Robin Fields in Undark:

In the U.S., public health agencies generally don’t test sewage for polio. Instead, they wait for people to show up sick in doctor’s offices or hospitals — a reactive strategy that can give this stealthy virus more time to circulate silently through the community before it is detected.

In New York, the first sign of trouble surfaced when a young man in Rockland County sought medical treatment for weakness and paralysis in June. By the time tests confirmed he had polio, nearly a month had passed.

Because the majority of polio infections cause no symptoms, by the time there’s a case of paralysis, 100 to 1,000 infections may have occurred, said Dr. Yvonne Maldonado, a professor of pediatrics at the Stanford School of Medicine who chairs the American Academy of Pediatrics’ committee on infectious diseases.

“You’re already chasing your tail if you’re going to wait for a case to show up,” she said.

More here.

Francis Fukuyama in Persuasion:

Many people have recognized the centrality of polarization and offered solutions for how to get out of it. Among these are: institutional changes, especially to our electoral laws, that would restructure the incentives under which politicians operate; the growth of a third, centrist party that grabs the middle ground from the extreme wings of the existing two; and grassroots movements to build moderation and understanding from the bottom up. All of these will be important components of depolarization, but none of them will be sufficient by themselves or take place soon enough to solve the problem.

The path out of polarization needs to be a political one, given the nature of our democratic system: that is, a realigning election in which one party decisively wins control of both houses of Congress and the presidency and holds on to power through two or three electoral cycles. These realignments are rare, but in conjunction with the other pathways suggested may be in reach in the coming years if one of the two parties plays its cards right.

More here.

Emergence

I call out for Water Woman, my mother
I call out for Earth Woman, my mother
I emerge from below the earth’s surface
I emerge from within sacred darkness
that cradles my mother Earth Woman’s heart
I emerge at the House-Made-of-Thought
I emerge at the House-Made-of-Language
I am home
I am home

by Manny Loley
from The Poetry Foundations
translated by the author from the Navajo

Notes:
Audio version performed by the author
Read the Navajo-language version by the author, “Hasísná.”

Nat Watkins in The New Atlantis:

I have worked in restaurants, lived on sustenance homesteads, volunteered for aquaponics and permaculture farms, and harvested at food forests from Hawaii to Texas. I invariably come home with a crate of spare cuttings and leftovers that no one else wants. My pockets are often full of uneaten complimentary bread.

This is possible because I live in a country where 30 to 40 percent of food produced is never eaten, where the average family throws out $1,500 worth of food every year, and where a typical restaurant discards about a half-pound of food per meal.

This is an astonishing historical anomaly. In almost any other time and place in human history, someone would look at the very same waste and say, “Looks delicious!” Some of the world’s most common dishes — like chilis, soups, and casseroles — were once common ways of using leftovers. A culture of scarcity created delicious food, often literally out of cultures growing on food: yeasts, molds, and bacteria. We would have no cheese, bread, and beer without them. By contrast, our culture of abundance is also a culture of waste, partly because we have forgotten the ways we used to cook.

More here.

Peter J. van Dijk, Adrienne P. Jessop and T. H. Noel Ellis in Nature:

There are few historical records concerning Gregor Johann Mendel and his work, so theories abound concerning his motivation. These theories range from Fisher’s view that Mendel was testing a fully formed previous theory of inheritance to Olby’s view that Mendel was not interested in inheritance at all, whereas textbooks often state his motivation was to understand inheritance. In this Perspective, we review current ideas about how Mendel arrived at his discoveries and then discuss an alternative scenario based on recently discovered historical sources that support the suggestion that Mendel’s fundamental research on the inheritance of traits emerged from an applied plant breeding program. Mendel recognized the importance of the new cell theory; understanding of the formation of reproductive cells and the process of fertilization explained his segregation ratios. This interest was probably encouraged by his friendship with Johann Nave, whose untimely death preceded Mendel’s first 1865 lecture by a few months. This year is the 200th anniversary of Mendel’s birth, presenting a timely opportunity to revisit the events in his life that led him to undertake his seminal research. We review existing ideas on how Mendel made his discoveries, before presenting more recent evidence.

More here.

Akshya Saxena in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

AS SOMEONE WHO grew up in India in the early 2000s, after the once-colonized country had opened itself to the global economy, one thing was clear to me. Aspiration and English were synonymous. Both were essential. This lesson was drilled into me at my missionary-run English-medium high school in New Delhi. Whether we dreamed of becoming doctors or engineers or corporate hotshots, we were repeatedly told that we needed to have English. Students were penalized for speaking in any language other than English, and our pronunciations were disciplined in preparation for roles no one doubted we would take on. Away from the institutional ear, my peers and I still cherished our other languages, to varying degrees. But, for the most part, we learned to joke, dream, rebel, and obey in English.

Everyone agreed that English was A Good Thing to Have. I heard similar ideas about the importance of English at home as well. My father, raising daughters in a country that did not value women, encouraged my sister and me to speak in English, and beamed with pride when we did.

More here.

Ellen Jovin in Literary Hub:

In the late afternoon of September 21, 2018, I exited my New York apartment building carrying a folding table and a big sign reading GRAMMAR TABLE. I crossed Broadway to a little park called Verdi Square, found a spot at the northern entrance to the Seventy-Second Street subway station, propped up my sign, and prepared to answer grammar questions from passersby.

This might seem bizarre to some, but to me it felt like destiny. I’ve been teaching writing and grammar for decades. I love grammar. I’ve studied twenty-five languages for fun. My bookshelves are filled with grammar and usage books, carefully alphabetized by language from Albanian to Zulu.

More here.

Jonathan Shaw in Harvard Magazine:

INTERPRETING ANCIENT DNA—a scientific approach that has grown powerfully during the past decade—reveals that human history is a story of mixing and migration at a scale and complexity that no one previously imagined. Waves of people and genes have flowed across oceans and continents for millennia, creating a mosaic of admixture. Genetically, “race” is a broken concept, this work shows, because every population is a mixture of other populations—which are themselves mixtures of still earlier populations. The analysis of ancient DNA can nevertheless reveal genetic signatures of people who lived in a particular time and place—proving that today’s inhabitants are not necessarily descended from the inhabitants of thousands of years ago. Britain, for instance, has experienced no fewer than five major waves of migration in the last 10,000 years. Three of these migrations involved near-total replacement of the then-native population.

Genetic studies have also provided objective evidence that has helped answer or refine longstanding questions in archaeology, anthropology, and linguistics. How did farming spread, or Indo-European languages? What happened to the Neanderthals? The research has upended certain theories and affirmed others, as it rapidly matures into a freestanding discipline. In 2010, scientists had assembled just five ancient human genomes, including three Neanderthals. Today, the lab of professor of genetics and of human evolutionary biology David Reich alone has sequenced more than 16,000 ancient humans from around the world.

More here.

Chantel Prat in Nautilus:

I remember all too well that day early in the pandemic when we first received the “stay at home” order. My attitude quickly shifted from feeling like I got a “snow day” to feeling like a bird in a cage. Being a person who is both extraverted by nature and not one who enjoys being told what to do, the transition was pretty rough.

But you know what?

I got used to it. Though the pandemic undoubtedly affected some of your lives more than others, I know it touched every one of us in ways we will never forget. And now, after two years and counting, I am positive that every person reading this is fundamentally different from when the pandemic started. Because that’s how our brains work. They are molded by our experiences so that we can fit into all kinds of different situations—even the decidedly suboptimal ones. This is actually one of the most human things about all of our brains. In fact, according to some contemporary views of human evolution, our ancestors underwent a “cognitive revolution” precisely because they were forced to adapt. Based on evidence suggesting that the size of our ancestors’ brains increased following periods of extreme weather instability, one popular explanation for our remarkable flexibility is that the hominids who were not able to adapt to environmental changes didn’t survive. In other words, the brains of modern humans were selected for their ability to learn and adapt to changing environments.

More here.

Guy Gunartne in The Guardian:

“One morning Anders, a white man, woke up to find he had turned a deep and undeniable brown.” So begins Mohsin Hamid’s inventive new novel, The Last White Man. Anders, as it turns out, is not an isolated case. More people in an unnamed town begin to change, including Oona, a yoga instructor and a friend of Anders. Violence inevitably erupts around them. White vigilante gangs terrorise the transformed, while some doggedly refuse to accept an end to whiteness. At its heart, this is a novel about seeing, being seen, loss and letting go. The loss of privilege that comes from being perceived as white, and no longer being able to view the world from within whiteness, are some of the anxieties examined here.

The immediacy of the novel’s opening may evoke Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis, but Hamid’s prose style is much more akin to José Saramago. His often paragraph-long sentences are set to an unbroken rhythm. At times, it reads like a parable. We move briskly from hypnotic early depictions of social rupture to the tenderness of the closing stages. Hamid’s decision to foreground the themes of loss and mourning allows the novel to speak most incisively to the condition of whiteness itself.

More here.

T V Padma in Nature:

An injectable drug that protects people at high risk of HIV infection has been recommended for use by the World Health Organization (WHO). Cabotegravir (also known as CAB-LA), which is given every two months, was initially approved by the United States Food and Drug Administration in December 2021.

Cabotegravir is currently manufactured by ViiV Healthcare, a UK-based company jointly owned by GSK in London, Pfizer in New York City and Shionogi in Osaka, Japan. On 28 July, the day that the WHO issued its recommendation, ViiV announced a voluntary licensing agreement in which up to three other companies would be allowed to produce and supply generic versions of the drug; these would be intended for use in 90 of the world’s lowest-income countries, where the majority of new HIV cases occur.

“We believe that widening access to cabotegravir could be game-changing in HIV prevention and could significantly contribute towards the goal of ending the HIV epidemic,” a ViiV Healthcare spokesperson said. But many are concerned that the drug will be too expensive to have an impact. Campaign groups say that the drug’s price tag — estimated at US$3,700 per vial in the United States — puts it out of reach of the poorest countries. The medical charity Doctors Without Borders has called the license “limited and disappointing”.

ViiV has promised to provide the drug at a “not for profit price” for public programmes in low income countries. It has not said what this price would be — but it has told Nature that it will be more than $10 per dose, the price that campaign groups are urging.

More here.

Jennifer Szalai at the NYT:

Care work — tending to the sick, the very young or the very old — has long been denied the kind of recognition (and remuneration) that such essential labor deserves. Activists have argued that society should treat it as a social good, affording people the time and the resources to attend to loved ones as needed.

But there’s still the stubborn fact that for some people and some relationships, caregiving will always feel like a burden, no matter how assiduously one might try to manage it. In “Mothercare,” the novelist and critic Lynne Tillman offers an account that is startling in its blunt, even brutal, refusal of sentimentality. “Handling Mother’s body violated her and me,” Tillman writes, recalling how she would help her mother use the bedside commode. “Carrying it full from her bedroom to the toilet and dumping it disgusted me. I would gag, and that never stopped.”

more here.

Will Di Novi at Hazlitt:

Ever since ancient Uruk, the world’s first major city, founded around 4000 BC in what is now Iraq, alleys have served as a borderland between private and public life. Uruk’s covered lanes, no more than eight feet wide, offered respite from the sun when residents walked to the temple, as well as a space to escape from tiny windowless homes. A place to meet and make mischief, tucked away from the plazas where power and privilege reigned, these were sites where urban ideals collided with human desire.

That would never change. Even as the back alley shifted form and function, inspiring local variants in every urban culture—the “castra” alleyways in Roman fortress towns, the hutongs of Beijing, the terraced lanes of Istanbul with howling packs of dogs—it stayed the city’s unofficial social laboratory. The lower and middle classes of early modern Seoul defied a rigid caste system in narrow Pimagol: “Avoid-Horse-Streets” where nobles couldn’t ride.

more here.

Melinda Cooper in Phenomenal World:

When the Federal Reserve turned to unconventional monetary policy in 2008, many feared that we would soon see a return to the wage-price spiral of the 1970s. The combination of deficit spending and monetary ease raised the old specter of debt monetization, in which the Treasury sells its debt directly to the central bank instead of the bond market, thereby freeing itself from interest obligations and market discipline. (Pejoratively, this is referred to as “printing money.”) But while quantitative easing (QE) did involve the mass purchase of Treasury bonds by the Federal Reserve, the Fed was buying these bonds from private financial institutions, not from the Treasury itself. Instead of opening a direct line from the central bank to the Treasury (a public—and, in theory, democratic—entity) , the Fed’s “money printing” operation detoured around the Treasury to create new reserves on the books of primary-dealer banks.

This was, at best, an indirect form of debt monetization. But inflation hawks nevertheless turned to the well-worn scripts of the 1970s to make sense of what was happening. By driving down interest rates on future government borrowing, they warned, QE would encourage wanton social spending and release workers from the discipline of the market. Wages would inevitably be driven upwards at the expense of profits. They need not have worried. Beginning with the Troubled Asset Relief Program or TARP, which bailed out private financial institutions while leaving indebted households underwater, post-crisis fiscal stimulus has prevented a collapse in consumption but done little to offset the astounding concentration of wealth and income at the top. For all these reasons and more, the Fed’s decade-long (and counting) experiment with the money printer has failed to resurrect the wage-push consumer-price inflation of the early 1970s.

More here.

Thea Riofrancos in The Nation (illustration by Tim Robinson):

n 1957, as the postwar economic boom led to a “great acceleration” in hydrocarbon energy use, a group of scientists working for a Texas-based petroleum company called Humble Oil (later renamed ExxonMobil) embarked on a study prompted by growing public concern over air pollution and new research on the consequences of burning fossil fuels. What they found was that the “enormous quantity of carbon dioxide” in the atmosphere was linked to the “combustion of fossil fuels.” Sixty-five years later, reality has proved to be even worse than their findings. With the unchecked combustion of fossil fuels releasing enormous quantities of carbon, the world is now on track to reach 5.8 degrees Fahrenheit above preindustrial levels. At the most recent UN Climate Change Conference, the assembled heads of state produced, yet again, zero binding commitments to reduce those emissions. And despite the green rhetoric, only 6 percent of the fiscal stimulus packages implemented by the G20 nations in 2020 and 2021 have contributed to emissions reductions, even as oil company profits soared to record highs. Amid government inaction, it has also become clear that the private sector will not save us. We’ve been told that benevolent investors would reroute capital away from dirty energy sectors and toward the green industries of the future. But the promise of “socially responsible finance” has proved to be mostly a scam. Despite pledges to do otherwise, Blackrock, the world’s largest asset manager, has continued to invest in fossil fuel companies, and the production of coal—the dirtiest fossil fuel—is now on the rise.

Meanwhile, with neither states nor capital doing all that much to slash carbon use, emissions have fully rebounded from their pandemic slump.

More here.