Jill Lepore in The New Yorker:

Burnout is generally said to date to 1973; at least, that’s around when it got its name. By the nineteen-eighties, everyone was burned out. In 1990, when the Princeton scholar Robert Fagles published a new English translation of the Iliad, he had Achilles tell Agamemnon that he doesn’t want people to think he’s “a worthless, burnt-out coward.” This expression, needless to say, was not in Homer’s original Greek. Still, the notion that people who fought in the Trojan War, in the twelfth or thirteenth century B.C., suffered from burnout is a good indication of the disorder’s claim to universality: people who write about burnout tend to argue that it exists everywhere and has existed forever, even if, somehow, it’s always getting worse. One Swiss psychotherapist, in a history of burnout published in 2013 that begins with the usual invocation of immediate emergency—“Burnout is increasingly serious and of widespread concern”—insists that he found it in the Old Testament. Moses was burned out, in Numbers 11:14, when he complained to God, “I am not able to bear all this people alone, because it is too heavy for me.” And so was Elijah, in 1 Kings 19, when he “went a day’s journey into the wilderness, and came and sat down under a juniper tree: and he requested for himself that he might die; and said, It is enough.”

To be burned out is to be used up, like a battery so depleted that it can’t be recharged. In people, unlike batteries, it is said to produce the defining symptoms of “burnout syndrome”: exhaustion, cynicism, and loss of efficacy. Around the world, three out of five workers say they’re burned out. A 2020 U.S. study put that figure at three in four. A recent book claims that burnout afflicts an entire generation. In “Can’t Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation,” the former BuzzFeed News reporter Anne Helen Petersen figures herself as a “pile of embers.” The earth itself suffers from burnout.

More here.

Amber Dance in Nature:

Evolutionary biologist David Baum was thrilled to flick through a preprint in August 2019 and come face-to-face — well, face-to-cell — with a distant cousin. Baum, who works at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, was looking at an archaeon: a type of microorganism best known for living in extreme environments, such as deep-ocean vents and acid lakes. Archaea can look similar to bacteria, but have about as much in common with them as they do with a banana. The one in the bioRxiv preprint had tentacle-like projections, making the cells look like meatballs with some strands of spaghetti attached. Baum had spent a lot of time imagining what humans’ far-flung ancestors might look like, and this microbe was a perfect doppelgänger.

Archaea are more than just oddball lifeforms that thrive in unusual places — they turn out to be quite widespread. Moreover, they might hold the key to understanding how complex life evolved on Earth. Many scientists suspect that an ancient archaeon gave rise to the group of organisms known as eukaryotes, which include amoebae, mushrooms, plants and people — although it’s also possible that both eukaryotes and archaea arose from some more distant common ancestor.

Eukaryotic cells are palatial structures with complex internal features, including a nucleus to house genetic material and separate compartments to generate energy and build proteins. A popular theory about their evolution suggests that they descended from an archaeon that, somewhere along the way, merged with another microbe. But researchers have had trouble exploring this idea, in part because archaea can be hard to grow and study in the laboratory. The microbes have received so little attention that even the basics of their lifestyle — how they develop and divide, for example — remain largely mysterious

More here.

Justin E. H. Smith in his Substack Newsletter:

“Ethnoscience” and “Indigenous science”, along with more fine-grained designations like “ethnomathematics”, “ethnoastronomy”, etc., are common terms used to describe both Indigenous systems of knowledge, as well as the scholarly study of these systems. These terms are contested among specialists, for reasons I will not address here. More recently they have also been swallowed up by the voracious beast that is our neverending culture war, and are now hotly contested by people who know nothing about them as well.

Thus in his New York Times column of May 13 entitled “This Is How Wokeness Ends”, David Brooks singles out ethnomathematics as one of the “fringe absurdities” produced by the new “soft totalitarian” ideology currently taking America by storm. Two days before that, Brian Leiter declared on his widely read philosophy blog that Indigenous science is “bad science” — this in response to another philosophy blog, Figs in Winter, that had recently deemed Indigenous science “pseudoscience” (Leiter thinks this latter category is unuseful, in view of the well-known demarcation problem in the philosophy of science). Now, Brooks has made a career out of modeling ignorance for intellectually soft and complacent Americans, while Leiter is a representative of an academic discipline that, at least in principle, encourages its members to pursue broad learning and to cultivate an interest in the world around them. So, though perhaps I should be inured to this sort of thing by now, I admit I found it astonishing to come across something so aggressively ignorant and incurious as his dismissal of Indigenous science.

More here.

Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe:

For as much as people talk about food, a good case can be made that we don’t give it the attention or respect it actually deserves. Food is central to human life, and how we go about the process of creating and consuming it — from agriculture to distribution to cooking to dining — touches the most mundane aspects of our daily routines as well as large-scale questions of geopolitics and culture. Rachel Laudan is a historian of science whose masterful book, Cuisine and Empire, traces the development of the major world cuisines and how they intersect with politics, religion, and war. We talk about all this, and Rachel gives her pitch for granting more respect to “middling cuisine” around the world.

More here.

Tim Adams in The Guardian:

Could you define what you mean by “noise” in the book, in layman’s terms – how does it differ from things like subjectivity or error?

Our main subject is really system noise. System noise is not a phenomenon within the individual, it’s a phenomenon within an organisation or within a system that is supposed to come to decisions that are uniform. It’s really a very different thing from subjectivity or bias. You have to look statistically at a great number of cases. And then you see noise.

Some of the examples you describe – the extraordinary variance seen in sentencing for the same crimes (even influenced by such external matters as the weather, or the weekend football results), say, or the massive discrepancies in insurance underwriting or medical diagnosis or job interviews based on the same baseline information – are shocking. The driver of that noise often seems to lie with the protected status of the “experts” doing the choosing. No judge, I imagine, wants to acknowledge that an algorithm would be fairer at delivering justice?

The judicial system, I think, is special in a way, because it’s some “wise” person who is deciding. You have a lot of noise in medicine, but in medicine, there is an objective criterion of truth.

More here.

Edward Said on Eqbal Ahmad from The Eqbal Ahmad Project on Vimeo.

Motherhood is for Beginners

First, realize: you’ve been drowning
for thousands of years and you know
what finally gets their attention?

The economy. Birth rates at their lowest
where you live in a country that boasts
the second highest cost of childbirth

of any industrialized nation
and your neighbor recommends
goat yoga when you lock yourself

in the car to cry. The only thing
we love more than feeding babies
is keeping them in line for bread,

their sweet legs dangling off
mama’s hip and one hand caught
like a finch in her hair. Second:

a man once told you women
who refuse to have children
are selfish, and you stared at him

like he wasn’t your husband,
like that’s not the kind of paradox
you prepared yourself for, loving

a person who thinks this way
even for one disastrous moment,
even when you know he’ll learn

how cruel this claim is long before
you write the poem to remember it.
Forgiving him takes just as much

work as it does to forgive mothers
who say the same thing, assuming
you’ll agree because your daughter

Read more »

Hadley Freeman in The Guardian:

Poor Salman Rushdie. The one thing I am most keen to talk to him about is the one thing he absolutely, definitely does not want to discuss. “I really resist the idea of being dragged back to that period of time that you insist on bringing up,” he grumbles when I make the mistake of mentioning it twice in the first 15 minutes of our conversation. He is in his elegant, book-lined apartment, a cosy armchair just behind him, the corridor to the kitchen over his shoulder. He’s in New York, which has been his home for the past 20 years, and we are talking – as is the way these days – on video. But even through the screen his frustration is palpable, and I don’t blame him. He’s one of the most famous literary authors alive, having won pretty much every book prize on the planet, including the best of the Booker for Midnight’s Children. We’re meeting to talk about his latest book, Languages Of Truth, which is a collection of nonfiction from the last two decades, covering everything from Osama bin Laden to Linda Evangelista; from Cervantes to Covid. So why do I keep bringing up the fatwa?

We try again. I want to do better because, really, he’s a lot of fun to chat to. Given his success and his history, pomposity should be a given, paranoia would be understandable. But this thoughtful man with an easy giggle is neither, as happy to talk about Field Of Dreams (“A very good film!”) as he is about Elena Ferrante, of whom he’s a fan. Also, Rushdie, 73, tells me, that since he recovered from Covid last spring, he’s been working on his first play. “Ooh, that’s exciting,” I say. “What’s it about?”

“Helen of Troy. It’s written in verse, and she’s interesting because all we really know about her is that she ran off with Paris. But who is she? Why does she do what she does? How does she feel about the consequences of her actions?”

More here.

Annie Roth in The New York Times:

For centuries, humans have been captivated by the beauty of the betta. Their slender bodies and oversized fins, which hang like bolts of silk, come in a variety of vibrant colors seldom seen in nature. However, bettas, also known as the Siamese fighting fish, did not become living works of art on their own. The betta’s elaborate colors and long, flowing fins are the product of a millennium of careful selective breeding. Or as Yi-Kai Tea, a doctoral candidate at the University of Sydney who studies the evolution and speciation of fishes, put it, “quite literally the fish equivalent of dog domestication.”

A new study, uploaded in April to the preprint service BioRxiv, shows through genome sequencing that humans began domesticating bettas at least 1,000 years ago. The millennium of careful selection gave rise to the stunning diversity of domestic betta fishes alive today, but also caused both wild and domestic betta fish to undergo vast genetic changes. By studying the genes of these fish, the study’s authors argue, scientists can learn a great deal about how domestication alters the genes of wild animals.

Mr. Tea, who was not involved in the analysis, praised the research for being “the first major study to tease apart the genetic basis for this remarkable phenomenon” in fish, he said.

More here.

Moudhy Al-Rashid in Psyche:

Along a dried-up channel of the Euphrates river in modern-day Iraq, broken mud bricks poke out of vast, dusty ruins. They are the remains of Uruk, the birthplace of writing that’s better known in popular culture today as the city once ruled by the legendary king Gilgamesh, the hero of an epic about his struggle with life, love and death. Sometimes called the oldest story in the world, the Epic of Gilgamesh continues to resonate with modern audiences more than 3,000 years after a Babylonian scholar named Sîn-leqi-unninni picked up his reed stylus and, in the tiny tetrahedrons of cuneiform script, impressed a standardised version of the epic on to 12 clay tablets. Written in a literary dialect of the Akkadian language spoken in ancient Mesopotamia, it’s this version that has survived on fragmentary clay copies – some as big as an iPad and others as little as a fingertip – uncovered from sites throughout what is now Iraq, Syria and neighbouring countries.

The story is equal parts hero’s journey and crash course in Mesopotamian cosmology, as Gilgamesh follows the Tigris and Euphrates rivers to their source beyond the known world in search of a survivor of the apocalyptic Flood named Uta-napishti. Fundamentally, it tells of Gilgamesh’s transformation from cruel to kindly king.

More here.

Helen Pearson in Nature:

It wasn’t long into the pandemic before Simon Carley realized we had an evidence problem. It was early 2020, and COVID-19 infections were starting to lap at the shores of the United Kingdom, where Carley is an emergency-medicine doctor at hospitals in Manchester. Carley is also a specialist in evidence-based medicine — the transformative idea that physicians should decide how to treat people by referring to rigorous evidence, such as clinical trials.

As cases of COVID-19 climbed in February, Carley thought that clinicians were suddenly abandoning evidence and reaching for drugs just because they sounded biologically plausible. Early studies Carley saw being published often lacked control groups or enrolled too few people to draw firm conclusions. “We were starting to treat patients with these drugs initially just on what seemed like a good idea,” he says. He understood the desire to do whatever is possible for someone gravely ill, but he also knew how dangerous it is to assume a drug works when so many promising treatments prove to be ineffective — or even harmful — in trials. “The COVID-19 pandemic has arguably been one of the greatest challenges to evidence-based medicine since the term was coined in the last century,” Carley and his colleagues wrote of the problems they were seeing.

More here.

Robert Kuttner in The American Prospect:

Joe Biden’s American Families Plan is something of a miracle. It carries out goals that advocates have only dreamed of. These include $225 billion for day care, so that no family pays more than 7 percent of its income on child care; universal pre-kindergarten; paid family and medical leave; as well as better pay for care workers and $200 billion to assure four million uninsured people will gain health coverage.

All this, and more, is nothing short of astonishing. And yet, there is a deeper challenge that these superb proposals don’t reach.

Far too much of the entire caregiving sector has been commercialized by for-profit vendors, from health care, to residential and home nursing care for the elderly, and even child care and pre-kindergarten. These entrepreneurs use taxpayer dollars and consumer premiums to maximize profits.

What’s wrong with that? Doesn’t the profit motive optimize efficiencies?

Not in the caregiving sector it doesn’t. As they say at the business schools, good management produces an “alignment of incentives.” But mix caregiving with commercial vendors, and incentives are often backwards.

More here.

Matt Taibbi in his Substack Newsletter:

When I read Chaos Monkeys the first time I was annoyed, because this was Antonio’s third career at least — he’d also worked at Goldman, Sachs — and he tossed off a memorable bestseller like it was nothing. Nearly all autobiographies fail because the genre requires total honesty, and not only do few writers have the stomach for turning the razor on themselves, most still have one eye on future job offers or circles of friends, and so keep the bulk of their interesting thoughts sidelined — you’re usually reading a résumé, not a book.

Chaos Monkeys is not that. Garcia-Martinez is an immediately relatable narrator because in one breath he tells you exactly what he thinks of former colleagues (“A week before my last day, I had lunch with the only senior person at Goldman Sachs who was not an inveterate asshole”) and in the next explains, but does not excuse, the psychic quirks that have him chasing rings in some of the world’s most rapacious corporations.

More here.

Alice Rothchild in CounterPunch:

The both-sides-have-their reasons-but-Israel-is-the-victim stories follow an expected pattern. Israeli Jews, still living in the shadow of the Holocaust, return to their rightful homes and then fight for every inch of what is justly theirs.  They are repeatedly faced with intractable Arab terrorists who attack innocent civilians and must be crushed with all the might the Israeli military has at its disposal. Never Again! Add “barely human” Hamas and Iranian militants, and armed and aggressive ultra-Orthodox Jews and settlers abetted by Israeli soldiers defending God’s promises and marching defiantly through Jerusalem yelling “Death to the Arabs!” and we have the narrative in place. The United Nations, a host of human rights groups, and the International Court protest, suggesting various crimes against humanity, while Israelis wring their hands and cry foul. Victim again. The US remains remarkably silent given that much of the weaponry is ours. Could both sides just de-escalate, please?

What is different this time?

While there have been uprisings of Palestinian citizens in Israel against land confiscations and other violations, as well as in support of Palestinians suffering in the territories (Land Day in 1976 comes to mind), now Palestinians in Acre, Haifa, Jaffe, Lod, Nazareth, and Ramle are protesting loudly and vigorously. The mayor of Lod may call this “Kristallnacht” but Palestinian citizens have reached a breaking point, unable to tolerate the 72 year history of racist and exclusionary policies by the Israeli government, its most recent attacks in Jerusalem, and ever-increasing rightward, tending toward fascistic, political parties.

The Israeli government may have miscalculated, although it is entirely possible that the wily Netanyahu thinks that a war would rally the fractured Israeli populace and improve his chances of reappearing Houdini-like as a viable candidate and of course staying out of prison. I suspect that most Israeli politicians believe that anything that causes a rift in the dysfunctional Hamas/ Palestinian Authority relationship and provides an excuse to assassinate a few Hamas leaders is also good for Israel. Israel has already thrown a monkey wrench into the now cancelled Palestinian elections by denying East Jerusalemites the right to vote, thus increasing the distress of the already pandemic stressed occupied Palestinian population.

More here.

Ian Gilligan in aeon:

Archaeologists and other scientists are beginning to unravel the story of our most intimate technology: clothing. They’re learning when and why our ancestors first started to wear clothes, and how their adoption was crucial to the evolutionary success of our ancestors when they faced climate change on a massive scale during the Pleistocene ice ages. These investigations have revealed a new twist to the story, assigning a much more prominent role to clothing than previously imagined. After the last ice age, global warming prompted people in many areas to change their clothes, from animal hides to textiles. This change in clothing material, I suspect, could be what triggered one of the greatest changes in the life of humanity. Not food but clothing led to the agricultural revolution.

My recent work shows that clothing wasn’t just the unique adaptation of a more-or-less hairless mammal to the changing natural environments. The development of clothing led to innovations with many repercussions for humanity, beyond survival in cold climates. A need for portable insulation from the cold in the Palaeolithic promoted major technological transitions. These include stone toolkits for working animal hides and, subsequently, bone tools such as pointed awls and needles to make tailored garments. Later, during the coldest stage of the last ice age, Homo sapiens in middle latitudes devised multi-layered outfits with an inner layer of underwear. Equipped with effective protection from wind chill, our species could penetrate into the frigid Arctic Circle, further north than cold-adapted Neanderthals had managed to venture. From the northeastern corner of Siberia, modern humans strolled across an exposed land bridge to enter Alaska by 15,000 years ago, if not earlier, to likely become the first hominins to set foot in the Americas. At the Broken Mammoth site in Alaska, archaeologists have unearthed the fragile technology that made the journey possible: a 13,000-year-old eyed needle.

More here.

Crooked Timber is having a seminar on Kim Stanley Robinson’s Ministry for the Future.

The participants in the seminar:

• • Henry Farrell blogs at Crooked Timber. Technocracy and Empire.
  • Maria Farrell blogs at Crooked Timber. What is Ours is Only Ours to Give.
  • Jessica Green is an associate professor of political science at the University of Toronto. Can the World’s Bankers Really Save the Climate?
  • Oliver Morton is The Economist’s briefings editor. On Solar Geoengineering and Kim Stanley Robinson.
  • Suresh Naidu is a professor of economics and international and public affairs at Columbia University. This Is How It Gets Better.
  • John Quiggin blogs at Crooked Timber. Half the Earth?.
  • Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò is an assistant professor of philosophy at Georgetown University. What’s In Our Way?
  • Todd Tucker is director of governance studies at the Roosevelt Institute. Ministry for Your Future Soul
  • Belle Waring blogs at Crooked Timber. The Sudden Tempest of Ultimate Summer
  • Kim Stanley Robinson is a writer. Response.

More here.

Thomas Meaney in The New Yorker:

International conferences are notoriously difficult to organize, all the more so when the aim is global revolution and the world’s empires oppose your agenda. When, starting in 1919, Vladimir Lenin convened the first congresses of the Communist International, some Bolsheviks were disappointed by the characters who turned up—old-fashioned socialists, trade unionists, and anarchists, coming with false papers, in disguise, under aliases, and all apparently expecting hotel rooms. The Russian revolutionary Victor Serge observed, “It was obvious at first glance that here were no insurgent souls.” Lenin kept a blinking electric light on his desk to cut meetings short. But one of the arrivals made an impression. “Very tall, very handsome, very dark, with very wavy hair,” Serge recalled. It was Manabendra Nath Roy, an Indian who was a founder of the Mexican Communist Party. When ducking imperial authorities, he used a method described by a comrade: “If you want to hide revolutionary connections . . . you had better travel first class.”

Roy had cut an unusual path to Moscow. Born into a Brahmin family in West Bengal in 1887, he left India in his twenties on a series of missions to secure funds and weapons for an uprising against the British Raj. During the First World War, a group of Indian anti-imperialists wanted the Germans to open a second front against their common enemy. But Roy’s parleys with contacts in Java, China, and Japan yielded almost nothing. In Tokyo, he resolved to press onward to the United States: “I decided to take the bull by the horn, pinned a golden cross to the lapel of my coat, put on a very sombre face, and called at the American consulate.” Disguised as “Father Martin” and having, he said, “reinforced my armour with a morocco-bound copy of the Holy Bible beautifully printed on rice-paper,” Roy arrived in San Francisco in 1916.

More here.