George Philip LeBourdais in The Point:

The diminutive iceberg was an afterthought by the time it broke apart. I was riding a soft inflatable boat towards one of the great glaciers of Spitsbergen, an island located north of Norway and east of Greenland. Spitsbergen is part of the remote archipelago of Svalbard, deep within the Arctic Circle and about halfway between mainland Europe and the North Pole. A tall ship had carried me there along with a troop of photographers and writers and scientists for an improbable artist residency. We stared at the glacier’s calving face in Fuglefjord, where it stops gouging the earth and splinters into the sea. We were trying to catch one of those awesome, humbling instances when ice splits like marble in a quarry and crashes into the water. Momentary respects had been paid to a distinctive but small iceberg (no bigger than a stout Victorian house in San Francisco) but we puttered past en route to the glacier itself—where we thought the action was.

We shuddered when the iceberg broke at our backs. Turning in unison with my shipmates, I felt the air change. It had become so fresh it was almost repellent, as though an ancient sepulcher had cracked open to release a saturated gush of oxygen. Dark, clear ice below the berg’s surface began to rotate upwards, cranking horologically into its new position. After a collective gasp, we hushed and watched.

Once a land on the margins, the Arctic has become a global center of attention for climatologists, environmental activists and tourists. The rhetoric of the sublime is no longer required to imagine the epochal changes that happen there; we can watch the footage ourselves. Time-lapse videography has made the retreat of the world’s glaciers dramatically clear. James Balog, photographer for the award-winning 2014 documentary Chasing Ice and director of the Extreme Ice Survey, calls ice “the canary in the global coal mine … the place where we can see and touch and feel climate change.”

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Shashi Tharoor in The Guardian:

Many modern apologists for British colonial rule in India no longer contest the basic facts of imperial exploitation and plunder, rapacity and loot, which are too deeply documented to be challengeable. Instead they offer a counter-argument: granted, the British took what they could for 200 years, but didn’t they also leave behind a great deal of lasting benefit? In particular, political unity and democracy, the rule of law, railways, English education, even tea and cricket?

Indeed, the British like to point out that the very idea of “India” as one entity (now three, but one during the British Raj), instead of multiple warring principalities and statelets, is the incontestable contribution of British imperial rule.

Unfortunately for this argument, throughout the history of the subcontinent, there has existed an impulsion for unity. The idea of India is as old as the Vedas, the earliest Hindu scriptures, which describe “Bharatvarsha” as the land between the Himalayas and the seas. If this “sacred geography” is essentially a Hindu idea, Maulana Azad has written of how Indian Muslims, whether Pathans from the north-west or Tamils from the south, were all seen by Arabs as “Hindis”, hailing from a recognisable civilisational space. Numerous Indian rulers had sought to unite the territory, with the Mauryas (three centuries before Christ) and the Mughals coming the closest by ruling almost 90% of the subcontinent. Had the British not completed the job, there is little doubt that some Indian ruler, emulating his forerunners, would have done so.

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Emily Wolahan at The Quarterly Conversation:

What I most appreciate about In Praise of Defeat, however, is that it coveys the length and breadth of Laâbi’s career as an artist. His early work is very powerful, but since 1985 he has been in exile in Paris (though he has recently been able to return occasionally to Morocco). Because Laâbi’s political activism and imprisonment came at the beginning of his career, most of Laâbi’s poems are written in the thirty years since his release. As with anyone who suffers something as horrific as imprisonment and torture, it’s not something Laâbi can leave behind. And the experience permanently places him in the in-between. In “Suns Under Arrest,” dedicated to Nelson Mandela and Abraham Serfaty, he writes:

The prison that our man inhabits
is round and square
near and far away
it is of yesterday and tomorrow
subterranean and lost in the clouds
carnivorous and vegetarian
it is a hutch near a mosque in a shantytown

By evoking the in-between, the prison our man inhabits also becomes any place where we are caught in stasis.

Laâbi is the man in prison who survived and therefore he has the opportunity to continue to develop as an artist. This is evident in the wonderful “Fragments of Forgotten Genesis” from 1998. Laâbi adopts the form of fragments, in between sentence and utterance, and shifts between witness, memory and reflection.

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Dwight Garner at the NYT:

Herself the daughter of Turkish immigrants and a graduate of Harvard, Batuman is a staff writer at The New Yorker and the author of “The Possessed: Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Read Them” (2010). That book was a witty and melancholy tour de force about reading and love and the pleasures of travel as against tourism.

That same voice is poured into “The Idiot.” It’s memorable to witness Selin, via Batuman, absorb the world around her. Each paragraph is a small anthology of well-made observations.

Only Batuman would send a character in search of new clothes and have her think, “what was ‘Cinderella,’ if not an allegory for the fundamental unhappiness of shoe shopping?”

Selin notes the “death roar” of an institutional toilet. She observes how, lighting a cigarette, “when the flame came into contact with the paper, it made a sound like the needle coming down on a record player.”

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Michael Dirda at The Washington Post:

Shortly before Angela Carter’s death in 1992 — from lung cancer, at age 51, after a lifetime of smoking — I reviewed her last novel, the marvel-filled, magnificent “Wise Children,” a century-long saga covering the melodramatic lives and amours of an English theatrical family. Suffused throughout with a Shakespearean air of enchantment, it included an Ophelia-like mad scene, myriad echoes of “King Lear” and “The Tempest,” twins substituting for each other with lovers, knockings at the gate, rude mechanicals, a kitschy Hollywood production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” near-incest, fathers belatedly recognizing daughters, the dead returning to life and, on every page, an atmosphere of mummery and carnival where, in the end, every Jack gets his Jill and all’s right with the world — hey nonny-no! I loved it then, and still do.

Nonetheless, Edmund Gordon’s “The Invention of Angela Carter,” while an exceptionally thoughtful and engrossing biography, has left me wondering whether it’s such a good idea to read about contemporary writers one admires. In the case of Carter, Gordon traces an inner life of intense self-scrutiny, marked at times by melancholy desperation, an almost hysterical search for love, and periodic callousness toward family and friends.

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Monica Uszerowicz in Avidly:

Grandma Eva was interned in the ghetto with most of her family—a few lucky siblings escaped to the U.S.—for two years before her transport to Auschwitz. She was hungry, as it were, for two years, and would never again understand fullness, even when food touched her lips. When she was alive, she’d tell me the story of her brother, Pesach—named for the holiday—eating a particularly watery soup, shoveling it into his mouth quickly, then tapping the bowl with his spoon. He tapped it loudly, a request for more he couldn’t make with his tongue, because in that same moment, he collapsed and died. She’d spend her time at Auschwitz hiding bread beneath her pillow, hiding the thinness of her frame in clothes that masked her bones. She became little more than a body, and her attempts to transcend the limitations to which she’d been reduced were as clandestine as she was ill. She was a secret who kept more secrets, though there was nowhere for them to hide. When liberation came, it took Grandma a year to recover from her injuries; she stayed in a hospital bed, bound by a metal brace. The doctors fed her apples and wine—the apples strengthened her teeth; the wine, her blood. She was biting into an apple when she heard her sister, passing by the hospital and calling for her, her sister who’d returned from the States to scour Łódź for her familial survivors.

My father knows how to eat, but doesn’t know how to stop. “I don’t have a mechanism that says ‘stop,’” he tells me. “I always ate until I was stuffed, growing up. Now I unconsciously do the same.” Dad will clean his plate, and mine, too. It’s not a particularly healthy habit; it points to the problem of “intuitive eating,” of “eating when you’re hungry and stopping when you’re full.” What if fullness is relative to trauma? What happens when your intuition is ancestral?

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Dilip M. Menon in Africa is a Country:

In April 2015, the statue of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi in Gandhi Square, Johannesburg was almost covered with white paint by a young protestor before he was arrested. The previous months had seen a sustained agitation at the University of Cape Town for the taking down of the statue of Sir Cecil Rhodes – the imperialist and racist benefactor of the University. The statue came to stand in for a colonialism yet to end. In this attack on pigeon perches all over South Africa, a statue of the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa in Durban was covered in red paint; perhaps only because he was white, and not as an indictment of his poetry. There was some irony to the fact that the statue of Gandhi was almost whitewashed, considering the better part of his life was spent in fighting white imperialism. This month, professors at the University of Ghana called for the removal of the statue of Gandhi that had been unveiled by the President of India in June. All of these instances are reflective of a rethinking happening in Africa of the role of colonialism, anticolonialism and the idea of African identity.

The politics of statuary represents a deeper crisis located in questions of belonging, entitlement and exclusion in postcolonial Africa. In 1986, the Kenyan writer and intellectual Ngugi wa Thiong’o (formerly James Ngugi) wrote his manifesto Decolonising the Mind, arguing for linguistic decolonization and combating the continuing influence of English as a language and European thought in politically decolonized, but intellectually still-colonized Africa. Thirty years down the line, the same issues have resurfaced; Ngugi, Frantz Fanon, and the South African thinker of black consciousness, Steve Biko are back on the agenda as South Africans and Africans, more generally, ask themselves, what has not changed. African universities have been ravaged by the attack of neo-liberal thinking and privatization that have made universities into factories and leeched them off politics. In South Africa, a battle has just been joined. The Feesmustfall movement that commenced in late 2015 challenged both high fees and the exclusion of youth from universities. The movement also protests against a syllabus that is nothing more than a version of courses taught in Euro-American campuses. The universities in Africa are haughtily monolingual in a multilingual landscape and the issue of African knowledge systems is not even considered. We gave up this battle, if it was ever fought, in Indian universities fairly early on, producing generations of academics to service the Euro-American knowledge economy, much as we produced clerks for the British colonial service.

Now, what does all of this have to do with Gandhi and statues of him?

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Darryl Pinckney in the New York Review of Books:

When James Baldwin died in 1987, at the age of sixty-three, he was seen as a spent force, a witness for the civil rights movement who had outlived his moment. Baldwin didn’t know when to shut up about the sins of the West and he went on about them in prose that seemed to lack the grace of voice that had made him famous. But that was the view of him mostly on the white side of town. Ever-militant Amiri Baraka, once scornful of Baldwin as a darling of white liberals, praised “Jimmy” in his eulogy as the creator of a contemporary American speech that we needed in order to talk to one another. Black people have always forgiven and taken back into the tribe the black stars who got kicked out of The Man’s heaven.

Baldwin left behind more than enough keepers of his flame. Even so, his revival has been astonishing. He is the subject of conferences, studies, and an academic journal, the James Baldwin Review. He is quoted everywhere; some of his words are embossed on a great wall of the National Museum of African American History and Culture. Of all the participants and witnesses from the civil rights era, Baldwin is just about the only one we still read on these matters. Not many pick up Martin Luther King Jr.’s Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story (1958) or The Trumpet of Conscience (1967). We remember Malcolm X as an unparalleled orator, but after the collections of speeches there is only The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1964), an as-told-to story, an achievement shared with Alex Haley. Kenneth Clark’s work had a profound influence on Brown v. Board of Education, but as distinguished as his sociology was, nobody is rushing around campus having just discovered Clark’s Dark Ghetto (1965).

Baldwin said that Martin Luther King Jr., symbol of nonviolence, had done what no black leader had before him, which was “to carry the battle into the individual heart.” But he refused to condemn Malcolm X, King’s supposed violent alternative, because, he said, his bitterness articulated the sufferings of black people.

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Catherine Caruso in Scientific American:

Elite memory athletes are not so different from their peers in any other sport: They face off in intense competitions where they execute seemingly superhuman feats such as memorizing a string of 500 digits in five minutes. Most memory athletes credit their success to hours of memorization technique practice. One lingering question, though, is whether memory champs succeed by practice alone or are somehow gifted. Recent research suggests there may be hope for the rest of us. A study, published today in Neuron, provides solid evidence that most people can successfully learn and apply the memorization techniques used by memory champions, while triggering large-scale brain changes in the process.

A team led by Martin Dresler at Radboud University in the Netherlands used a combination of behavioral tests and brain scans to compare memory champions with the general population. It found top memory athletes had a different pattern of brain connectivity than controls did, but also that subjects who learned a common memorization technique over a period of weeks, not years, greatly improved their memory skills, and began to exhibit brain connection patterns resembling those of elite memorizers.

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Rebecca McCray in Slate:

On Tuesday night, Rolando Ruiz was executed in Texas after spending more than two decades on death row. The legal team representing Ruiz, who killed Theresa Rodriguez as part of a murder-for-hire scheme in 1992, filed multiple petitions with the Supreme Court for a stay of execution, one of which argued that his fate constituted cruel and unusual punishment. All of those petitions were denied.

Justice Stephen Breyer, who dissented from his colleagues’ denial of certiorari, believed Ruiz’s Eighth Amendment claim was “a strong one” and worth a closer look. “This Court long ago, speaking of a period of only four weeks of imprisonment prior to execution, said that a prisoner’s uncertainty before execution is ‘one of the most horrible feelings to which he can be subjected,’ ” wrote Breyer. Ruiz, Breyer notes, endured that uncertainty for 22 years.

Ruiz was one of the nearly 40 percent of death row prisoners in the U.S. who have spent 20 or more years awaiting execution. Breyer pointed out that like most inmates sentenced to death, Ruiz lived in solitary confinement, where he suffered hallucinations, suicidal thoughts, and depression. These psychological symptoms are common among prisoners placed in solitary confinement, and they run rampant among Texas inmates.

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Jonathan Glancey at 1843:

In a workshop south-east of Stuttgart’s city centre, builders can fly. Here, programmed by students at Stuttgart University’s Institute for Computational Design (ICD), drones buzz around like purposeful bees, fetching and carrying long threads of carbon fibre spun by a robot in the middle of the room. Bit by bit, and without the help of a single human hand, the drones shape these strands into a structure.

The workshop is run by Achim Menges, a German architect and the founder of the ICD. He is at the forefront of the rapidly evolving field of robotic architecture, in which robots make not only the components of buildings but also assemble the buildings themselves. This approach offers two advantages. The first is that it saves money and time. This year in Vienna, Coop Himmelblau, an Austrian architectural firm, will use robots to help build a new hotel tower, the machines lifting and welding the panels that form the building’s exterior into place. Wolf D. Prix, the architect behind the project, estimates that robots could reduce construction times and manpower by as much as 90%, which gives architects more freedom to create.

In California, Ron Culver and Joseph Sarafian have developed an unlikely method of making intricate structures out of concrete using robots and Lycra. Traditionally, concrete is formed using hard moulds; for each different shape you want to generate you need a different mould.

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Catherine Fletcher at Literary Review:

Be Like the Fox tells Machiavelli’s life story. Its title refers to his advice that by being like the fox one can avoid snares. In a rather breathless historical present, Benner organises Machiavelli’s own words into dialogue and commentary as her protagonist makes his way through the religious drama of Savonarola’s regime, encounters with Cesare Borgia, torture and exile, and finally his later years of writing. Machiavelli’s wonderful turns of phrase make for a creative, lively and very readable book with more than a little contemporary resonance. ‘Victories are never so clear’, he writes, ‘that the winner does not have to have some respect, especially for justice.’

Benner is a political philosopher whose previous works on Machiavelli have explored his ethics and, most recently, proposed a new reading ofThe Prince. In answer to that favourite question of seminar tutors, ‘Was The Prince a satire?’, she made a clever but controversial case for a third way, an ironic reading of Machiavelli, suggesting that his true views were often hidden for reasons of political caution and that a prince who actually followed The Prince’s advice was doomed to failure. Be Like the Fox continues her argument that (as its subtitle suggests) Machiavelli was a man on a ‘lifelong quest for freedom’, even during those years of work for the Medici, when many of Florence’s citizens were resigning themselves to the unpleasant reality that the dynasty was the only viable alternative to foreign domination.

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Matthew Bown at the Times Literary Supplement:

The recent Bernard Buffet retrospective at the Paris Museum of Modern Art was of no interest to the contemporary art world. This is presumably because Buffet is not a terribly good artist. His surfaces are worked mechanically, his colour is diagrammatic. His stylizations – thick-trunked, skinny-limbed figures forced into angular shapes, like the square-cropped winter trees around the Place des Vosges – are banal. Such limitations, coupled with the artist’s ambitions of subject and scale, make for queasy viewing. But in the post-war decade Buffet was extolled by Louis Aragon, Jean Cocteau, Claude Roger-Marx; in 1955, Connaissance des Artsnamed him as one of the top ten post-war painters; in 1956 he had a room of his own at the Venice Biennale. His success in the 1950s raises interesting questions. Should histories of twentieth-century art acknowledge and explain his former prominence, or should they ignore it in favour of hindsight? Perhaps we accept that to write Buffet out of art history is reasonable; but what, then, is the value of Aragon’s celebrated two-volume appreciation of Matisse if he also thought Buffet was top-notch? Is it all just phrase-making from someone who didn’t actually have a clue?

There was a whole generation of figurative painters whose work may be discussed in relation to Buffet’s, including socialist realists such as André Fougeron, Renato Guttuso or even Peter de Francia, Professor of Painting at the Royal College of Art from 1972 to 86. All, like Buffet, now more-or-less excluded from mainstream art history.

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Herbert Sauro in Nature:

In 2000, two landmark papers started a revolution in our ability to design entirely new functions inside cells. The authors took two electronic circuits — an oscillator and a switch — and built the equivalent from living matter (M. B. Elowitz and S. Leibler Nature 403, 335–338 (2000); T. S. Gardner et al. Nature 403, 339–342; 2000). Life became a machine. To many, including me, this was a profound moment: the beginning of the field of synthetic biology. Now an international enterprise with the potential to transform our lives, synthetic biology crosses age and organizational boundaries, and involves large corporations, small start-ups, academics and tinkerers. In Synthetic, talented science historian Sophia Roosth describes her observations of the field's early evolution — the fruit of embedding herself in the working lives of synthetic biologists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. She chronicles the adventures of players such as bioengineer Drew Endy and computer engineer Tom Knight, who championed the field. She covers highlights including whether we can patent new life and how automation is changing the way we do biology. She looks at biologist George Church's dream of resurrecting the woolly mammoth. And she examines the start of the do-it-yourself synthbio scene, in which amateurs set up labs in garages and bedrooms.

Roosth conducted some interviews at the University of California, Berkeley, as well as at the Joint BioEnergy Institute and Amyris Biotechnologies in nearby Emeryville, where metabolic engineering is the primary interest. One surprising insight that she gathered was the difference in scientific cultures. The east-coast scene, as one interviewee notes, is “super all positive, group love”. The west is more corporate — a reversal of expectations. Roosth's approach sparks deep questions about the nature of life. At Berkeley, she and bioengineer Adam Arkin discussed what makes a pig gene a pig gene. He said that this isn't a meaningful question: out of context, the gene has no “pigness”. Thus, Roosth asks, how do we define species in the synthetic world, and what does it mean to move genes from one organism to another? More profoundly, what does 'synthetic' even mean?

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Brian Resnick in Vox:

In just a few years, scientists will unveil a creature whose every letter of DNA was written by a human being. It will be a yeast cell will a fully designer genome, with biological capabilities seen nowhere else in nature.

Today, a global team of scientists has announced a major milestone in their decade-long quest to create a fully synthetic yeast genome. As described in the journal Science, the hundreds of scientists have completed work on six of the yeast’s 16 chromosomes (the individual stands of DNA that make up a genome). Meanwhile, the remaining 10 chromosomes (plus one extra, not found in nature) have been designed and are awaiting production.

The synthetic yeast will be a huge advancement in bioengineering. It will be a proof of concept that scientists can design and implement genome-wide changes, tailoring microorganisms in major ways for further engineering and study. It means we may be able to create whole new species of microorganisms for industrial or scientific purposes.

No, this isn’t “playing God,” the scientists behind the project say. In their view, rewriting the yeast genome is more like domestication. “No one created a dog; they adapted a wolf,” says Sarah Richardson, a synthetic biologist who is the lead author on one of the Science papers describing the project.

Right now, biologists have a lot of genetic engineering tools at their disposal. CRISPR/Cas9 allows biologists to neatly snip out one single gene and replace it with another. Recombinant DNA is how we’ve coaxed bacteria to create human insulin — a treatment for diabetics. But those techniques are for tiny edits. This yeast project is a rewriting and reorganization of the whole genetic book.

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Annie Lowrey in The Atlantic:

Angus Deaton studies the grand questions not just of economics but of life. What makes people happy? How should we measure well-being? Should countries give foreign aid? What can and should experiments do? Is inequality increasing or decreasing? Is the world getting better or worse?

Better, he believes, truly better. But not everywhere or for everyone. This week, in a speech at a conference held by the National Association for Business Economics, Deaton, the Nobel laureate and emeritus Princeton economist, pointed out that inequality among countries is decreasing, while inequality within countries is increasing. China and India are making dramatic economic improvements, while parts of sub-Saharan Africa are seeing much more modest gains. In developed countries, the rich have gotten much richer while the middle class has shriveled. A study he coauthored with the famed Princeton economist Anne Case highlights one particularly dire outcome: Mortality is actually increasing for middle-aged white Americans, due in no small part to overdoses and suicides—so-called “deaths of despair.” (Case also happens to be Deaton’s wife. More on that later.)

Deaton sat down with me after his speech. We talked about whether poor people are better off here or in low-income countries, the moral ambiguities of companies making money off of Medicaid-financed OxyContin prescriptions, which is the nicest conservative think tank in Washington, what is going on with white people and mortality, and the charms of former-President Obama.

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From Phys.org:

Time crystals may sound like something from science fiction, having more to do with time travel or Dr. Who. These strange materials—in which atoms and molecules are arranged across space and time—are in fact quite real, and are opening up entirely new ways to think about the nature of matter. They also eventually may help protect information in futuristic devices known as quantum computers.

Two groups of researchers based at Harvard University and the University of Maryland report March 9 in the journal Nature that they have successfully created time crystals using theories developed at Princeton University. The Harvard-based team included scientists from Princeton who played fundamental roles in working out the theoretical understanding that led to the creation of these exotic crystals.

"Our work discovered the essential physics of how time crystals function," said Shivaji Sondhi, a Princeton professor of physics. "What is more, this discovery builds on a set of developments at Princeton that gets at the issue of how we understand complex systems in and out of equilibrium, which is centrally important to how physicists explain the nature of the everyday world."

In 2015, Sondhi and colleagues including then-graduate student Vedika Khemani, who earned her Ph.D. at Princeton in 2016 and is now a junior fellow at Harvard, as well as collaborators Achilleas Lazarides and Roderich Moessner at the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems in Germany, published the theoretical basis for how time crystals—at first considered impossible—could actually exist. Published in the journal Physics Review Letters in June 2016, the paper spurred conversations about how to build such crystals.

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