Olivia Laing in the New Statesman:

There’s something kind of hot about monsters. They’re so dumb and hungry, with their big hairy mitts and gleaming fangs, leaving a trail of gore in their wake. And they’re soulful, too: Cocteau’s melancholy Bête, a tear spangling his fur; Boris Karloff as Frankenstein’s lonesome Creature, mumbling, “Alone: bad. Friend, good!” Monsters plunder unconscious terrors about dangerous homes and unsettling bodies; hardly any wonder we’re all fixated on what Charlie Fox calls “monstrous entertainments”, from zombie parades to Stranger Things to the 2015 exhibition of Alexander McQueen’s spectral waifs and hybrids at the Victoria and Albert Museum.

“A monster is a fear assuming a form” is a pretty neat definition with which to embark on a whizzy cultural history of fiends and ghouls in the contemporary imagination. The beast, the freak, the oddity has provided many artists with inspirational material, from Diane Arbus to John Carpenter and David Lynch, but isn’t the artist also a type of monster: a vampire or del­inquent, like Arthur Rimbaud loaded on absinthe, stabbing Verlaine in a lesbian bar? The monster’s stock-in-trade of transformation, catharsis, revenge, is, as Fox notes, “something like art’s task”.

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Michael Price in Science:

Do the anatomical differences between men and women—sex organs, facial hair, and the like—extend to our brains? The question has been as difficult to answer as it has been controversial. Now, the largest brain-imaging study of its kind indeed finds some sex-specific patterns, but overall more similarities than differences. The work raises new questions about how brain differences between the sexes may influence intelligence and behavior.

For decades, brain scientists have noticed that on average, male brains tend to have slightly higher total brain volume than female ones, even when corrected for males’ larger average body size. But it has proved notoriously tricky to pin down exactly which substructures within the brain are more or less voluminous. Most studies have looked at relatively small sample sizes—typically fewer than 100 brains—making large-scale conclusions impossible.

In the new study, a team of researchers led by psychologist Stuart Ritchie, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Edinburgh, turned to data from UK Biobank, an ongoing, long-term biomedical study of people living in the United Kingdom with 500,000 enrollees. A subset of those enrolled in the study underwent brain scans using MRI. In 2750 women and 2466 men aged 44–77, Ritchie and his colleagues examined the volumes of 68 regions within the brain, as well as the thickness of the cerebral cortex, the brain’s wrinkly outer layer thought to be important in consciousness, language, memory, perception, and other functions.

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Jason Dana in the New York Times:

A friend of mine once had a curious experience with a job interview. Excited about the possible position, she arrived five minutes early and was immediately ushered into the interview by the receptionist. Following an amicable discussion with a panel of interviewers, she was offered the job.

Afterward, one of the interviewers remarked how impressed she was that my friend could be so composed after showing up 25 minutes late to the interview. As it turned out, my friend had been told the wrong start time by half an hour; she had remained composed because she did not know she was late.

My friend is not the type of person who would have remained cool had she known she was late, but the interviewers reached the opposite conclusion. Of course, they also could have concluded that her calm reflected a flippant attitude, which is also not a trait of hers. Either way, they would have been wrong to assume that her behavior in the interview was indicative of her future performance at the job.

This is a widespread problem. Employers like to use free-form, unstructured interviews in an attempt to “get to know” a job candidate. Such interviews are also increasingly popular with admissions officers at universities looking to move away from test scores and other standardized measures of student quality. But as in my friend’s case, interviewers typically form strong but unwarranted impressions about interviewees, often revealing more about themselves than the candidates.

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Catherine Young in Bitchmedia:

For as long as feminism has existed, feminists have been accused of hating men. Pleas for equal rights, franchise, and financial independence have been met with not just ardent and sometimes violent opposition, but the persistent, insidious untruth that feminists desire nothing more than to emasculate and eradicate the male sex and “take over.” While hating men isn’t a core tenet of feminist ideology, a curious trend has taken hold online over the past couple years: ironic misandry. Women attach #KillAllMen and #BanMen hashtags to news stories of male-perpetrated violence against women or legislation sponsored by male politicians designed to cut back on women’s rights. From the celebration of “Gleeful Mobs of Women Murdering Men in Western Art History” by the Toast to the bracelets proclaiming that “All Men Must Die” and mugs filled with “Male Tears” for sale on Etsy, the idea of telegraphing male hatred in public as a performance has really caught on. The thinking seems to be this: If men continue to insist that striving for gender equality is the same as hating them, why not lean into it?

In a Vice essay titled “The Year in Male Tears,” writer Chelsea Summers defined modern misandry not as a hatred of men, but as “a seething rage against patriarchal power” and declared 2014 “the year misandry became chic.” It was the year feminists agreed that “dick is abundant and low value” and that male tears made the best moisturizer. In 2015, #GiveYourMoneyToWomen emerged and grew in strength and visibility. In a piece titled “Give Your Money to Women: The End Game of Capitalism,” feminist activists Lauren Chief Elk, Yoeshin Lourdes, and Bardot Smith described the radical hashtag and movement as a “theory and practical framework of gender justice.” In short, gymtw is centered around the idea that women deserve to be directly compensated by men for the emotional labor they provide. “gymtw is a decolonial effort,” Chief Elk said in a 2016 tweet, and “Friday is payday.” Even celebrities got in on the fun. Gifs of Nicki Minaj cutting a banana in half in her “Anaconda” video were remixed with glitter “misandry” signs, and in her music video for “Bitch Better Have My Money,” Rihanna kidnapped and dismembered the trifling accountant who stole her money, then bathed in his blood. Misandry has gone mainstream, and unfortunately the irony seems to be lost on men. For the first time, the primary drivers of conversations around misandry are, in fact, the very feminists long-accused of not-so-secretly wanting to do away with men.

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Hedda Hassel Morch in Nautilus:

The nature of consciousness seems to be unique among scientific puzzles. Not only do neuroscientists have no fundamental explanation for how it arises from physical states of the brain, we are not even sure whether we ever will. Astronomers wonder what dark matter is, geologists seek the origins of life, and biologists try to understand cancer—all difficult problems, of course, yet at least we have some idea of how to go about investigating them and rough conceptions of what their solutions could look like. Our first-person experience, on the other hand, lies beyond the traditional methods of science. Following the philosopher David Chalmers, we call it the hard problem of consciousness. But perhaps consciousness is not uniquely troublesome. Going back to Gottfried Leibniz and Immanuel Kant, philosophers of science have struggled with a lesser known, but equally hard, problem of matter. What is physical matter in and of itself, behind the mathematical structure described by physics? This problem, too, seems to lie beyond the traditional methods of science, because all we can observe is what matter does, not what it is in itself—the “software” of the universe but not its ultimate “hardware.” On the surface, these problems seem entirely separate. But a closer look reveals that they might be deeply connected.

Consciousness is a multifaceted phenomenon, but subjective experience is its most puzzling aspect. Our brains do not merely seem to gather and process information. They do not merely undergo biochemical processes. Rather, they create a vivid series of feelings and experiences, such as seeing red, feeling hungry, or being baffled about philosophy. There is something that it’s like to be you, and no one else can ever know that as directly as you do. Our own consciousness involves a complex array of sensations, emotions, desires, and thoughts. But, in principle, conscious experiences may be very simple. An animal that feels an immediate pain or an instinctive urge or desire, even without reflecting on it, would also be conscious. Our own consciousness is also usually consciousness of something—it involves awareness or contemplation of things in the world, abstract ideas, or the self. But someone who is dreaming an incoherent dream or hallucinating wildly would still be conscious in the sense of having some kind of subjective experience, even though they are not conscious of anything in particular.

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Fahad Hashmi in Café Dissensus:

C.M. Naim is Professor Emeritus of Urdu studies at the University of Chicago. He taught Urdu language and literature in the department of South Asian Languages and Civilisation, University of Chicago. He co-founded Mahfil (The Journal of South Asian Literature) in 1963 and the Annual of Urdu Studies in 1981. Besides a good number of works to his credit, he has also translated Qurratulain Hyder’s Housing society, Patjhad ki Awaz, and Sitaharan which is A Season of Betrayals in its English version; Vibhuti Narayan Rai’s Shahar mein curfew as Curfew in the City; and Harishankar Parsai’s satirical sketches as Inspector Matadeen on the Moon: Selected Satires.

Fahad Hashmi: What sort of prose and poetry are being produced in the Urdu language in academies and government aided-centres, meant for the promotion of the language in India?

C.M. Naim: The state academies do not produce much on their own; they mostly facilitate publication of books written or edited by someone within the state. They also give awards. As for the major ‘Central’ organization, the National Council for the Promotion of Urdu Language (NCPUL), it has been doing fairly good work: publication of inexpensive editions of classical texts; keeping prices down of their own other publications; holding book exhibitions and sales in major cities across the country; subsidizing publication of research work done by scholars at various places, and probably much more. You may want to check their website to see their various projects. I have only listed the things that I have noted myself. It also publishes a magazine, but I don’t read it regularly.

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Cici Zhang in Popular Science:

Mountains aren't just beautiful: these locales also tend to host some of the richest diversity of species on the planet. We’ve known this for a long time—ever since Alexander von Humboldt, the Prussian geographer and naturalist, first climbed up the Andes in the 18th century. But nobody has really figured out why.

One popular hypothesis goes like this: the reason why mountains have so many different species is that, as mountains are uplifted by colliding tectonic plates, the process creates more environments, and therefore more opportunities for new species to adapt to them. However, this hypothesis never had any explicit quantitative testing until now, according to a recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Many other studies have looked at the diversity of one single plant group or another, and results seemed to support the popular hypothesis. “That claim is often made. The hypothesis often incorporates the narratives of these studies, but it's never been explicitly tested” across time and space, through quantitative comparison, says study co-author Richard Ree, Associate Curator of Botany at Chicago’s Field Museum.

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Sonya Lalli in The f Word:

Despite its optimistic title and bright, bold cover, Here Comes the Sun is not the classic beach read it might appear at first glance. The cheerful package stands in stark contrast to the novel’s sobering depictions of women struggling to forge their own paths in a Jamaican village. Born and raised in Jamaica, debut novelist Nicole Dennis-Benn writes with incredible authenticity – whether it’s capturing the local dialect, or illustrating the shocking disparities in wealth between tourists at the island’s lavish resorts, and the Jamaicans who live on its edges. In Here Comes the Sun, it’s the impoverished fishing village of River Bank, on the outskirts of Montego Bay. Dennis-Benn’s novel focuses on sisters Margot and Thandi, and their mother Delores. Although they’re not always likeable – or their choices relatable – the moral complexities and individual burdens of these characters have us invested from the get-go.

Thirty-year-old Margot has a much-coveted job working at the front desk of a luxury resort in Montego Bay. Ambitious to a fault, she also sells sex to wealthy guests, balancing this secret life with her affairs with the resort’s married owner, Alfonso, and Verdane, the River Bank woman she has loved since she was a girl. She struggles to keep her blossoming relationship with Verdane in the shadows, having been brought up in a society where homosexuality is not just frowned upon, but downright dangerous. It’s not unusual for Verdane, who was outed to her community as a young age, to face physical threats or find dead dogs on her doorstep.

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Derek Thompson in The Economist:

A friend who stumbled upon my Twitter account told me that my tweets made me sound like an unrecognisable jerk. “You’re much nicer than this in real life,” she said. This is a common refrain about social media: that they make people behave worse than they do in “real life”. On Twitter, I snark. On Facebook, I preen. On Instagram, I pose. On Snapchat, I goof. It is tempting to say, as my friend suggested, that these online identities are caricatures of the real me. It is certainly true that social media can unleash the cruellest side of human nature. For many women and minorities, the virtual world is a hellscape of bullying and taunting. But as face-to-face conversation becomes rarer it’s time to stop thinking that it is authentic and social media are artificial. Preener, snarker, poser, goof: they’re all real, and they’re all me.

The internet and social media don’t create new personalities; they allow people to express sides of themselves that social norms discourage in the “real world”. Some people want to lark around in the office but fear their boss will look dimly on their behaviour. Snapchat, however, provides them with an outlet for the natural impulse to caper without disturbing their colleagues. Facebook and Instagram encourage pride in one’s achievements that might appear unseemly in other circumstances. We may come to see face-to-face conversation as the social medium that most distorts our personalities. It requires us to speak even when we don’t know what to say and forces us to be pleasant or acquiescent when we would rather not.

But how does the internet manage to elicit such different sides of our personality? And why should social media reveal some aspect of our humanity that many centuries of chit-chat failed to unearth?

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From Vanity Fair:

What is your idea of perfect happiness? Reading quietly, in high grass, among loved ones (who are also quietly reading). Followed by a boozy lunch.

What is your greatest fear? Violent death. Death generally.

Which historical figure do you most identify with? Aspirationally speaking, Virginia Woolf and Zora Neale Hurston.

Which living person do you most admire? I feel almost certain I don't know them. It would be one of these types who dedicate their lives to the welfare of others, whereas the people I tend to know are people making stories out of the dramas of themselves.

What is the trait you most deplore in yourself? Narcissism, solipsism.

What is the trait you most deplore in others? The same.

What is your favorite journey? Any walk through Rome.

What do you consider the most overrated virtue? Patriotism. Ideological consistency.

More here. [Thanks to Amitava Kumar.]

Ed Yong in The Atlantic:

Octopuses have three hearts, parrot-like beaks, venomous bites, and eight semi-autonomous arms that can taste the world. They squirt ink, contort through the tiniest of spaces, and melt into the world by changing both color and texture. They are incredibly intelligent, capable of wielding tools, solving problems, and sabotaging equipment. As Sy Montgomery once wrote, “no sci-fi alien is so startlingly strange” as an octopus. But their disarming otherness doesn’t end with their bodies. Their genes are also really weird.

A team of scientists led by Joshua Rosenthal at the Marine Biological Laboratory and Eli Eisenberg at Tel Aviv University have shown that octopuses and their relatives—the cephalopods—practice a type of genetic alteration called RNA editing that’s very rare in the rest of the animal kingdom. They use it to fine-tune the information encoded by their genes without altering the genes themselves. And they do so extensively, to a far greater degree than any other animal group.

“They presented this work at a recent conference, and it was a big surprise to everyone,” says Kazuko Nishikura from the Wistar Institute. “I study RNA editing in mice and humans, where it’s very restricted. The situation is very different here. I wonder if it has to do with their extremely developed brains.”

It certainly seems that way. Rosenthal and Eisenberg found that RNA editing is especially rife in the neurons of cephalopods.

More here.

Anis Shivani in Salon:

Two weeks ago, Bob Dylan accepted the Nobel Prize in person; true to form, he did so not at the December ceremony (where Patti Smith performed in his stead), but during a previously scheduled tour of Stockholm. He has yet to deliver, on tape or in person, the acceptance speech that is a precondition for the prize money. When he won the prize it was just before the November election, and now we’re a few months into the unfolding disaster. Which makes you wonder: Does the Nobel Prize committee know more about us than we know about ourselves?

This may quite possibly be the best Nobel Prize choice ever for literature, right up there with the recognition of William Faulkner. It has been given to the right person at the right time, as the academy has made an urgent intervention into the vexing question of just what literature is, at a political moment when demagoguery is making a mockery of language.

Writers and critics know that nearly all the greatest writers of the past century — and we know who they are — failed to get the award. The Nobel for literature is most helpful when it brings someone deserving to the global audience’s attention. Such was the case with Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk; he was already at a young age a world-class author, but the award gave him millions of new readers. And though Dylan has been a songwriter’s songwriter, or musician’s musician, for 55 years, there couldn’t be a better time than now for his poetry of prophecy to soak through to everyone’s consciousness.

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Zaheer Kazmi in Prospect:

Recent moves by the Trump administration to ban entry to the US of citizens of several Muslim-majority states seem to be a striking departure from western counter-extremism policies. These strategies have focused until now on the proscription of specific individuals and terrorist groups rather than on blanket bans on whole countries.

Meanwhile, the administration’s parallel desire to designate the Muslim Brotherhood a foreign terrorist organisation is also gaining steam. This has revived perennial tensions in western policy circles over how to deal with the apparently non-violent Islamist “movement,” which has been notoriously difficult to define as a unitary entity.

But while they may appear to augur a new era, Trump’s actions have deeper roots, which reveal the coming together of two distinct but related policy developments since 9/11: attempts by western governments at proscribing non-violent Islamist groups; and the direction of travel in definitions of extremism. The pattern has been to target violence, then non-violent extremism and now, it seems, followers of a particular faith.

The growing intimacy between these trends has been most apparent in the evolution of the UK’s counter-extremism policy, especially since 2014 and the subsequent period of Conservative ascendancy following their election victory in 2015. The problems associated with these recent policy developments point to three underlying issues the Trump administration now also faces: the need for clarity in defining “extremism” and “political Islam”; the limits of policing transnational movements by unilateral domestic means; and the efficacy of using proscription as a policy tool.

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Adrian Nathan West at The Quarterly Conversation:

Two years before his death, Alfred Döblin, author of seventeen novels and a dozen volumes of stories, essays, and memoirs, complained, “Whenever they mentioned my name, they always followed it with Berlin Alexanderplatz.” That there are worse fates a writer could suffer is a fitting rejoinder in the German-speaking world, where his novel is ranked among the milestones of literary modernism and readers can relish its seediness, its bewildering structure, and its vertiginous language in the original. In translation, however, the book has been cut and bowdlerized, and its formal innovations tamed; and the slang and sudden shifts in linguistic register, which are among its signal pleasures, drift from dated to incomprehensible. A new version by Michael Hofmann, due out this year, will doubtless do much to address these lacunae, but in the meantime NYRB Classics has issued translations of two seminal works of Döblin’s: The Three Leaps of Wang Lun and Bright Magic: Stories, selected and translated by Damion Searls.

Bright Magic opens with the complete text of The Murder of a Buttercup, Döblin’s first collection of short fiction. He wrote these stories between 1903 and 1905, and in 1906 submitted them to the publisher Bruno Cassirer. There, they were read by the comic poet Christian Morgenstern, who turned them down, declaring that they gave him an “unsettling, morbid impression,” and intimating that their author was of unsound mind. They finally appeared in 1913 in a series of expressionist prose that included Gottfried Benn’s Brains and Georg Heym’s exquisite, neglected The Thief.

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