David Rennie in The Economist:

It says a lot about the Qing emperors’ worldview that, for much of the time their dynasty lasted, relations with foreign powers were handled by an Office of Barbarian Control. Jump to late 2016 and the dawn of the Trump era in America, and life for the nearly 180 ambassadors resident in Washington, DC is almost as humiliating. Before the election, modern-day envoys spent months talking to foreign-policy experts signed up with Hillary Clinton’s campaign – a veritable administration-in-waiting, housed in think-tanks, universities and consulting firms, comprising several hundred advisers organised into working groups and sub-groups and busy holding conference calls and sending one another memos. Even the farthest-flung country had friends within this system: a former National Security Council director with a passion for the Caucasus, say, who might soon serve as a principal deputy assistant secretary of state (an actual job title). In contrast, embassies anxious to know what Republican foreign-policy grandees were telling Trump faced an unusual hurdle. During 2016 dozens of conservative thinkers and bigwigs from both Bush presidencies signed “Never Trump” letters declaring the businessman a terrifying menace to global security – though since his win, Washington being what it is, some are now pondering whether they might work for him anyway.

For foreign envoys, Trump’s victory was as disruptive and confusing as a coup behind imperial palace walls. Diplomats and news outlets found themselves tracking down anyone with a sense of the new ruler’s thinking, from business partners to old friends to anyone in the small band of advisers who accompanied him on his journey from insurgent to president-elect. Even arranging phone calls of congratulation to Trump from heads of state and government was a source of angst. Foreign diplomats have spent days swapping wry tales of repeat-dialling the Trump Tower in Manhattan, the brass and pink-marble temple to 1980s style that has become the hard-to-access centre of American power, like a vertical Forbidden City. Some heads of government were offered calls with the president-elect at such short notice that they ended up talking to Trump on their mobile phones.

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James Ryerson in the New York Times:

Americans seem to be forever undergoing a “crisis” of civility. Year after year, we’re told that the norms dictating decent behavior are eroding; that we’ve lost sight of the basic regard we owe our fellow participants in public life; that the contentiousness of our culture threatens to undermine our democracy. Worrisome stuff, of course — but a little vague. If, as any historian will tell you, people in all times and places have been alarmed by this development (the ancient Romans called it pugna verborum, or “the battle of words”), you might wonder how urgent, or even actual, the trouble really is. Then there’s the problem of definition. One man’s civility is another man’s repression. Were the Act Up protesters in the 1980s so indecorous as to disqualify themselves from political conversation, as their critics charged? Or were they the ones demanding civility, in the form of simple recognition of the lives of people with AIDS? Is Donald Trump dangerously boorish? Or is he, too, resisting an ersatz decorum, one he and his supporters call “political correctness,” which they claim honors the feelings of everyone but the beleaguered white working-class male?

One response to these complexities is to abandon the quest for civility, deeming it a historically fanciful, hopelessly imprecise ideal. Another response, exemplified by the political scientist Keith J. Bybee’s slim and artful treatise HOW CIVILITY WORKS (Stanford Briefs/Stanford University, paper, $12.99), is to suggest we continue to fight for civility but learn to think of it less romantically.

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Rebecca Robbins in Stat:

The new immersive art installation here in the heart of Silicon Valley was dreamed up by David Byrne, the front man of the Talking Heads, and loosely modeled after the work of neuroscience and psychology labs at top institutions like Caltech and Harvard.

So when I showed up at a warehouse on a rainy Sunday morning earlier this month, I wasn’t sure what to expect.

What I experienced was light on science but heavy on amusing novelty. I trekked with a group of nine fellow visitors through four rooms, each the site of a quasi-scientific experiment. After an hour, I’d navigated moral dilemmas, got tricked into believing a moving object was standing still, predicted (with limited success) the winners of an election, and found myself experiencing life as though I’d been turned into a doll.

The vibe could hardly get more surreal.

At a point, one of our guides, cloaked in a lime-green lab coat, capped off a discussion about the unreliability of our gut instinct and our vision by musing: “Is it possible that we’re surrogate avatars walking around interacting with and processing data in our virtual reality? Do you think that I’m real? Do you think that you’re real? And what is reality?”

The installation, dubbed “The Institute Presents: Neurosociety,” was co-created by Byrne, a science enthusiast. For this project, Byrne and his collaborator, the technology investor Mala Gaonkar, went on something of a listening tour of research labs around the world to gather ideas, advice, and source material.

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Adriana Barton in The Globe and Mail:

By the time we get wrinkles and grey hair, sayings like “age is just a number” start to sound a bit rosy. But on a biological level, there’s no doubt that some people age at a slower rate than others – and not just because they won the genetic lottery.

Elizabeth Blackburn, a Nobel Prize-winning scientist who peers deep into human cells, insists that we have some control over how fast we decline.

How we eat, move, think and feel can either help keep our cells healthy or put them into early retirement, according to a growing body of research cited in her new book, The Telomere Effect: A Revolutionary Approach to Living Younger, Healthier, Longer, published earlier this month.

How our cells age, it turns out, largely depends on the length of our telomeres, the protective caps at the ends of our chromosomes.

Tucked inside every cell, chromosomes carry our genetic information and help ensure DNA is accurately copied every time a cell divides. If chromosomes were shoelaces, telomeres would be the plastic tips that keep them from fraying.

But telomeres shorten with each cell division. And when they get too short, cells lose their ability to divide and renew the body tissues that depend on them. A lack of new cells in the walls of our blood vessels, for instance, could lead to hardening arteries, increasing the risk of heart attack.

The good news is that telomeres can lengthen, too.

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Emma Crichton-Miller at Prospect Magazine:

As the Tate’s Andrew Wilson suggests, overfamiliarity with a handful of images has inured us to the radicalism of Hockney’s work, and obscured the consistency that runs through it. “Is the Hockney of popular imagination—of A Bigger Splash and the double portraits—the real Hockney? Or is he more extended than that?” Wilson asked me. The opportunity to see works from private collections, some of which have not been on display for 30 or 40 years, will enable a more thoroughgoing exploration of the oeuvre. There will be recognisable icons such as Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy, from 1970-71, which features the “it” couple of their day, textile designer Celia Birtwell and fashion designer Ossie Clark, the latter ruffling a fur rug with his toes as light streams into their elegantly under-furnished Notting Hill flat.

But there will be much more: exuberant cubist interiors and scroll-like landscapes from the 1980s; the Very New Paintings of the 1990s; etchings, drawings and photo collages; iPad drawings and the immersive landscapes of the 2000s; group portraits of card players from 2014 and the latest massive video works. “What I hope comes through,” Wilson says, “is this idea of Hockney as a quintessentially postmodern artist, incredibly virtuosic, marrying styles, moving between media, playful, mercurial. But also incredibly traditional, in a very radical, very contemporary way.” Wilson continues: “What has been absorbing him since he was a student in Bradford is this conundrum which preoccupies all painters: How do you represent the world of three or four dimensions, plus emotion, in two dimensions? This is the bedrock of his work.”

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Paul Laity in The Guardian:

In the wake of Trump’s victory, he says, “I feel utterly astonished that we could have come to this. I find his election the most appalling thing I’ve seen in politics in my life.” The Russians hacking the Democratic party is “almost like a declaration of war, without bullets”. “I’ve been struggling ever since Trump won to work out how to live my life in the years ahead,” he says. And he has decided to act: “I have come to the conclusion to accept something that has been offered to me again and again over the years – to become president of PEN America. I have been vice-president, and secretary, but I’ve never wanted to take on the full burden. I’ll start early in 2018. I’m going to speak out as often as I can, otherwise I don’t think I can live with myself.”

In 4321 the young Fergusons react to landmark events of 1960s US history: the civil rights movement and JF Kennedy’s assassination, the Vietnam war and the student protests at Columbia University in 1968. I ask Auster if there any connections to be made between then and now. “Tumultuous as those times were, they weren’t as depressing as what’s going on today,” he reflects. “How little has changed in American life since then. Race is still a very big problem. Stupid foreign policy decisions are still being made. And the country is just as divided now as it was then. It seems as though America has always been split between the people who believe in the individual above everything else, and those people who believe we’re responsible for one another.”

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James McWilliams at The Paris Review:

In 1912, the essayist Randolph Bourne wrote in the Atlantic Monthly that the ability to think “was given us for use in emergencies, and no man can be justly blamed if he reserves it for emergencies.” If the photography of Francesca Woodman can be reduced to one defining feature, it’s that she provides emergencies. Woodman’s emergencies are not loud or particularly dangerous; they don’t require alarms or intervention. But they do ask us to think, to ponder the urgency of an unorthodox kind of desire—a desire that insists, I am here, naked and soft, on one side of a wall, and I want to be over there, on the other side, where an equally naked and soft orchid flirts with me. This situation is serious.

For Woodman, who died in 1981 at twenty-two, convincing viewers to accept this predicament as crisis-worthy was a body-centered ambition. Feminist critics have long noted how she used her body to simultaneously court and reject “the male gaze.” Others have suggested that she posed as an unabashed object of seduction as an attention-grabbing tactic. Both claims seem generally credible. But what’s difficult to reconcile fully is how Woodman’s pictures—most of them, at least—tend to slowly sap her body of eroticism.

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Lori Adelman in The New York Times:

The Women’s March on Washington, which is expected to bring hundreds of thousands of participants to the capital on Saturday, was intended to demonstrate opposition among progressive women to the policies of President-elect Donald J. Trump. But the loudest criticism of the march has come not from Trump supporters; rather, it has come from participants who argue that women of color have hijacked the event by focusing it on themselves, instead of women more broadly. March organizers told me they received a surge of complaints after women of color called for more representation on the march’s leadership team. In essence, black and brown women are being labeled divisive for wanting to finally see themselves reflected in the modern feminist agenda. This criticism echoes one of the most persistent attacks against Democrats, from the left and the right, after the presidential election: that a focus on so-called identity politics was in part to blame for Hillary Clinton’s loss. Proponents of this view argue that Democrats have been sidetracked by trying to accommodate the various needs of a diverse America and thus have failed to promote a unifying narrative.

Critics miss the point. It’s not selfish — nor need it be divisive — for women of color to push to be included, just as it wasn’t inappropriate for minority groups to expect to be courted by Democrats during the campaign. The problem is not that “identity groups” have some undue obsession with their own agendas. It’s that the groups with the most power often fail to have a sense of solidarity across race and class that would allow for a vision of multicultural liberalism that could reinvigorate the Democratic Party.

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William Doreski at Harvard Review:

And then, in 2013, just when we thought Dickinson’s textual adventures had peaked, a coffee-table book entitled The Gorgeous Nothings: Emily Dickinson's Envelope Poems appeared. This facsimile edition presents scraps of writing—scrawls on envelopes, shreds with three or four words on them, and small draft pages, all carefully related to finished poems or known letters and handsomely reproduced full-sized in color—and poses yet more tenuous theses and questions. Although the editors insist that Dickinson’s is a visual art and finds the significance of these tatters in the poet’s sensitivity to space and layout, and although Susan Howe provides a brief, compelling, and suggestive (if factually challenged) preface, it’s not yet clear that this beautiful book has added much to the discussion. Like some other recent critical work, it challenges but does not disprove Franklin’s assertion that “a literary work is separable from its artifact.” That doesn’t mean that this edition is useless. Although Franklin took these fragments into account, further consideration by other critics might better establish the earliest genesis of some of her poems. And this large-format facsimile reminds us that Dickinson’s art is truly homemade, as Elizabeth Bishop might say (“Home-made, home-made! But aren’t we all?”), and that it originates in a domesticity that contrasts nicely with its vast metaphysical concerns.

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Heidi Ledford in Nature:

Francisco Mojica was not the first to see CRISPR, but he was probably the first to be smitten by it. He remembers the day in 1992 when he got his first glimpse of the microbial immune system that would launch a biotechnology revolution. He was reviewing genome-sequence data from the salt-loving microbe Haloferax mediterranei and noticed 14 unusual DNA sequences, each 30 bases long. They read roughly the same backwards and forwards, and they repeated every 35 bases or so. Soon, he saw more of them. Mojica was entranced, and made the repeats a focus of his research at the University of Alicante in Spain.

It wasn't a popular decision. His lab went years without funding. At meetings, Mojica would grab the biggest bigwigs he could find and ask what they thought of the strange little repeats. “Don't care about repeats so much,” he says that they would warn him. “There are many repeats in many organisms — we've known about them for years and still don't know how many of them work.”

Today, much more is known about the clustered, regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats that give CRISPR its name and help the CRISPR–Cas microbial immune system to destroy invading viruses. But although most in biomedicine have come to revere the mechanics of the system — particularly of a version called CRISPR–Cas9 — for the ways in which it can be harnessed to edit genes, Mojica and other microbiologists are still puzzling over some basic questions about the system and how it works. How did it evolve, and how did it shape microbial evolution? Why do some microbes use it, whereas others don't? And might it have other, yet-to-be-appreciated roles in their basic biology?

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Lisa Rosman in Signature:

Walking through the galleries of “Mastry,” the two-floor Kerry James Marshall retrospective at Met Breuer, the newest branch of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, I always flash on James Baldwin’s quote: “I love America more than any other country in this world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.” Certainly Marshall’s paintings, which I have visited three times in the last month, are profoundly American – proudly, gorgeously, and defiantly so. In a swoon of silver, brocade, and funeral banners, they embody the beautiful resistance that our country needs most right now – the civil rights movement that never really ended, the revolution that has just begun. More than that, these paintings ask us to join the party.

Born in Alabama in 1955, Marshall moved with his family to Los Angeles in 1963 – a classic midcentury migration of African American clans. He has said that his infatuation with Marvel comics began around the same time that he visited the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and certainly both influences are evident in his work. Also evident is the Civil Rights movement, which grew up right along with the artist, often in the same place. He was in Birmingham when four young girls were killed in a bombing of a Baptist church, and was living in L.A.’s Watts section during its 1965 riots. Remaining in that city during his early adulthood, he knew founding members of the Crips gang and studied at the Otis Art Institute, where he opted to become a representational painter who queries accepted tropes of beauty as well as the eye of the beholder. Marshall has a great deal to say about the gaze.

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André van Loon at The Berlin Review of Books:

It is difficult to write about Alexander Herzen (1812-1870). Just when you think you’ve got the right idea about him, a central insight, he turns away. One can hardly say the simplest thing about him: he was a Russian aristocratic philosopher, but born a landowner’s illegitimate son who polemicised against Tsarism; an early revolutionary, he cautioned against going too fast, lest Russian society broke under the strain; hailed for denouncing official misrule, ultimately he was scorned by both the Romantic dissenters of the 1840s and the nihilists of the 1860s; once as famous as Fyodor Dostoevsky and Lev Tolstoy, he died in relative obscurity; patient, even unrealistic about people’s real intentions, he could be a bitter critic who engaged in long-running feuds; an attentive and loving family man, he committed adultery and was distraught when his wife fell in love with a minor German poet; trained in the natural sciences at Moscow University, he went on to write philosophy, political essays, socialist polemics, history, fiction and a monumental memoir.

Herzen left no central body of doctrine after his death, was adopted by figures as different as Lenin and Isaiah Berlin, and continues to generate various interpretations about his ‘real’ significance.

One can say one thing with certainty, however: to read Herzen is to get involved in ‘those damned questions’, as Dostoevsky called them. How should we live? Where does human responsibility end and fate, or God, or evil begin? What is freedom – is it a supreme virtue or a crime? Is Utopia attainable or even desirable? Is a ‘better’ society valuable to the present, or a nasty dream, used to deceive today’s freethinkers?

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Menachem Feuer at berfrois:

Like human beings who grow and change as they move through time and space, literary characters go through a process of elaboration in which they take on a new look and feel. When it moves from one culture to another, a literary character is translated into new idioms. And, in turn, that character can now articulate new ideas. One of the most interesting comic characters in the Jewish literary tradition – one who has been elaborated and re-elaborated over time, space, and language – is the schlemiel. She has been translated into nearly every European language, has had a tremendous impact on Eastern European and German Jews, and in the early 20^th century she traveled over the Atlantic to find a new home on American shores. Since the advent of Charlie Chaplin and the first translations of Shalom Aleichem into English, the schlemiel has become an American icon. In film, television, and Jewish American literature, we find new American idioms for the schlemiel (think, for instance, of filmmakers and actors like Woody Allen, Ben Stiller, Adam Sandler, or Seth Rogen or TV stars like Larry David and Jason Alexander or writers like I.B. Singer, Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, and Shalom Auslander). When one thinks of America, now, one doesn’t simply think of a heroic figure; one also thinks of the schlemiel and her antics. And, to be sure, it was the work of many Jewish-American writers, filmmakers, and actors that jettisoned the schlemiel through Broadway, Hollywood, and the pages of popular novels to become an American icon.

What many literary critics overlook, however, is the fact that the schlemiel has also found its way into the pages of great Anglo-American writers like John Updike (see his “Beck” series) and Thomas Pynchon.

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Richard Turney at the Times Literary Supplement:

It is easy to forget just how strange Berger can be: the swimming dog seemingly committing suicide in Corker’s Freedom; the dead horses in G.; Pig Earth’s ladders that link the rotting matter of the forest floor to ethereal butterflies and angels above; the soup shared with the dead in Here is Where We Meet. In my own reading of Berger over many years, certain themes have shown themselves particularly clearly: he has been a consistently inventive writer of himself, playing with the name “John” and its etymological cousins, Janos, Jean, and Jonas. He is an obsessive writer of animals, primarily for what they show us of ourselves; think of the teeming and disturbing bestiary of The Foot of Clive, the rich descriptions of livestock in Pig Earth, in which nothing remains simply itself, (Pepé’s slaughtered pig has lungs reminiscent of “two sprays of pear blossom”), andKing, Berger’s novel of homelessness, in which the narrator may well be a dog.

His was a distinctive vocabulary of symbols that are altered and reconfigured with every iteration, and perhaps find their fullest expressions in G. and Once in Europa, texts which had had me chasing the tail of a series of metonymic connections to find them twisting and coiling back on themselves, and which laced both books with a simultaneous feeling of superabundance and mystery. Most obviously, he worked restlessly between genres and traditions, probing the spaces between various oppositions.

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John Seabrook in The New Yorker:

For a quarter of a century, I averaged a twenty-dollar bottle of wine almost every night, buying most of them individually at a nearby liquor store. I also bought cases of wine for parties and for weekend houses, and plowed through those, too—oceans of wine washing over us and our friends as the children played under the table. Even though I had been drinking three hundred and sixty-five days a year since I was twenty-four, it never occurred to me that I might be an alcoholic. I didn’t think of myself as a particularly heavy drinker. At the very Jag-defiling beginnings of my drinking career, it was clear that I could hold only a certain amount. That mark increased over time, but only up to a point: two highball or water glasses full of ice and either gin or bourbon, followed by up to a bottle and a half of wine. Any more and I’d get sick. My gut always had my back.

In 2009, when my family moved to a town house in Brooklyn, I had a cellar of my own, at last. I loved the vaulted basement, which was dry and high-ceilinged enough for me to stand in. Just after we moved in, I ordered a top-of-the-line redwood wine case, with room for a hundred and twenty-eight bottles, installed it under one of the vaults, and filled it with an exotic collection of vintages I had acquired from my brother-in-law’s online wine business, which was going out of it. Night after night, I went down to my cellar and drank a bottle by myself, because Lisa was cutting back on drinking, and supposedly I was, too.

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Jocelyn Kaiser in Science:

The first results of a high-profile effort to replicate influential papers in cancer biology are roiling the biomedical community. Of the five studies the project has tackled so far, some involving experimental treatments already in clinical trials, only two could be repeated; one could not, and technical problems stymied the remaining two replication efforts. Some scientists say these early findings from the Reproducibility Project: Cancer Biology, which appear tomorrow in eLife, bolster concerns that too many basic biomedical studies don’t hold up in other labs. “The composite picture is, there is a reproducibility problem,” says epidemiologist John Ioannidis of Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, an adviser to the project whose attention-getting analyses have argued that biomedical research suffers from systemic flaws. But others say the results simply show that good studies can be difficult to precisely reproduce, because biological systems are so variable. “People make these flippant comments that science is not reproducible. These first five papers show there are layers of complexity here that make it hard to say that,” says Charles Sawyers, an eLife editor and cancer biologist at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City.

The cancer biology project was inspired by reports from two companies that when they tried to follow up on dozens of papers pointing to potential new drugs, they could not replicate as many as 89% of the studies. But the firms, Bayer and Amgen, did not reveal the specific papers or many details of their attempts. So in 2013 the nonprofit Center for Open Science in Charlottesville, Virginia, which had led a replication project for psychology papers, teamed up with Science Exchange of Palo Alto, a service that matches scientists with contract labs that do experiments for hire. The partners won $2 million from a foundation for a large-scale cancer replication effort.

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David Skinner in Humanities:

To change the world is the dream of many an ambitious figure, but what about those who want to unchange it? Who dream of the old order that existed before the 1960s, or before World War I, or before the French Revolution?

Mark Lilla is a professor of humanities at Columbia University and a contributor to the New York Review of Books. In his new collection of essays, The Shipwrecked Mind: On Political Reaction, he explores the lives and ideas of sundry reactionaries for whom the last revolution “marked the end of a glorious journey, not the beginning of one.” His gallery of backward-looking thinkers stretches from the German-Jewish thinker Franz Rosenzweig to the émigré philosophers Leo Strauss and Eric Voegelin, and all the way to the political Islamists who dream of restoring a caliphate.

In 1992, Lilla received a grant from NEH to support translations of postwar political theory in France for a book he edited called New French Thought. His interest in continental philosophy and the modern era has also resulted in books on Giambattista Vico and the place of the religious imagination in contemporary politics. This fall New York Review Books reissued a prequel to the current volume called The Reckless Mind: Intellectuals in Politics, which is about the dangerous relationship between politics and philosophy as evidenced in the lives of Martin Heidegger, Carl Schmitt, and others.

Recently, HUMANITIES emailed Lilla several questions and he emailed us back several answers.

HUMANITIES: What is the shipwrecked mind? Why is it shipwrecked?

MARK LILLA: One of the most common metaphors for history, and for time itself, is that of a river. Time flows, history has currents, etc. While thinking about this image, it occurred to me that some people believe that time carries us along and all we can do is passively experience the ride. Think of cyclical theories of history or even cosmology: The world runs its course, is destroyed, and is then reborn to travel the cycle again.

Other people, though, have a catastrophic conception of history: The river flows but it may not be heading in the right direction. It might flow into a channel full of shoals or rocks, where a ship can run aground or be shattered. This, I think, is the picture of history that reactionaries have.

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