke. Have I risked this, made a grab at knowledge, for a mere joke?” She had been reciting nolite te bastardes caborundorum as a prayer, hoping for meaning. In the end, how real or fake the Latin is doesn’t matter for the meaning. Upon hearing the translation—“don’t let the bastards grind you down”—Offred understands why her Handmaid predecessor wrote the phrase, and realizes that the Commander had secretly met with her, too, because where else would she have learned it? The person who fails to understand or realize anything is, for all his Latin, the Commander.

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Carl Zimmer in The New York Times:

It’s still not clear what in the brain accounts for intelligence. Neuroscientists have compared the brains of people with high and low test scores for clues, and they’ve found a few. Brain size explains a small part of the variation, for example, although there are plenty of people with small brains who score higher than others with bigger brains. Other studies hint that intelligence has something to do with how efficiently a brain can send signals from one region to another. Danielle Posthuma, a geneticist at Vrije University Amsterdam and senior author of the new paper, first became interested in the study of intelligence in the 1990s. “I’ve always been intrigued by how it works,” she said. “Is it a matter of connections in the brain, or neurotransmitters that aren’t sufficient?” Dr. Posthuma wanted to find the genes that influence intelligence. She started by studying identical twins who share the same DNA. Identical twins tended to have more similar intelligence test scores than fraternal twins, she and her colleagues found. Hundreds of other studies have come to the same conclusion, showing a clear genetic influence on intelligence. But that doesn’t mean that intelligence is determined by genes alone. Our environment exerts its own effects, only some of which scientists understand well. Lead in drinking water, for instance, can drag down test scores. In places where food doesn’t contain iodine, giving supplements to children can raise scores. Advances in DNA sequencing technology raised the possibility that researchers could find individual genes underlying differences in intelligence test scores. Some candidates were identified in small populations, but their effects did not reappear in studies on larger groups. So scientists turned to what’s now called the genome-wide association study: They sequence bits of genetic material scattered across the DNA of many unrelated people, then look to see whether people who share a particular condition — say, a high intelligence test score — also share the same genetic marker.

In 2014, Dr. Posthuma was part of a large-scale study of over 150,000 people that revealed 108 genes linked to schizophrenia. But she and her colleagues had less luck with intelligence, which has proved a hard nut to crack for a few reasons. Standard intelligence tests can take a long time to complete, making it hard to gather results on huge numbers of people. Scientists can try combining smaller studies, but they often have to merge different tests together, potentially masking the effects of genes. As a result, the first generation of genome-wide association studies on intelligence failed to find any genes. Later studies managed to turn up promising results, but when researchers turned to other groups of people, the effect of the genes again disappeared. But in the past couple of years, larger studies relying on new statistical methods finally have produced compelling evidence that particular genes really are involved in shaping human intelligence.

More here.

Parker Bauer in The Weekly Standard:

In January 1944 the up-and-coming novelist Vladimir Nabokov sent the oracular literary critic Edmund Wilson a letter, with two enclosures. The first was a sample of Nabokov's new translation of the Russian verse novel Eugene Onegin; the second was a pair of socks Wilson had lent him. The translation, he disclosed, had been done by "a new method I have found after some scientific thinking." In one sock Nabokov had poked a hole, which his wife, Vera, had sewed up with "her rather simple patching methods."

Sometimes Wilson would tuck in a note to Nabokov a paper butterfly with a wound-up rubber band, which, on opening, "buzzed out of the card like a real lepidopteron," delighting Nabokov, whose sideline was the classifying of butterfly genitalia for the Harvard Museum. Mostly by mail, the two writers carried on discourse and disputation (and sometimes just carried on, needling one another) for a quarter-century. Alas, it all ended quite badly.

Pen pals forever, or so it might have seemed: two literary minds who meshed and yet clashed, both deeply engaged but different enough to keep it interesting, masters of the amicable insult. "We have always been frank with one another," breezes Nabokov in 1956, as a kind of keynote for their entire correspondence, "and I know that you will find my criticism exhilarating." Their letters—crackling with debate on diction both Russian and English, with pleas to read this or that overlooked novel, with a crossfire of critiques of their own works—were private, even intimate. Their breakup was anything but. At the end, the combatants were flinging their charges not in personal notes but in the letters columns of literary journals where, almost cinematically, the world could enjoy the spectacle.

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Steve Taylor in Psychology Today:

Questionnaires by psychologists have shown that almost everyone – including college students – feels that time is passing faster now compared to when they were half or a quarter as old as now. And perhaps most strikingly, a number of experiments have shown that, when older people are asked to guess how long intervals of time are, or to ‘reproduce' the length of periods of time, they guess a shorter amount than younger people.

We usually become conscious of this speeding up around our late twenties, when most of us have ‘settled down.' We have steady jobs and marriages and homes and our lives become ordered into routines – the daily routine of working, coming home, having dinner and watching TV; the weekly routine of (for example) going to the gym on Monday night, going to the cinema on Wednesday night, going for a drink with friends on Friday night etc.; and the yearly routine of birthdays, bank holidays and two weeks' holiday in the summer. After a few years we start to realise that the time it takes us to run through these routines seems to be decreasing, as if we're on a turntable which is picking up speed with every rotation.

This speeding up is probably responsible for the phenomenon which psychologists call ‘forward telescoping': our tendency to think that past events have happened more recently than they actually have. Marriages, deaths, the birth of children – when we look back at these and other significant events, we're often surprised that they happened so long ago, shocked to find that it's already four years since a friend died when we thought it was only a couple of years, or that a niece or nephew is already ten years old when it only seems like three or four years since they were born.

More here. [Thanks to Ali Minai.]

Jennifer Ouellette in Physics World:

After being found guilty of heresy by the Catholic Church, Galileo Galilei was infamously placed under house arrest for the last nine years of his life. But he was far from idle during this time, writing one of the foundational works of modern science, Discourses and Mathematical Demonstrations Relating to Two New Sciences. The text includes a discussion of why it would be impossible to scale up an animal, a tree or a building to infinity. Galileo phrased it as a question of geometry – assuming a fixed shape for an object, its volume will increase at a much faster rate than its area. In practical terms, as an animal grows in size, its weight increases faster than the corresponding strength of its limbs, until the animal collapses under the force of its own weight. That’s why there could never be an animal the size of Godzilla, or Hollywood’s latest incarnation of King Kong.

In other words, there are very real constraints on how large a complex organism can grow. This is the essence of all modern-day scaling laws, and the subject of Geoffrey West’s provocative new book, Scale: the Universal Laws of Life and Death in Organisms, Cities and Companies. A physicist by training, West is a pioneer in the field of complexity science, and former director of the prestigious Santa Fe Institute in the US. Scale is the culmination of years of interdisciplinary research geared toward answering one fundamental question: could there be just a few simple rules that all complex organisms obey, whether they are animals, corporations or cities?

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From The Poke, and more here.

Eric Barker in Time:

Karen Arnold, a researcher at Boston College, followed 81 high school valedictorians and salutatorians from graduation onward to see what becomes of those who lead the academic pack. Of the 95 percent who went on to graduate college, their average GPA was 3.6, and by 1994, 60 percent had received a graduate degree. There was little debate that high school success predicted college success. Nearly 90 percent are now in professional careers with 40 percent in the highest tier jobs.They are reliable, consistent, and well-adjusted, and by all measures the majority have good lives.

But how many of these number-one high school performers go on to change the world, run the world, or impress the world? The answer seems to be clear: zero.

Commenting on the success trajectories of her subjects, Karen Arnold said, “Even though most are strong occupational achievers, the great majority of former high school valedictorians do not appear headed for the very top of adult achievement arenas.” In another interview Arnold said, “Valedictorians aren’t likely to be the future’s visionaries . . . they typically settle into the system instead of shaking it up.”

Was it just that these 81 didn’t happen to reach the stratosphere? No. Research shows that what makes students likely to be impressive in the classroom is the same thing that makes them less likely to be home-run hitters outside the classroom.

More here.