Shelley Fan in Singularity Hub:

The components sound like the aftermath of a shopping and spa retreat: three AA batteries. Two electrical acupuncture needles. One plastic holder that’s usually attached to battery-powered fairy lights. But together they merge into a powerful stimulation device that uses household batteries to control gene expression in cells.

The idea seems wild, but a new study in Nature Metabolism this week showed that it’s possible. The team, led by Dr. Martin Fussenegger at ETH Zurich and the University of Basel in Switzerland, developed a system that uses direct-current electricity—in the form of batteries or portable battery banks—to turn on a gene in human cells in mice with a literal flip of a switch. To be clear, the battery pack can’t regulate in vivo human genes. For now, it only works for lab-made genes inserted into living cells. Yet the interface has already had an impact. In a proof-of-concept test, the scientists implanted genetically engineered human cells into mice with Type 1 diabetes. These cells are normally silent, but can pump out insulin when activated with an electrical zap.

The team used acupuncture needles to deliver the trigger for 10 seconds a day, and the blood sugar levels in the mice returned to normal within a month. The rodents even regained the ability to manage blood sugar levels after a large meal without the need for external insulin, a normally difficult feat.

Called “electrogenetics,” these interfaces are still in their infancy. But the team is especially excited for their potential in wearables to directly guide therapeutics for metabolic and potentially other disorders. Because the setup requires very little power, three AA batteries could trigger a daily insulin shot for more than five years, they said. The study is the latest to connect the body’s analogue controls—gene expression—with digital and programmable software such as smartphone apps. The system is “a leap forward, representing the missing link that will enable wearables to control genes in the not-so-distant future,” said the team.

More here.

Amor Towles in the New York Times:

For over 100 years the cadaver, that unsung hero of murder mysteries, has been accommodating, gracious and generally on time. There is no other figure in crime who has proved more reliable. Since the murder mystery first gained popularity, there have been two world wars, multiple economic crises, dance crazes and moonshots, the advent of radio, cinema, television and the internet. Ideas of right and wrong have evolved, tastes have changed. But through it all, the cadaver has shown up without complaint to do its job. A clock-puncher of the highest order, if you will.

More here.

Miriam Lindner in Adaptive Human Behavior and Physiology:

Mass shooters, violent extremists, and terrorists, who are overwhelmingly male, exhibit misogynistic attitudes and a history of violence against women. Over the past few years, incels (“involuntary celibates”) have gathered in online communities to discuss their frustration with sexual/romantic rejection, espouse male supremacist attitudes, and justify violence against women and men who are more popular with women. Despite the link between misogyny and mass violence, and the recent emergence of online misogynistic extremism, theories and empirical research on misogynistic extremism remain scarce. This article fills this gap.

More here.

Christine Sypnowich at Aeon:

It is often remarked that, for most of the 20th century, political theory languished in the shadow of scientistic views that had dominated philosophy as a whole. Logical positivism insisted on the strict delineation of conceptual from empirical enquiry, matters of fact from matters of value, themes that lingered in the succeeding school of ordinary language philosophy. Murdoch blamed the dominance of a sterile logical analysis for contributing to the lack of vision and creativity in progressive thought. Whereas moral philosophy, as Murdoch put it, ‘survived by the skin of its teeth’, turning itself into a meta-discipline concerned with understanding concepts, political philosophy ‘almost perished’. The intrinsically controversial nature of prescriptions about justice, equality and liberty was replaced with an analysis of how words were used; gone was the ancient Greeks’ idea of political philosophy as reasoned enquiry into how we ought to live in common.

The diminished role of political philosophy as a normative exercise doubtless reflected not just an empiricist outlook in philosophy but also a smug acceptance of the empirically given, that is, the ascription of an automatic legitimacy to the liberal institutions of capitalist democracies in the postwar period.

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Oshan Jarow at Vox:

It’s tempting to imagine memory as a videotape that stores and plays back the past just as it happened. But the workings of the mind are not so simple. Memory is more of a creative act, reconstructing the past under the often hasty and biased influences of the present.

The “creation” of memory doesn’t only influence what we remember, it influences our sense of time’s duration too. Having more memories available for recall can stretch our sense of how much time has passed, while our moods and emotions can tune the richness of what we remember up or down.

This all means news, current events, and the technologies that convey them (like the internet) can influence our perception of time passing slowly or quickly, by influencing how strongly we remember things.

More here.

Sharon Olds and Rachel B. Glaser at The Paris Review:

Over the past few years, Korean reality TV has been a source of inspiration for my writing. Reading the subtitles is an amazing lesson in dialogue. The random casts of participants are a fun study of group dynamics. These shows allow me to witness tender, precarious moments between lovers and strangers. They prove that the mundane and dramatic often go hand in hand. Watching them, I’ve cried, laughed, and shouted at the screen. I’ve become more aware of how we are all living a life of scenes, surrounded by and involved in a seemingly never-ending narrative.

Recently, my husband and I watched Single’s Inferno, a reality show in which young men and women glamp on a desert island. If they “match” with each other, or win challenges (like mud wrestling), they get to helicopter away to a fancy hotel for an overnight date. The stragglers cook together and end up bonding. These conversations encouraged me to write scenes in a less plot-centric way. Often in fiction, it can feel like there is no room to just “hang out.”

more here.

Justin E. H. Smith at Harper’s:

I recall having breakfast at a hotel in Brussels in 2017 and sitting across from Douglas Coupland, the author of Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture, the 1991 book that gave my generation a sort of name that was really only a placeholder for a name. I wanted to tell him how much I resented him for this, but I couldn’t muster the courage to be disagreeable.

At the time it was my firm belief that generations did not exist, that they were simply a retroactive periodization that imposed narrative cohesion on history, one which had really no more legitimacy than such contested categories as “the Dark Ages” or “postmodernity.” “Generation,” of course, means primarily sexual generation—think, for example, of Aristotle’s treatise On the Generation of Animals—and for a long time I bristled at the thought that my own individual generation, in Aristotle’s sense, could also, at the same time, be part of a vastly larger collective generation: the coming-into-being of millions of us at once, or in roughly the same period, millions who, as coevals, share much of the same nature and the same fate. This felt like an echo of astrology. What do I, who am sui generis (note here the reappearance of the Latin root in question), have to do with those who were born in approximately the same epoch?

More here.

Daniel Buck in City Journal:

The California State Board of Education’s new math framework, adopted last month, has drawn intense public criticism. Most critics have focused on the framework’s overt political content or its aims to achieve “equity” by holding back advanced students, but there is an arguably even more fundamental problem: an approach to education called inquiry learning, which has virtually zero grounding in research. There is little in the framework that resembles real mathematical learning.

The framework has roots dating back to the “math wars” of the 1990s. Then as now, reformists and traditionalists argued over the best way to teach children math, and California’s math curriculum was a focal point. Reformists encouraged students to discover and construct knowledge with little guidance from the teacher; traditionalists emphasized the need for step-by-step practice of procedures and memorization of basic math facts. In 1997, California adopted compromise standards—a pedagogical hodgepodge of both approaches.

The new framework, clocking in at 1,000 pages, represents a complete victory for the reformists. It’s astounding in both its breadth—including learning goals, instructional “best-practices,” and class sequences—and its mediocrity.

More here.

Yascha Mounk and Sohrab Ahmari at Persuasion:

Yascha Mounk: You have a really interesting new book called Tyranny, Inc. One might think that when a conservative intellectual writes about “Tyranny, Inc.,” they’re writing about Harvard or Brookings. But you’re writing about the big corporations in the United States. What do you mean by “Tyranny, Inc.?”

Sohrab Ahmari: This is not a tirade against “woke capital.” It’s really a critique of the workings of unhindered capitalism as such. And it comes not from a kind of conservative cultural place in the sense that corporations are pushing gender ideology and so forth. But rather, on a much more fundamental level, it’s an attempt to show how our supposedly non-coercive market societies are in fact suffused with coercion. But that this coercion is taken to be in a “private sphere,” it’s in the marketplace, or the workplace, and, therefore, it’s not treated as being justiciable or being subjected to democratic give and take. We are forced to acquiesce to coercion that is sometimes so systematic and so unjust that I argue it amounts to what I call private tyranny.

More here.

Sam Sodomsky at Pitchfork:

Nearly every step of O’Connor’s career brought trouble. While making her debut album, 1987’s The Lion and the Cobra, she scrapped an entire session and had to pay the remaining debt on her own; she became pregnant with her first child before its release and was horrified by the label’s suggestion to get an abortion. There was, of course, the 1992 Saturday Night Live debacle, where she tore up a photo of Pope John Paul II and asked viewers to “fight the real enemy,” essentially torching a pop career she never wanted. Two weeks later, she was booed while performing at a Bob Dylan tribute show, abandoning her song midway through to scream an a capella Bob Marley cover and run offstage, crying into the arms of Kris Kristofferson.

You could fill a book with these stories, and in most cases, you would come away from it feeling more disdain for the music industry and more tenderness—and respect—for O’Connor. Over the past decade, it seemed as though her legacy was being refurbished and rewritten by a more sympathetic audience. Kathleen Hanna wrote about how O’Connor’s music helped her feel like she “existed in the larger world”; Phoebe Bridgers covered one of her greatest protest songs; Fiona Apple shared a delightful video rocking out to O’Connor’s Lion and the Cobra single “Mandinka” with her dog.

more here.

David Edgerton at Literary Review:

There was a time when commodity histories were everywhere. They tended to focus on consumption and trade over very long distances. Ulbe Bosma’s The World of Sugar is much more than this sort of book. It is one of the most accomplished longue durée case studies in the history of capitalism that we have, concerned not just with trade and consumption but with production also. At every turn it subverts both critiques and celebrations of capitalism, and our understanding of much else besides. It is an extraordinary achievement.

It is, for a start, a genuinely global history. Bosma discusses all the sugar-growing places of the world, from Cuba and Java, the largest exporters of the early 20th century, to Taiwan and the Tucumán region of Argentina. He points to Eastern countries as the greatest producers and consumers of sugar up to the late 19th century. But global does not simply mean ‘exotic’. This is a history not just of cane sugar but also of beet sugar, an equally important form of traded sugar over the last hundred years.

more here.

Gaby Hinsliff in The Guardian:

It must be a while ago now since Chris Bryant has had to write a sermon. But the former curate turned Labour MP, middle-ranking minister and latterly chair of the parliamentary committee that helps determine the fate of MPs who have sinned, doesn’t seem to have lost the knack. His account of what is rotten in the state of politics is neither lofty – if anything Bryant goes out of his way to confess to what he sees as his own failings, including a tendency to be “impulsive, sanctimonious and pompous” – nor overmoralising, but remains gently steadfast in the belief that parliament in general and this one in particular has lost its way. Code of Conduct is an attempt to guide it back to something like the straight and narrow.

He is, of course, entering a crowded literary field. Almost half the publishing industry seems to have had a shot now at detailing how the Boris Johnson era descended into such squalor; the lies, the chaos, the unedifying scrabble around for someone else to pay for his interior designers, and the willingness to overlook all manner of dubious behaviour in his ministers and aides. Even more ink has been spilt on the way Brexit has twisted politics out of shape, with its litany of false promises setting up leave voters for inevitable disillusionment. The queasy charade that is the modern honours system or the culture of abuse and threats that puts good people off standing for parliament are equally well-worn subjects, and in that sense Bryant is comparatively late to the party. But he brings with him more than two decades’ experience as a parliamentarian, a nonpartisan approach that helps him look beyond the failings of individuals to the system itself, and a raft of often small but practical suggestions for cleaning out the stables.

More here.

Mark Golden in Phys.Org:

Stanford University scientists have invented a new kind of paint that can keep homes and other buildings cooler in the summer and warmer in the winter, significantly reducing energy use, costs, and greenhouse gas emissions.

…Current low-emissivity paints usually have a metallic silver or gray color, the aesthetics of which limit their use. The newly invented paints have two layers applied separately: an infrared reflective bottom layer using aluminum flakes and an ultrathin, infrared transparent upper layer using inorganic nanoparticles that comes in a wide range of colors. The infrared spectrum of sunlight causes 49% of natural heating of the planet when it is absorbed by surfaces. For keeping heat out, the paint can be applied to exterior walls and roofs. Most of this infrared light passes through the color layer of the new paints, reflects off the lower layer, and passes back out as light, not being absorbed by the building materials as heat. To keep heat inside, the paints are applied to interior walls, where again, the lower layer reflects the infrared waves that transfer energy across space and are invisible to the human eye.

More here.

Nina’s Blues

Your body, hard vowels
In a soft dress, is still.

What you can’t know
is that after you died
All the black poets
In New York City
Took a deep breath,
And breathed you out;
Dark corners of small clubs,
The silence you left twitching

On the floors of the gigs
You turned your back on,
The balled-up fists of notes
Flung, angry from a keyboard.

You won’t be able to hear us
Try to etch what rose
Off your eyes, from your throat.

Out you bleed, not as sweet, or sweaty,
Through our dark fingertips.
We drum rest
We drum thank you
We drum stay.

by Cornelius Eady

Nina Simone

Mitchell Consky at The Walrus:

Last June, four boys bonded inside a summer camp cabin.

After throwing loose shirts into cubbies and spreading sleeping bags onto sandy mattresses, a game of tag around the bunk beds quickly evolved into “the floor is lava.”

Concealed within the laughter, however, was a link these four boys, all between the ages of five and seven, didn’t yet know about: each of them had lost a father. And I, their camp counsellor for the weekend, had lost mine too.

But “lost” wasn’t the right word.

As my co-counsellors and I learned from our training a few weeks earlier, being specific with language was imperative at grief camp. It was better to avoid any euphemisms like “passed away” and “lost,” as they could inadvertently add confusion to the despair. In a child’s mind, when something is lost, it can also be found. Our fathers would not be found.

More here.

Mark Harris in Undark:

Who hasn’t gazed at a murmuration of thousands of starlings wheeling rhythmically above their roost at dusk, and not wondered at the majesty and mystery of natural systems? For the Italian theoretical physicist Giorgio Parisi, merely marveling at nature wasn’t enough. In the early 1990s, he embarked on a decades-long project to install high-end commercial cameras on the rooftops of Rome, timed with millisecond-precision to capture and track every bird in the flock in three dimensions.

In this brief, crisply written memoir, “In a Flight of Starlings: The Wonders of Complex Systems,” Parisi takes the reader on a journey through his scientific life in the realm of complex, disordered systems, from fundamental particles to migratory birds. He argues that science’s struggle to understand and master the universe’s complexity, and especially to communicate it to an ever-more skeptical public, holds the key to humanity’s future well-being.

More here.