David A. Bell at Dissent:

And then there is the likely next president. Emmanuel Macron is what Americans would call a cultural liberal, who supports gay marriage and is willing to condemn his own country for its past imperialist ventures. But on economic matters he is much more of a technocrat and free-marketer (his resume includes the ultra-elite École Nationale d’Administration and the Rothschild Bank) who will do little to redress growing inequalities or guard against the effects of globalization. The presidential election will be followed in June by a parliamentary election, and while Macron has already gained the endorsement of leading Socialists (including former Prime Minister Manuel Valls), his economic positions will make it impossible for much of the left to support him. Much of the traditional Socialist base of teachers, civil servants, and union organizers frankly despises him. The result could well be a formal split in the Socialist Party created by François Mitterrand in 1971, with a centrist rump joining with Macron’s new En Marche movement and other centrists like François Bayrou to form some sort of new, Blairite “Third Way” party. Hamon’s miserable 6 percent showing (which more or less match Hollande’s miserable approval ratings) has already sounded a likely death knell for the Socialists, whose membership has fallen drastically over the past few years. But can its left-wing elements find common ground with Mélenchon, the Greens, and other, smaller left-wing parties? Can they form a substantial bloc that will support Macron on condition that he take seriously his professed admiration for Scandinavian social democracy? Nothing is less clear.

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Tad Friend in The New Yorker:

On a velvety March evening in Mandeville Canyon, high above the rest of Los Angeles, Norman Lear’s living room was jammed with powerful people eager to learn the secrets of longevity. When the symposium’s first speaker asked how many people there wanted to live to two hundred, if they could remain healthy, almost every hand went up. Understandably, then, the Moroccan phyllo chicken puffs weren’t going fast. The venture capitalists were keeping slim to maintain their imposing vitality, the scientists were keeping slim because they’d read—and in some cases done—the research on caloric restriction, and the Hollywood stars were keeping slim because of course.

When Liz Blackburn, who won a Nobel Prize for her work in genetics, took questions, Goldie Hawn, regal on a comfy sofa, purred, “I have a question about the mitochondria. I’ve been told about a molecule called glutathione that helps the health of the cell?” Glutathione is a powerful antioxidant that protects cells and their mitochondria, which provide energy; some in Hollywood call it “the God molecule.” But taken in excess it can muffle a number of bodily repair mechanisms, leading to liver and kidney problems or even the rapid and potentially fatal sloughing of your skin. Blackburn gently suggested that a varied, healthy diet was best, and that no single molecule was the answer to the puzzle of aging. Yet the premise of the evening was that answers, and maybe even an encompassing solution, were just around the corner. The party was the kickoff event for the National Academy of Medicine’s Grand Challenge in Healthy Longevity, which will award at least twenty-five million dollars for breakthroughs in the field. Victor Dzau, the academy’s president, stood to acknowledge several of the scientists in the room. He praised their work with enzymes that help regulate aging; with teasing out genes that control life span in various dog breeds; and with a technique by which an old mouse is surgically connected to a young mouse, shares its blood, and within weeks becomes younger.

More here.

Matthew Hutson in Science:

If you’ve used the smartphone application Snapchat, you may have turned a photo of yourself into a disco bear or melded your face with someone else’s. Now, a group of researchers has created the most advanced technique yet for building 3D facial models on the computer. The system could improve personalized avatars in video games, facial recognition for security, and—of course—Snapchat filters. When computers process faces, they sometimes rely on a so-called 3D morphable model (3DMM). The model represents an average face, but also contains information on common patterns of deviation from that average. For example, if you have a long nose, you’re also likely to have a long chin. Given such correlations, a computer can then characterize your unique face not by storing every point in a 3D scan, but by listing just a couple hundred numbers describing your deviation from an average face, including parameters that roughly correspond to age, gender, and length of face.

There’s a catch, however. To account for all the ways faces can vary, a 3DMM needs to integrate information on many faces. Until now that has required scanning lots of people and then painstakingly labeling all of their features. Consequently, the current best models are based on only a couple hundred people—mostly white adults—and have limited ability to model people of different ages and races. Now, James Booth, a computer scientist at Imperial College London (ICL), and colleagues have developed a new method that automates the construction of 3DMMs and enables them to incorporate a wider spectrum of humanity. The method has three main steps. First, an algorithm automatically landmarks facial scans—labeling the tip of the nose and other points. Second, another algorithm lines up all the scans according to their landmarks and combines them into a model. Third, an algorithm detects and removes bad scans. “The really big contribution in this work is they show how to fully automate this process,” says William Smith, who studies computer vision at the University of York in the United Kingdom and was not involved in the study. Labeling dozens of facial features on many faces is “pretty tedious,” says Alan Brunton, a computer scientist at the Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Graphics Research in Darmstadt, Germany, who was also uninvolved. “You think it’s relatively easy to click a point, but it’s not always obvious where the corner of the mouth really is, so even when you do this manually you have some error.” But Booth and colleagues didn’t stop there. They applied their method to a set of nearly 10,000 demographically diverse facial scans. The scans were done at a science museum in London by the plastic surgeons Allan Ponniah and David Dunaway, who hoped to improve reconstructive surgery. They approached Stefanos Zafeiriou, a computer scientist at ICL for help analyzing the data. Applying the algorithm to those scans created what they call the “large scale facial model,” or LSFM. In tests against existing models, the LSFM much more accurately represented faces, the authors report in a forthcoming issue of the International Journal of Computer Vision. In one comparison, they created a model of a child’s face from a photograph. Using the LSFM, the model looked like the child. Using one of the most popular existing morphable models—which is based completely on adults—it looked like an unrelated grown-up. Booth and his colleagues even had enough scans to create more-specific morphable models for different races and ages. And their model can automatically classify faces into age groups based on shape.

More here.

Holly Williams in The Guardian:

“I did as you told me, you dirty little girl, and pulled myself off twice when I read your letter.” He might be celebrated for his epic and allusive novels, but James Joyce came straight to the point when writing to his partner, Nora Barnacle. This was the opening salvo of a letter from 1908 and is just one of scores of explicit missives he sent her.

A new stage show is celebrating such letters of desire sent by famous figures through the centuries, whether explicit or coded, erotic or romantic. Theatre-maker Rachel Mars is curating a selection to be read aloud in the performance which is part of the Hotbed “festival of sex” at Camden People’s theatre in London. These will be interspersed with anonymised modern messages: texts, tweets and dating app sexts.

If emails have done away with the fine art of correspondence, then what future is there for the sex letter compared with the instant gratification offered by a flurry of Tinder messages? There’s a certain sensuality that is surely lost when long-awaited love letters are replaced by auto-destructing Snapchat messages.

“The form of sexting is so immediate,” says Mars. “I am nostalgic for letters. There’s a craft that’s been lost in expressing some kind of desire or passion or bodily experience for someone else.”

More here.

Natalie Wolchover in Quanta:

In his 1824 book, Reflections on the Motive Power of Fire, the 28-year-old French engineer Sadi Carnot worked out a formula for how efficiently steam engines can convert heat — now known to be a random, diffuse kind of energy — into work, an orderly kind of energy that might push a piston or turn a wheel. To Carnot’s surprise, he discovered that a perfect engine’s efficiency depends only on the difference in temperature between the engine’s heat source (typically a fire) and its heat sink (typically the outside air). Work is a byproduct, Carnot realized, of heat naturally passing to a colder body from a warmer one.

Carnot died of cholera eight years later, before he could see his efficiency formula develop over the 19th century into the theory of thermodynamics: a set of universal laws dictating the interplay among temperature, heat, work, energy and entropy — a measure of energy’s incessant spreading from more- to less-energetic bodies. The laws of thermodynamics apply not only to steam engines but also to everything else: the sun, black holes, living beings and the entire universe. The theory is so simple and general that Albert Einstein deemed it likely to “never be overthrown.”

Yet since the beginning, thermodynamics has held a singularly strange status among the theories of nature.

“If physical theories were people, thermodynamics would be the village witch,” the physicist Lídia del Rio and co-authors wrote last year in Journal of Physics A. “The other theories find her somewhat odd, somehow different in nature from the rest, yet everyone comes to her for advice, and no one dares to contradict her.”

Unlike, say, the Standard Model of particle physics, which tries to get at what exists, the laws of thermodynamics only say what can and can’t be done. But one of the strangest things about the theory is that these rules seem subjective. A gas made of particles that in aggregate all appear to be the same temperature — and therefore unable to do work — might, upon closer inspection, have microscopic temperature differences that could be exploited after all. As the 19th-century physicist James Clerk Maxwell put it, “The idea of dissipation of energy depends on the extent of our knowledge.”

In recent years, a revolutionary understanding of thermodynamics has emerged that explains this subjectivity using quantum information theory — “a toddler among physical theories,” as del Rio and co-authors put it, that describes the spread of information through quantum systems.

More here. [Thanks to Sean Carroll.]

Kim Ghattas in Foreign Policy:

If ever there were a sign that the world is upside down, it is that a Muslim prince from an Arab royal family is now one of the leading voices defending human rights on the global stage. At a time when the issue seems to be taking a back seat everywhere, Prince Zeid Raad al-Hussein of Jordan, the U.N. high commissioner for human rights, has excoriated Western politicians for their xenophobia and requested an investigation into allegations of torture in Bahrain — even as the United States announced it is lifting human rights restrictions on arm sales to the kingdom.

Before the U.S. election, Zeid stood in front of the U.N. General Assembly in September and decried “race-baiting bigots who seek to gain, or retain, power by wielding prejudice and deceit at the expense of those most vulnerable.”

He explicitly called out Geert Wilders and Donald Trump in another speech, decrying Wilders’s “lies and half-truths, manipulations, and peddling of fear.” He added that his own personal background must be a nightmare for xenophobes everywhere, as a “Muslim, who is, confusingly to racists, also white-skinned; whose mother is European and father, Arab.” And since Trump’s ascension to the White House, Zeid has not shied way from criticizing him, calling the new administration’s travel ban “mean-spirited” and illegal under human rights law. In fact, he was the only prominent Arab voice on the world stage denouncing the ban and speaking out about the impact on Arab communities in the United States while Arab governments stayed mum.

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Jennifer Helinek at Open Letters Monthly:

Forgive people for renewing their obsession with Margaret Atwood’s 1985 feminist dystopian classic, The Handmaid’s Tale. Given the release of a special edition audiobook at the beginning of April, a Hulu TV adaptation premiering at the end of April, and the book’s anticipation of Trump-era surrealism, a glut of Handmaid’s Tale articles has been inevitable. The book’s narrator, Offred, tells the story of the first generation of a society called Gilead, built from the ashes of the state once known as America. In Gilead, absolute political, economic, and social misogyny becomes the law of the land, and each woman is given a specific role – housemaid, wife, or breeder. Like all breeders (called “handmaids”), Offred has been renamed for her owner; she now belongs to a powerful man named Fred (but whom the book refers to simply as “the Commander”), and her job is to provide the Commander and his barren wife with a baby.

Offred leads a regimented, tedious existence that barely distracts her from the bittersweet, tormenting influence of memory. She reflects on how Christian extremists massacred the president and Congress, froze women’s bank accounts, and outlawed female employment before completely remolding society. Her thoughts on the transition process offer some of the book’s most prescient lines, like, “They blamed it on the Islamic fanatics, at the time,” and, “The roadblocks began to appear, and Identipassses. Everyone approved of that, since it was obvious you couldn’t be too careful.”

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Eugene McCarraher at The Hedgehog Review:

Marxists can be the very best theologians, especially when they stare, unbelieving, into the abyss of historical hopelessness. Writing in the wake of the Nazi Judeocide and the specter of nuclear holocaust, Theodor Adorno, for instance, enlisted the eschatological hope of biblical religion. “The only philosophy which can be responsibly practiced in the face of despair,” he mused in the finale ofMinima Moralia (1951), regards all things “from the standpoint of redemption.” Such a philosophy uncovers the world “with its rifts and crevices, as indigent and distorted as it will appear one day in the messianic light.” To be sure, Adorno was no believer: “The reality or unreality of redemption hardly matters,” he wrote. Thus, the vantage of redemption must be “wrested from what is,” not revealed from outside history; it must be torn from a reality marked “by the same distortion and indigence which it seeks to escape.” Yet how could we elicit a promise of deliverance from a world so corrupt and misshapen? Mindful of the ancient Jewish prohibitions against soothsaying and graven images, Adorno insisted that our only purchase on the messianic future lay in “consummate negativity,” a relentless critique of the present that refused any glimpse or blueprint of utopia, a modern, secular surrogate for the prophetic iconoclasm of messianic faith.

Stuart Jeffries quotes this oft-cited passage in his “group biography” of the Frankfurt School, noting of the redemptive perspective only “how precarious it [is] to occupy it.” It’s a missed opportunity for insight. Adorno’s invocation of religion sheds invaluable light on the melancholy Marxism that so significantly informed the thought of the main thinkers among this congeries of dissident intellectuals who, in the 1920s, became informally associated with the Frankfurt-based Institute for Social Research. Returning to the inaugural moment in the history of the classical Marxist tradition—the repudiation of religion as a form of social criticism—Adorno contravened Marx in seeking to salvage and appropriate the moral authority of the sacred for critical purposes.

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Karen Wilkin at The Hudson Review:

Among the most notable of the past season’s exhibitions were revelations of studio practice in early twentieth-century Paris, the Dutch Golden Age, and seventeenth-century Spain. In London, for example, “Rodin and Dance: The Essence of Movement,” at the Courtauld Gallery, organized in collaboration with the Musée Rodin, Paris, surveyed the French master’s compelling late images of dancers. Made in the 1890s, when Auguste Rodin was in his 50s and 60s, these radically simplified drawings and sculptures bear witness to a private side of the celebrated artist. Exhibited with photographs that provided context, they docu­mented Rodin’s delight in vanguard dance, from a Cambodian troupe to Isadora Duncan and Loie Fuller. Rodin attended perfor­mances and had dancers pose for him in the studio (one acrobatic model with an exceptionally flexible spine was a favorite), responding with rapid pencil drawings, many made, as was his frequent practice, without taking his eyes off the model to glance at the page. Some of these vigorous, pared-down images were embellished with watercolor, while others remained untouched—evidence of both Rodin’s methods and his ability to distill perception into economical, evocative shapes.

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Phyllis Korkkis in The New York Times:

The workplace, like almost all places where people interact, can be a petri dish of conflict. Offensive remarks, unrealistic demands, people taking credit for others’ work, bullying — the transgressions that occur can take many forms. They also have the potential to escalate out of control and permanently damage relationships. Gabrielle S. Adams, an assistant professor at the London Business School and a visiting fellow at Harvard University, has examined the role that empathy and forgiveness can play in resolving these conflicts. In recent studies, Professor Adams found that misunderstandings often exist between the victims of harm and the people who committed the harm. In many cases, the transgressors did not intend a negative effect, whereas the victims tended to think that the damage was intentional. In addition, transgressors frequently felt guilty and wanted to be forgiven much more than their victims realized.

When someone feels wronged, it can help to actively empathize with the person who is perceived as the wrongdoer, according to a study that Professor Adams conducted along with M. Ena Inesi, also of the London Business School. That can enable the victim to realize that the transgressor may well wish to be forgiven, their study found. They came to these conclusions, in part, by having people record diaries, over a five-day period, of situations in which they thought they had harmed or offended other people, or been harmed by or offended by others. From these diaries, wide “miscalibrations” of other people’s perceptions became apparent, Professor Adams said. “We ask victims to think about what it would be like to be the transgressor, and you reduce that miscalibration,” she said. She also conducted a lab experiment in which people could select from a set of assignments. One of the assignments — testing out various juice flavors — was much more enjoyable than a different one: going through a set of nonsense words and crossing out the letter E. If given first choice of an assignment, people would almost always choose the fun juice test, which meant that the other participant was forced to take the tedious letter E assignment. As a result, the second person tended to be resentful of the first person — but the first people indicated that they hadn’t intended the harm and felt guilty about it. This is typical of many workplace conflicts, Professor Adams said. Think of bullying. Many people can cite instances in which they think they have been bullied. But how many people would say that they have bullied someone themselves? In a conflict, the people involved almost always have a different interpretation of events, Professor Adams said. This is partly because we have a built-in tendency as humans to think that we are good people, and also that we are right. By making it a point to resolve conflicts by encouraging empathy and forgiveness, workers and managers can improve workplace conditions, Professor Adams said.

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Sara Reardon in Nature:

The anaesthetic ketamine — a hallucinogenic club drug also known as Special K — has tantalized researchers who are seeking new ways to treat depression. The drug can lift a person’s mood in hours, even when depression is severe. But several ‘ketamine-like’ medications have failed to alleviate depression in clinical trials over the past decade. Now, some researchers think they know why. Emerging evidence suggests that scientists have misunderstood how ketamine fights depression. So they might have attempted to mimic the wrong biological mechanism when designing drugs to improve mood while avoiding the disorienting ketamine high. On 20 May, researchers at a meeting of the Society of Biological Psychiatry in San Diego, California, will present results suggesting that some of ketamine’s power comes from its ability to affect brain cells called glia, which support neurons. Their finding adds to recent studies contradicting a long-held idea that the drug works mainly by blocking proteins called NMDA receptors, on the surface of brain cells, which transmit signals between those cells.

At the upcoming meeting, a team led by neuroscientist Mark Rasenick of the University of Illinois at Chicago will report on tests of antidepressant drugs in cultured rat glial cells. All of the drugs that the researchers studied caused a cluster of proteins to shift position in the glial cells’ membranes, signalling to the cells to form new connections with their neighbours. But ketamine produced this effect in 15 minutes, as compared to 3 days for conventional antidepressants. Moreover, drugs that block NMDA receptors but are not antidepressants did not show the effect at all. This suggests that ketamine’s ability to bind to NMDA receptors might not be its primary weapon against depression. Rasenick’s team is not the first to suggest a different target for ketamine. A paper published in Nature in May 2016 concluded that one of ketamine’s breakdown products — not the drug itself — probably lifted depression in mice¹. And this compound affected cell proteins called AMPA receptors, instead of NMDA receptors.

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Review by Deborah Smith in The Guardian:

Ghachar Ghochar is the English-language debut of a writer already established as a leading figure in both the pan-Indian and Kannada-language literary scenes. Once again, reading beyond our tiny borders shows us what we’ve been missing, and proves the necessity of translation for a dynamic literary culture: Ghachar Ghochar is both fascinatingly different from much Indian writing in English, and provides a masterclass in crafting, particularly on the power of leaving things unsaid. In fewer than 28,000 words, Vivek Shanbhag weaves a web of suggestion and implication, to be read with a sense of mounting unease.

The opening chapter demonstrates how the short novel is the perfect form for Shanbhag’s particular talents: precise observations, accumulation of detail, narrative progression by way of oblique tangents. It opens in a Bangalore coffee shop, whose name hasn’t changed in a hundred years, andwhere the unnamed narrator unburdens himself to laconic waiter Vincent. The latter is splendidly outfitted in cummerbund and turban, and Coffee House’s tasteful oak-panelled walls are decorated with old photographs showing “just how beautiful this city was a century ago”. The narrator has no reason to be there, he confesses, “but who can admit to doing something for no reason in times like these, in a city as busy as this one?”

In a handful of deftly drawn strokes, we learn that Coffee House is his refuge from contemporary life, harking back as it does to a time before the bourgeois concerns of money-making had taken root.

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Bob Yirka in Phys.org:

A biologist with the University of Zurich has discovered a species of dragonfly whose females play dead to avoid copulating with other males once her eggs have already been fertilized. In his paper published in the journal Ecology, Rassim Khelifa recalls his first experience with a female mooreland hawker dragonfly playing dead, and what he found after further study of the species.

As Khelifa describes it, he was out collecting larvae in the Swiss Alps one day, when he happened to notice one dragonfly chasing another—suddenly, the one being chased simply stopped flying and crashed to the ground, belly up. The pursuer, he notes, paused for a moment, then moved on. As Khelifa approached the dragonfly on the ground he noted it was female and then was surprised when she suddenly awoke, turned over and flew away.

Intrigued, and suspecting the behavior was intentional, Khelifa initiated a study of the species in their native environment, watching 31 male/female pursuits over time. He reports that the females tried the fake death routine 27 times, and that it worked 21 times. He notes further that in each of the fake death attempts, the female had just left her eggs, or was on her way to tend to them again.

More here. [Thanks to Farrukh Azfar.]

Melik Kaylan in Forbes:

So first the Dutch, and then the French have voted back into the center and rejected the populist-nationalist axis. A good deal of flack still pocks the scene but you can feel a general drift on the European air. Geert Wilders, the self-appointed anti-Islam Dutch firebrand, a brave man whatever you think of his policies, got left standing at the altar. And now Marine Le Pen. Certainly the mood might yet change in France before the run-off, with more Daesh-linked attacks or other spoilers. But they already had a terror attack timed to affect the vote and it didn't work. If anything, it seems to have consolidated the center. Many still doubt the trend. Here the New York Times idly suggests that the failed far-left French candidate, Melenchon, may yet tilt things towards Le Pen: he has refused to back the new front-runner Macron in the run-off. But it won't happen.

The French, like the Dutch and Germans, are unlikely to merge the political poles, the far left and right, in the way that the anglo-saxon world has embraced. Here's why. Core Europeans have finally woken up to the extremity of the danger. By that I refer not to the inner beast of fascism or authoritarianism or whatever 'ism the bien pensant side discerns in the bud. Rather, Europeans have detected a more pressing danger – the forces from without working to push them off-balance: the Trump-Putin-Erdogan factor.

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Joe Halstead at Literary Hub:

Mount Lookout, West Virginia is a blip on the radar, little more than a collection of families, a few modest doublewide trailers, and a post office. To get to my parents’ house, you have to break off from US Route 19 and take East Mount Lookout Road, driving through a collection of trailers scattered through the hills, past big-ass trucks resting in driveways like content, fattened grizzly bears. That night, I sat in the living room with my mom and dad, watching the nation break down over Trump on live TV. My dad sat to my left, slightly in front of me, my new nephew, Joshua, bouncing on his knee. Every once in a while my dad turned around and looked at me, to make sure I was still there and that I was having a good time. He said he’d like to go kill a deer. I said I’d like that, too. Understand this about me: I’ve done this for most of my life. It’s simply part of who I am. It’s part of who you are, too. Pull back the curtain of civilization and what you see is the quasi-medieval zombie world, or a Lord of the Flies, in all of us. It’s just the modern world that keeps a lid on it. I’m tempted to indict it, but my complicity makes such a critique feel self-righteous and hypocritical.

On TV, they were debating whether Trump is a total climate-change denier or if he merely denies that human activity has contributed to climate change.

“Don’t ever be one of them environmentalists, Joey,” my dad said. His gaze turned elsewhere when he added, “First they take your job, then they take everything you got.”

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Jay Parini at Literary Review:

The problem with Fitzgerald has never been the work; it’s been the writing about him. The standard biography for some time has been Some Sort of Epic Grandeur, a 1981 study by Matthew J Bruccoli. It’s a reliable and boring compilation of facts, not as well written as the first major assessment of the life and work, The Far Side of Paradiseby Arthur Mizener (1951). Any number of lives of Fitzgerald have appeared over the decades, but I’ve not found them satisfying, in large part because they tend to portray the author as a spokesman for the so-called Jazz Age, a drunken playboy with unresolved aspirations who embodies the empty morality of the Lost Generation. One got more by reading memoirs of the period, such as Malcolm Cowley’s haunting Exile’s Return (1934), which recalls well-known American authors in Paris in the 1920s, a kind of golden age that continues to inspire young American writers to travel abroad to seek their imaginative fortunes. Fitzgerald was hardly celebrating the lifestyles of the rich and famous. Instead, he offered a rueful and remorseless critique of that world, however much he adored it.

Fitzgerald was a good Catholic boy by training, a young man who read the Gospels and understood (though he resisted the notion, almost successfully) that it’s easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for the rich to enter heaven. His wealth-bedazzled characters, including Jay Gatsby, Amory Blaine in This Side of Paradise and Gordon Sterrett in ‘May Day’, that incomparable early masterpiece of short fiction, find little pleasure in their lives. They have swallowed a notion of the American Dream that has turned into a kaleidoscopic fantasy which tantalises but never quite resolves into a steady image. There is no fun in their yearning for something they can’t possess and that nobody can ever have.

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Ingrid D. Rowland at the New York Review of Books:

But most of all, the Caravaggio originals in London’s “Beyond Caravaggio” demonstrate why the painter exerted such an overwhelming influence on patrons and colleagues alike, and why he is so passionately loved today. He can paint beautifully most of the time. He produced marvelous compositions of light beaming forth from the darkness, covered his canvases with luminous whites, full-blooded reds, velvet blacks, but above all, especially later in his career, he painted with restraint, and taste, and a gigantic, compassionate heart.

The restraint shows when we compare his work with that of his admirers. If the young Caravaggio painted several versions of a boy with fruit as a way of advertising his skill at both still life and the human figure, his pupil and follower Francesco Boneri (nicknamed Cecco del Caravaggio—“Caravaggio’s Frankie”) painted a red-haired musician surrounded by a bushel of fruit, cheese, bread, gourds, two glass flasks encased in nets, a hanging head of garlic, a glass vase full of water, and a violin—splendidly painted, like the sitter’s plume, shirt, and brocaded vest, but he could have proven his skill just as cogently with half as many objects. Caravaggio’s painting of Doubting Thomas showed the disciple sticking his index finger into the side wound of Jesus, a startling image already, but discreetly done compared with the way that Giovanni Antonio Galli, called Lo Spadarino (“Little Swordsman”), gives us Christ head-on, staring us down as he spreads the wound wider himself, daring us to play Saint Thomas with our eyes instead of our finger.

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Oset Babur in Harvard Magazine:

Imagine a business that creates a perfectly energy-efficient environment by adjusting ventilation rates in its workplace. On paper, the outcome would seem overwhelmingly positive: fewer greenhouse-gas emissions to the environment and lowered costs to the business. It’s an idyllic scenario, except for what Joseph Allen and his team at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health (HSPH) describe as the potentially serious human cost: workers with chronic migraines, nausea, fatigue, and difficulty focusing. Fortunately, these side effects are avoidable.

“The truth is, we absolutely can have buildings that are both energy-efficient and healthy,” says Allen, assistant professor of exposure assessment science. In 2015, his team published a two-part study that quantified the cognitive benefits of improved environmental conditions for workers. The first phase took place in the Syracuse University Center for Excellence, where knowledge workers, such as architects and engineers, went about their regular workdays as Allen and his team manipulated environmental factors. “We weren’t looking to test an unattainable, dream-state workplace. We wanted to test scenarios and conditions that would be possible to replicate,” he explains. They adjusted ventilation rates, carbon dioxide levels, and the quantity of airborne VOCs (volatile organic chemical compounds that are emitted by common objects such as desk chairs and white boards). At the end of each day, the team asked workers to complete cognitive-function assessments in nine key areas, including crisis response, decisionmaking, and strategy. “We saw pretty dramatic effects,” he reports: workers in optimized environments scored 131 percent better in crisis-response questions, 299 percent better on information usage, and 288 percent higher in strategy.

More here.