Melissa Hogenboom in BBC:

Forty thousand years ago in Europe, we were not the only human species alive – there were at least three others. Many of us are familiar with one of these, the Neanderthals. Distinguished by their stocky frames and heavy brows, they were remarkably like us and lived in many pockets of Europe for more than 300,000 years. For the most part, Neanderthals were a resilient group. They existed for about 200,000 years longer than we modern humans (Homo sapiens) have been alive. Evidence of their existence vanishes around 28,000 years ago – giving us an estimate for when they may, finally, have died off. Fossil evidence shows that, towards the end, the final few were clinging onto survival in places like Gibraltar. Findings from this British overseas territory, located at the southern tip of the Iberian peninsula, are helping us to understand more about what these last living Neanderthals were really like. And new insights reveal that they were much more like us than we once believed.

In recognition of this, Gibraltar received Unesco world heritage status in 2016. Of particular interest are four large caves. Three of these caves have barely been explored. But one of them, Gorham’s cave, is a site of yearly excavations. “They weren’t just surviving,” the Gibraltar museum’s director of archaeology Clive Finlayson tells me of its inhabitants.”It was in some way Neanderthal city,” he says. “This was the place with the highest concentration of Neanderthals anywhere in Europe.” It’s not known if this might amount to only dozens of people, or a few families, since genetic evidence also suggests that Neanderthals lived in “many small subpopulations”.

More here.

Michael Dirda in The Washington Post:

Michael Graziano at the IAI:

The scientific work that I do on the brain basis of consciousness is sometimes misunderstood – a misunderstanding which I think comes mainly from the political divide between mystics and materialists. I am a materialist, and reactions to my work tend to follow along the lines of: ‘keep your scientific hands off my consciousness mystery’.

This kind of argument often devolves into distortions and phrases examined out of context – in short, the wooly thinking of philosophy that’s lost its integrity. Among the most common and puzzling reaction I get goes something like this: ‘Graziano says that consciousness does not exist; that we lack an inner dialogue; that getting stuck by a pin, or walking into a wall, is ethereal’. None of these statements are true, of course, but I do often hear them coming from the nonscientific, or often pseudoscientific, political side.

As an attempt to get across the reality of what I work on, I’ll start with a simple example: suppose you’re looking at something obvious, like a chair. There it is, in front of you. The truth is that the chair you think is there is not exactly the same as the chair that is actually there – a strange thought for most people, but a very familiar one to neuroscientists.

More here.

David Michaels in the Boston Review:

Decision makers atop today’s corporate structures are responsible for delivering short- and long-term financial returns, and in the pursuit of these goals they place profits and growth above all else. Avoidance of financial loss, to many corporate executives, is an alibi for just about any ugly decision. This is not to say that decisions at the highest level are black-and-white or simple; they are dictated by factors such as the cost of possible government regulation and potential loss of market share to less hazardous products. And, of course, companies are afraid of being sued by people sickened by their products, which costs money and can result in serious damage to the brand. All of this is part of the corporate calculus.

Unfortunately, though, this story is old news: most people, especially Americans, have come to expect corporations to put profit above all else. Still, we mostly don’t expect there to be mercenary scientists. Science is supposed to be constant, apolitical, and above the fray. This commonsense view misses the rise of science-for-sale specialists over the last several decades and a “product defense industry” that sustains them—a cabal of apparent experts, PR flaks, and political lobbyists who use bad science to produce whatever results their sponsors want.

There are a handful of go-to firms in this booming field.

More here.

Izabella Tabarovsky in Forward:

My experience at the Auschwitz exhibit was a powerful one. But it was actually a familiar one. We are used to experiencing the horror of the Holocaust through the lens of Auschwitz. When we talk about the six million, we picture concentration camps, ghettos, cattle cars.

And yet, the members of my family who were murdered during the Holocaust did not die at Auschwitz. They were killed at Babi Yar. And I cannot imagine an exhibit like this honoring their memory.

In part, this inability stems from the fact that after decades of silence and intentional forgetting, the material evidence of their lives and deaths is long gone — unlike the thousands of artifacts left behind by the Nazi concentration camps. But the main reason I can’t imagine an exhibit dedicated to the memory of my family is that their story as a whole is not part of our collective memory of the Holocaust.

More here.

Laura Kalba at Public Books:

How much our historical context informs our perceptions of and beliefs about color is ably illustrated by Susan Murray’s award-winning book Bright Signals. Tracing the evolution of color television in America from the late 1920s to the early 1970s, the book successfully demonstrates how the medium reflected and refracted American social and political history, despite its initially halting, tentative development. Industry leaders, Murray shows, only progressively overcame regulators’, advertisers’, and the public’s initial resistance to color television as a finicky luxury.

The television industry’s strategy was twofold. First, manufacturers and regulators subjected electronic color to the same processes of measurement and standardization adopted in other industries (such as paints and plastics). Second, and more controversially, industry leaders actively promoted the medium as a new, more immersive, and emotionally engaging form of vision.

more here.

Roxana Robinson at The New Yorker:

What moves you to stand in the presence of the house, the landscape, the objects of a writer whom you so admire? Why are literary pilgrimages so compelling? Virginia Woolf explains: “It would seem to be a fact that writers stamp themselves upon their possessions more indelibly than other people.” Certainly, each year, thousands of people visit Monk’s House, Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s sixteenth-century cottage, in Rodmell, East Sussex. It’s set right on the village street, a modest clapboard building with a big garden beyond. Inside, the small, low-ceilinged rooms are peopled with pilgrims. You move quietly among them; the atmosphere is hushed and meditative, like that in a church. You are caught up in a silent current, adrift in Woolf’s life: these are the chairs that were decorated by her sister; here is her narrow bed by the window; here are her books, tightly packed, floor to ceiling. You are very close to her here. You are speaking with her in your mind.

more here.

Sasha Archibald at Cabinet Magazine:

Just off the coast of Espírito Santo, an island in the Vanuatu archipelago of the South Western Pacific, there is a massive underwater dump. Called Million Dollar Point after the millions of dollars worth of material disposed there, the dump is a popular diving destination, and divers report an amazing quantity of wreckage: jeeps, six-wheel drive trucks, bulldozers, semi-trailers, fork lifts, tractors, bound sheets of corrugated iron, unopened boxes of clothing, and cases of Coca-Cola. The dumped goods were not abandoned by the ni-Vanuatu people, nor by the Franco-British Condominium who ruled Vanuatu (then known as the New Hebrides) from 1906 until 1980, but by personnel of a WWII American military base named Buttons. At the end of the war, sometime between August 1945 and December 1947, the US military interred supplies, equipment, and vehicles under water.

more here.

Synge on Aran

Salt off the sea whets
the blades of four winds.
They peel acres
of locked rock, pare down
a rind of shriveled ground;
bull-noses are chiseled
on cliffs.
…………..Islanders too
are for sculpting. Note
the pointed scowl, the mouth
carved as upturned anchor
and the polished head
full of drownings.
…………………………There
he comes now, a hard pen
scarping in his head;
the nib filed on a salt wind
and dipped in the keening sea.

by Seamus Heaney
from Death of a Naturalist
Faber and Faber, 1996

Peter Rainer in The Christian Science Monitor:

When Canadian biologist Anne Innis Dagg was 3 years old, her mother took her to the zoo for the first time. There she saw her first giraffe, and a lifelong love affair ensued. And who can blame her? Is there any other four-legged creature whose looks are more magisterially goofy? Dagg is the focus of Alison Reid’s “The Woman Who Loves Giraffes,” and it confirms a long-held tenet of mine: If the subject of a documentary is fascinating, it doesn’t much matter if the filmmaking is workmanlike. Now in her 80s, Dagg is such a singular personality that everything about her seems sprightly and newly minted.

At 23, in the summer of 1956, with a master’s degree in biology, she traveled alone to South Africa during a time of mounting political unrest in order to study up close her beloved giraffes. Other than a Scottish study of red deer, she was the first person to venture into the wilds to investigate animal behavior. This was years before either Jane Goodall or Dian Fossey embarked on their work with chimpanzees and mountain gorillas. Her dogged independence had a rich pedigree: Her mother, Mary Quayle, was the dean of women at the University of Toronto’s University College; her father, Harold Innis, was a famous economist. Thanks to the welcoming ministrations of Alexander Matthew, whose citrus and cattle ranch was also home to many free-roaming giraffes, Dagg was able to closely observe these magnificent animals. Her research was groundbreaking, and the 16 millimeter color footage she shot at the time, amply displayed in the documentary, is breathtaking. (I was especially grateful that Dagg didn’t photograph any maulings or attacks – an unfortunate ingredient in far too many wildlife documentaries.)

More here.

From Phys.Org:

Brain organoids—three-dimensional balls of brain-like tissue grown in the lab, often from human stem cells—have been touted for their potential to let scientists study the formation of the brain’s complex circuitry in controlled laboratory conditions. The discussion surrounding brain organoids has been effusive, with some scientists suggesting they will make it possible to rapidly develop treatments for devastating brain diseases and others warning that organoids may soon attain some form of consciousness. But a new UC San Francisco study offers a more restrained perspective, by showing that widely used organoid models fail to replicate even basic features of brain development and organization, much less the complex circuitry needed to model complex brain diseases or normal cognition.

“Some people have branded organoids as ‘brains in a dish’ but our data suggest this is a huge exaggeration at this point,” said Arnold Kriegstein, MD, Ph.D., a professor of neurology in the UCSF Weill Institute for Neurosciences, John G. Bowes Distinguished Professor in Stem Cell and Tissue Biology, and director of the UCSF Eli and Edythe Broad Center for Regeneration Medicine and Stem Cell Research, whose lab has been a leader in the development of cerebral organoid models (see prior studies here, here and here.) “We find that organoids do not develop the distinctive cell subtypes or regional circuit organization that characterize normal human brain circuits. Since most human brain diseases are highly specific to particular cell types and circuits in the brain, this presents a grave challenge to efforts to use organoids to accurately model these complex conditions.”

More here.

Adam Tooze in the New York Review of Books:

“There is an estate in the realm more powerful than either your Lordship or the other House of Parliament,” one Lord Campbell proclaimed to the peers in the House of Lords, in 1851, “and that [is] the country solicitors.” It was the lawyers, in other words, who kept England’s landed elite so very, well, elite: who shielded and extended the wealth of the landowners, even granting them legal protection against their own creditors. How did they pull off this trick? Through a nimble tangle of contracts, carefully and complicatedly applied, as Katharina Pistor explains in her lucid new book, The Code of Capital: by mixing “modern notions of individual property rights with feudalist restrictions on alienability”; by employing trusts “to protect family estates, but then [turning] around and [using] the trust again to set aside assets for creditors so that they would roll over the debt of the life tenant one more time”; and by settling the rights to the estate among family members in line for inheritance. Solicitors maximized their clients’ profits and worth through strategic applications of the central institutions at their disposal: “contract, property, collateral, trust, corporate, and bankruptcy law,” what Pistor calls an “empire of law.”

The landowners themselves may not have understood this morass of legal relationships, this web, in Pistor’s words, of “claims and counterclaims, rights and restrictions on these rights.” No matter: by lawyers’ legal codifications, their wealth was increasing. The sort of legal logic applied in nineteenth-century England grows only more complicated, and more profit-generating, when the asset in question is not a hectare of country land but stocks and bonds and shares—when an entire organization is coded as a legal person (who can own assets and who can sue) through incorporation.

More here.

This bedroom has a nook with a small skylight. The nook is curtained off by a linen screen, embroidered with probably Slovak patterns. It is where Madla has her bed and she is already asleep. On the table she left a letter she wrote this afternoon to the schoolmistress.

“I’ve just started a fortnight’s holiday. We’ve shifted to Dobřichovice, because the cherries, currants and raspberries are now ripe. (…) There was excitement all round last week. Martin wrote to us that they’re expecting a baby, and it’s due in January. So they’re getting married in July, and at the end of July or the beginning of August Isabelle will come on a visit. So we all started to rejoice straight away. Friday evening L. and I went to the post office to phone them, so as to talk to Isabelle as soon as possible. But Martin informed us that she was in hospital, that she had a miscarriage.

more here.

Sarah Elizabeth Lewis at the NYRB:

An American Odyssey: The Life and Work of Romare Bearden by Mary Schmidt Campbell, the distinguished art historian, former director of the Studio Museum in Harlem, and president of Spelman College, tells the captivating story of how Bearden’s heritage, education, community, and politics informed the evolution of his artistic career. It addresses a foundational question: What is the role of the artist in the history of race and rights in this country? Campbell opens with a brief reflection on the work of Frederick Douglass. Before the New Negro Movement and the civil rights movement, it was Douglass who argued that images—specifically, the new medium of photography—had the potential to help America see itself more critically and capaciously. In lectures delivered during the Civil War, Douglass argued that pictures and images could help America out of its democratic crisis. As the most photographed American man in the nineteenth century, Douglass knew that photographs could inaugurate counternarratives that expand our notion of who counts, who belongs in society. His was a new argument about the power of representational justice—he asserted that being represented justly was a crucial tenet of democracy.

more here.

Hannah Devlin in The Guardian:

Cosmologists don’t enter their profession to tackle the easy questions, but there is one paradox that has reached staggering proportions.

Since the big bang, the universe has been expanding, but the known laws of physics suggest that the inward tug of gravity should be slowing down this expansion. In reality, though, the universe is ballooning at an accelerating rate.

Scientists have come up with a name – dark energy – for the mysterious agent that is allowing the cosmos to expand so rapidly and which is estimated to account for 70% of the contents of the universe. But ultimately nobody knows what the stuff actually is.

“It’s the big elephant in the room,” says Prof Claudia de Rham, a theoretical physicist at Imperial College. “It’s very frustrating.”

Change could be afoot.

More here.

The Editors at The Paris Review:

The artist Jack Whitten, who died in 2018, approached his practice with the curiosity of a scientist and the playfulness of a jazz musician. Many of his paintings are the result of a careful aesthetic hypothesis unleashed upon the canvas and then transformed by improvisation. The works at the center of “Jack Whitten. Transitional Space. A Drawing Survey.” (on view at Hauser & Wirth through April 4) display a delightful agnosticism regarding medium and material. In one, he splashes a paper collage with calligrapher’s ink and acrylic paint; in another, he seems to conjure the farthest reaches of space on a single sheet of blotter. A selection of images from the show appears below.

more here.

Tina Hassannia in Hyperallergic:

In 1953, the overthrow of democratically elected Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh set a historic, chilling precedent. The coup d’état, orchestrated by the CIA and MI6, irrevocably shaped the subsequent 67 years and counting of US interventionism for the worse. Mosaddegh’s fight for Iranian autonomy in nationalizing the oil industry — built and exploited by the British — was undermined by his ousting and the West’s installation of a puppet leader, the Shah.

Director Taghi Amirani’s decade of research into the subject brings us Coup 53, a documentary that turns the analysis of declassified intelligence documents into a suspense thriller. (He’s aided by Hollywood veteran Walter Murch, who not only edited but also co-wrote the film — his first script work since Return to Oz, of all things.) The movie lays out the calculating logic of Winston Churchill and Dwight D. Eisenhower’s oil-hungry foreign policy measures, and how they were influenced by Red Scare paranoia (they feared Mosaddegh would go communist). Experts, including Stephen Kinzer, author of All the Shah’s Men (a definitive English-language guide to the event), contextualize the history and political maneuvers leading up to the coup.

More here.

Ann Neumann in The Baffler:

ON OCTOBER 16, 2018, fifty-five-year-old Gary Giles noticed pain in his back and neck. He sought treatment from a chiropractor but the pain persisted. He developed flu-like symptoms along with numbness, tingling, and spasms. Giles was hospitalized on October 20; an MRI showed that his brain was experiencing seizures—as many as sixteen per hour. A mysterious neurological disease, doctors suspected, was attacking his body. He then began to have difficulty swallowing; he refused water. His daughter, Crystal, mopped a continuous stream of saliva from his chin. Still his health deteriorated. More than two dozen bewildered, devastated family members crowded into Giles’s room to say goodbye. On November 4, he died.

His wife, Juanita, was at their home south of Salt Lake City, Utah, two days later when state health officials—alarm in their voices—called to tell her the results of her husband’s autopsy: the cause of Gary’s death was rabies. Anyone in contact with Gary in his last days needed to immediately receive rabies shots—or experience the same fate. Juanita and twenty-five members of the family immediately got the shots. Weeks later, they were shocked to receive a $50,000 bill for the inoculations. Giles was the first Utahn to die of rabies since 1944.

The Giles family witnessed a rare event—less than a handful of Americans die each year from rabies—but their financial devastation from medical expenses is absurdly common. When journalist Sarah Kliff gathered data about emergency room bills in 2018, she discovered that rabies shots were a frequent charge contributing to consumer medical debt. In a piece for Vox in February, 2018, she wrote that prices ran as high as $10,000 (the same shots cost approximately $1,600 in the UK). People who are uninsured or underinsured and potentially infected with rabies face a grim choice: fatal disease or crippling debt.

More here.