David S. Ludwig and Steven B. Heymsfield in the New York Times:

Most diet trials in the best journals fail even the most basic of quality control measures. That’s the finding of a study by us published today on JAMA Network Open.

Investigators receiving funding for any clinical trial from the National Institutes of Health must register in advance what they plan to test, among other design features, to ensure that the data are fairly analyzed. Comparing the original registries with the final published studies, we found that diet trials in the past decade were about four times as likely as drug trials to have a discrepancy in the main outcome or measurement — raising concern for bias.

This quality-control problem of diet trials in comparison to ones on pharmaceuticals leads to a bigger issue: underinvestment in nutrition research and in how we tackle the mysteries of a healthy diet.

Although the problems with observational studies have received much attention (“Association doesn’t prove causation,” as scientists say), clinical trials can suffer from equally important limitations.

More here.

Omid Tofighian in the Sydney Review of Books:

The experience of translating Behrouz’s book is itself rich with multiple narratives; some reaching back before our initial communication, even before the construction of Manus Prison. Over the last few years, especially after meeting Behrouz, I’ve come to realise how integral narratives are to living life well, and the translation process for this book has confirmed and expanded my insights and experiences with storytelling. This translator’s tale provides some insight into the many experiences and conversations that have shaped the book and characterise our shared vision of narrative and life.

I had only been on Manus Island for a few hours when I rushed over to the central bus stop in Lorengau town. We met in person there for the first time. Behrouz hadn’t eaten a thing all day – he’d consumed nothing but smokes for breakfast and lunch. He was still on his mobile phone when I got out of the vehicle to greet him. Earlier that day I learned that the body of refugee Hamed Shamshiripour had just been discovered within a cluster of trees near a school, beaten and with a noose around his neck; in fact, I had passed by the crowd of Manusian locals and police on my way in from the airport. The circumstances were extremely suspicious and many refugees still claim he was killed. Behrouz is the first point of contact for many Australian and international journalists and at that point he had been engaged in interviews for the entire day. My first trip to Manus Island was supposed to be dedicated to working on the translation of the book – but on Manus only torture is allowed to proceed according to schedule.

More here.

John Woolf at Literary Hub:

There are no birth, baptism or early records enabling a reconstruction of Julia Pastrana’s formative years, but she was probably born in 1834 in the Sierra Madre region of Mexico. She suffered from two rare congenital disorders that meant her face and body were covered in dark hair and her gums were so overgrown it looked as if she had a second set of teeth.

Rumors abound about her early years: she was sold into show business by her parents; she was left to die in a forest but was miraculously rescued; she was protected by her mother, who, hailing from a so-called Root-Digger Indian tribe, fled the community when Pastrana was born. In this version, so the story goes, a group of Mexican herders then found Pastrana in a mountain cave hiding with her mother.

more here.

Domenick Ammirati at Artforum:

In 2009, Sagri’s use of the loop suggested specific referents very much at hand. In part, it seemed a commentary on the art world’s difficulty in accommodating performance. A convention of video art was transposed to a living, breathing performer, as if to mockingly anticipate the work’s reuptake as documentation in the white cube. At the same time, while it seemed to wryly allude to the postmillennial art world’s romance with the ’70s, and to stage a dark burlesque of labor conditions, the loop was a clear attempt to reckon with digital technology’s pervasive influence at that historical moment. This was the dawn of popularized streaming video: YouTube launched in 2005; Netflix and PornHub began streaming in 2007. Hence the foregrounding in Do Jaguar of the iPod as the device on which the audio component of the piece is stored; hence not only the loop but also the glitch, an accidental mini-loop or inadvertent fast-forward, as a choreographic riff on postindustrial labor and the erratic recursions of immaterial gig economics. Artists such as Ryan Trecartin and Lizzie Fitch were mining this same vein in video work, but Sagri was a key adapter of these concerns to live modes.

more here.

Barbara Newman at the LRB:

Every age creates its own Chaucer. For Eustache Deschamps, a contemporary, he was the ‘grant translateur’. For Hoccleve, a disciple, he was ‘my deere maistir’ and ‘the firste fyndere [inventive poet] of our fair langage’. The 15th century revered him for his eloquence, while the 20th century gave us many Chaucers: genial naif, apostle of courtly love, austere Augustinian moralist, sycophantic courtier, ironist and, not least, duelling misogynist and feminist versions. In Marion Turner’s capacious biography – the first since Derek Pearsall’s in 1992 and the first ever by a woman – Chaucer is Bakhtinian and plural, a man of many voices. Much like his Canterbury pilgrims, he is always en route but never arriving.

Michael Landis in Smithsonian:

The central story of The Little Mermaid is, of course, 16-year-old Ariel’s identity crisis. She feels constrained by her patriarchal mer-society and senses she doesn’t belong. She yearns for another world, apart from her own, where she can be free from the limits of her rigid culture and conservative family. Her body is under the water, but her heart and mind are on land with people. She leads a double life. She is, essentially, “in the closet” (as symbolized by her “cavern”—or closet—of human artifacts, where the character-building song “Part of Your World” takes place). When Ariel ventures to tell her friends and family about her secret identity, they chastise her and tell her she must conform. She must meet her father’s expectations, sing on demand, perform for the public and give up all hopes of a different life. Her father, King Triton, even has her followed by a court official. In her misery, Ariel flees to the sea witch Ursula, the only strong female in the entire film and thus Ariel’s only female role model. At this point, the movie becomes truly subversive cinema.

Conceived by Ashman, Ursula is based on the famous cross-dressing performer Divine, who was associated with the openly gay filmmaker John Waters. As scholar Laura Sells explained in a 1995 anthology of essays, Ursula’s “Poor Unfortunate Souls” song is essentially a drag show instructing the naive mermaid on how to attract Prince Eric (who is conspicuously uninterested in Ariel and most content at sea with his all-male crew and manservant Grimsby). “In Ursula’s drag scene,” Sells wrote, “Ariel learns that gender is performance; Ursula doesn’t simply symbolize woman, she performs woman.” While teaching young Ariel how to “get your man,” Ursula applies makeup, exaggerates her hips and shoulders, and accessorizes (her eel companions, Flotsam and Jetsam, are gender neutral)—all standard tropes of drag. “And don’t underestimate the importance of body language!,” sings Ursula with delicious sarcasm. The overall lesson: Being a woman in a man’s world is all about putting on a show. You are in control; you control the show. Sells added, “Ariel learns gender, not as a natural category, but as a performed construct.” It’s a powerful message for young girls, one deeply threatening to the King Tritons (and Ronald Reagans) of the world.

More here.

Gary Stix in Scientific American:

Socrates famously railed against the evils of writing. The sage warned that it would “introduce forgetfulness into the soul of those who learn it: they will not practice using their memory because they will put their trust in writing.” He got a few things wrong. For one, people nurture Socrates’ memory because of all of the books written about him. But he also was off the mark in his musings about a forgetfulness of the soul. If anything, it appears that just the opposite holds: a study of hundreds of illiterate people living at the northern end of an island considered to be a world media capital roundly contradicts the father of Western philosophy. Evaluations of the elderly in the environs of Manhattan’s Washington Heights (the neighborhood immortalized by a Lin-Manuel Miranda musical) reveal that the very act of reading or writing—largely apart from any formal education—may help protect against the forgetfulness of dementia. “The people who were illiterate in the study developed dementia at an earlier age than people who were literate in the study,” says Jennifer J. Manly, senior author of the paper, which appeared on November 13 in Neurology.

Earlier studies trying to parse this topic had not been able to disentangle the role of reading and writing from schooling to determine whether literacy, by itself, could be a pivotal factor safeguarding people against dementia later in life. The researchers conducting the new study, who are mostly at Columbia University’s Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons, recruited 983 people with four years or less of schooling who were part of the renowned Washington Heights–Inwood Columbia Community Aging Project. Of that group, 238 were illiterate, which was determined by asking the participants point-blank, “Did you ever learn to read or write?”—followed by reading tests administered to a subsample. Even without much time in school, study subjects sometimes learned from other family members.

More here.

David Graeber in the New York Review of Books:

There is a growing feeling, among those who have the responsibility of managing large economies, that the discipline of economics is no longer fit for purpose. It is beginning to look like a science designed to solve problems that no longer exist.

A good example is the obsession with inflation. Economists still teach their students that the primary economic role of government—many would insist, its only really proper economic role—is to guarantee price stability. We must be constantly vigilant over the dangers of inflation. For governments to simply print money is therefore inherently sinful. If, however, inflation is kept at bay through the coordinated action of government and central bankers, the market should find its “natural rate of unemployment,” and investors, taking advantage of clear price signals, should be able to ensure healthy growth. These assumptions came with the monetarism of the 1980s, the idea that government should restrict itself to managing the money supply, and by the 1990s had come to be accepted as such elementary common sense that pretty much all political debate had to set out from a ritual acknowledgment of the perils of government spending. This continues to be the case, despite the fact that, since the 2008 recession, central banks have been printing money frantically in an attempt to create inflation and compel the rich to do something useful with their money, and have been largely unsuccessful in both endeavors.

We now live in a different economic universe than we did before the crash. Falling unemployment no longer drives up wages. Printing money does not cause inflation. Yet the language of public debate, and the wisdom conveyed in economic textbooks, remain almost entirely unchanged.

More here.

Natalie Wolchover in Quanta:

After breakfast one morning in August, the mathematician Terence Tao opened an email from three physicists he didn’t know. The trio explained that they’d stumbled across a simple formula that, if true, established an unexpected relationship between some of the most basic and important objects in linear algebra.

The formula “looked too good to be true,” said Tao, who is a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, a Fields medalist, and one of the world’s leading mathematicians. “Something this short and simple — it should have been in textbooks already,” he said. “So my first thought was, no, this can’t be true.”

Then he thought about it some more.

The physicists — Stephen Parke of Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, Xining Zhang of the University of Chicago and Peter Denton of Brookhaven National Laboratory — had arrived at the mathematical identity about two months earlier while grappling with the strange behavior of particles called neutrinos.

More here.

Devorah Blachor in McSweeney’s:

This impeachment is so confusing. Both sides are making contradictory claims and it’s almost impossible to know who to trust.

On the one hand, you have George Kent, a career Foreign Service officer whose entire family served in the armed forces, including an uncle who was at Pearl Harbor and survived the Bataan Death March, and on the other hand, you have a bone spurs draft dodger whose dad got arrested at a KKK riot.

There’s this fellow Bill Taylor who served as a Captain and company commander in Vietnam and who was awarded a Bronze Star, but then again, Donald Trump’s first wife Ivana and numerous other women have said that he sexually assaulted them.

If only American politics weren’t so partisan, I might be able to make sense of it all, but I can’t.

More here.

Michelle Orange at Bookforum:

Savage Appetites, Rachel Monroe’s probing, recursive study, per the subtitle, of “women, crime, and obsession,” attempts to explain to themselves and the rest of us those women running in place while fixed on a master broadcast of ritual female destruction. A magazine writer known for her laser-cut dissections of cresting cultural phenomena, Monroe brings a rare form of joy to her reporting: Her best pieces combine a focused effort to nail down a good story and a more expansive instinct toward unraveling, questioning, showing her work. Writing about social-media hucksters, dating-app con men, and new-old wellness elixirs, she exhibits a gift—perhaps prized even more by editors than it is among journalists—for the precise interval at which a sort-of thing is ready to become a full-on thing, to be caught mid-microcurrent, skillfully examined, and released into the slightly wider waterways that now pass for the mainstream.

more here.

Paul J. Griffiths at Commonweal:

László Krasznahorkai is a Hungarian writer born in 1954. His first novel, Satantango, published in 1985, established his reputation as a novelist with a uniquely idiosyncratic voice, a melancholic passion for sin and the apocalypse, and a compassionate interest in the minute details of both the human and the nonhuman world. He began to be translated into English in the late 1990s, and since then has received many prizes and awards, including, in 2015, the Man Booker International Prize. Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming is his latest novel, and Krasznahorkai has said it’s his last. First published in Hungarian in 2016, it is the end of a cycle that began with Satantango and includes The Melancholy of Resistance (1989) and War and War (1999). These four, Krasznahorkai says, constitute his one book. He’s written many others, in many genres; but these four are the things to read first if you want to know him, feel him—and it does feel like something to read him: you know at once who it is you’re reading, and if you read enough of him the world you live in will begin to seem like the one he writes about, in rather the same way that once you’ve read Bleak House every fog participates in that novel’s fogs. Each of these four books, however, can be read independently, and there’s a case to be made for starting with this latest one: it’s arguably the best.

more here.

Francesca Wade at the TLS

In her 1931 essay “Professions for Women”, Woolf recalled that thrill of transforming from “a girl in a bedroom with a pen in her hand” to “a professional woman”, her opinions solicited and rewarded by wages she could spend, once rent and bills were covered, on “an extravagant little table” or a “long coveted & resisted coal scuttle” (money, she wrote in A Room of One’s Own, “dignifies what is frivolous if unpaid for”). But the sense of independence afforded by this work was not purely, or even primarily, financial. When she first sat down to write a damning review of a book by a respected gentleman, Woolf was haunted by a phantom voice urging her not to criticize but to charm and flatter, to speak in the language traditionally deemed womanly. She named this spectre the “Angel in the House”, after Coventry Patmore’s poem about the cloying, self-sacrificing ideal of Victorian womanhood; her imagined admonishment – “Never let anybody guess that you have a mind of your own” – nearly “plucked the heart out of my writing”. Conquering the urge to submit to that voice, Woolf concluded, was a prerequisite not only for writing, but for freedom in all aspects of life. The TLS’s affirmation helped Woolf to unmake assumptions of how women should think and behave, and find a new language in which to express herself, ignoring the insistent reminder that there were things “which it was unfitting for her as a woman to say”. Soon after her first reviews were published, seeking respite from dull commissions (“a nondescript book like this which really suggests nothing good or bad, is damned hard work”), she began on the novel that would become her debut, The Voyage Out. Virginia Woolf was launched.

more here.

The Joy of Writing

Why does this written doe bound through these written woods?
For a drink of written water from a spring
whose surface will xerox her soft muzzle?
Why does she lift her head; does she hear something?
Perched on four slim legs borrowed from the truth,
she pricks up her ears beneath my fingertips.
Silence—this word also rustles across the page
and parts the boughs
that have sprouted from the word “woods.”

Lying in wait, set to pounce on the blank page,
are letters up to no good,
clutches of clauses so subordinate
they’ll never let her get away.

Each drop of ink contains a fair supply
of hunters, equipped with squinting eyes behind their sights,
prepared to swarm the sloping pen at any moment,
surround the doe, and slowly aim their guns.

They forget that what’s here isn’t life.
Other laws, black on white, obtain.
The twinkling of an eye will take as long as I say,
and will, if I wish, divide into tiny eternities,
full of bullets stopped in midflight.
Not a thing will ever happen unless I say so.
Without my blessing, not a leaf will fall,
not a blade of grass will bend beneath that little hoof’s full stop.

Is there then a world
where I rule absolutely on fate?
A time I bind with chains of signs?
An existence become endless at my bidding?

The joy of writing.
The power of preserving.
Revenge of a mortal hand.

by Wislawa Szymborska
from Narrative Magazine

Cade Metz in The New York Times:

SAN FRANCISCO — Last fall, Google unveiled a breakthrough artificial intelligence technology called BERT that changed the way scientists build systems that learn how people write and talk.

But BERT, which is now being deployed in services like Google’s internet search engine, has a problem: It could be picking up on biases in the way a child mimics the bad behavior of his parents. BERT is one of a number of A.I. systems that learn from lots and lots of digitized information, as varied as old books, Wikipedia entries and news articles. Decades and even centuries of biases — along with a few new ones — are probably baked into all that material. BERT and its peers are more likely to associate men with computer programming, for example, and generally don’t give women enough credit. One program decided almost everything written about President Trump was negative, even if the actual content was flattering.

As new, more complex A.I. moves into an increasingly wide array of products, like online ad services and business software or talking digital assistants like Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa, tech companies will be pressured to guard against the unexpected biases that are being discovered. But scientists are still learning how technology like BERT, called “universal language models,” works. And they are often surprised by the mistakes their new A.I. is making. On a recent afternoon in San Francisco, while researching a book on artificial intelligence, the computer scientist Robert Munro fed 100 English words into BERT: “jewelry,” “baby,” “horses,” “house,” “money,” “action.” In 99 cases out of 100, BERT was more likely to associate the words with men rather than women. The word “mom” was the outlier.

More here.

Burnd Brunner in Nautilus:

Winter is changing its character. Since the beginning of the 21st century, glaciers have been melting at record speed. In Central Asia, they’ve lost approximately one quarter of their volume over the past 50 years. An ice grotto in Switzerland that is creeping down the slope as the Rhône Glacier advances is now covered with white blankets every summer to help preserve it. When a glacier ceases to flow and begins to melt, glaciologists use the term dead-ice, and when dead-ice melts completely, it leaves behind an uneven terrain full of potholes. Depending on their shape and location, these are known as donuts, puckered lips, or kettles. The highest ski resort in the world used to be on the glacier at the summit of Mount Chacaltaya in Bolivia. The glacier, 17,785 feet above sea level, disappeared years ago, and scientists have calculated that glaciers will continue to melt even if humans somehow manage to reduce the amount of greenhouse gases entering the atmosphere.

Investigations confirm that the snow cover in Earth’s Northern Hemisphere is diminishing. In many places, winter is getting shorter and spring is setting in earlier. A well-known saying in France—“If you could sell snow, you’d be rich”—is no longer universally applicable. Shorter winters disrupt many natural processes; they also affect the activities we undertake during the season.

More here.

Jonny Diamond in Literary Hub:

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, 100 Years of Solitude

Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.

[AI continues as follows]

His father had been at an airshow in the US. A US fighter pilot, Colonel Buendía had taken off and was returning with his two sons. But something went wrong. His plane crashed. He managed to eject.

At the crash site, his father took him to an abandoned church in a nearby town. They were not there long when a small creature materialized at their feet. The creature began to follow the young men.

More here.

Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe:

Maxwell’s Demon is a famous thought experiment in which a mischievous imp uses knowledge of the velocities of gas molecules in a box to decrease the entropy of the gas, which could then be used to do useful work such as pushing a piston. This is a classic example of converting information (what the gas molecules are doing) into work. But of course that kind of phenomenon is much more widespread — it happens any time a company or organization hires someone in order to take advantage of their know-how. César Hidalgo has become an expert in this relationship between information and work, both at the level of physics and how it bubbles up into economies and societies. Looking at the world through the lens of information brings new insights into how we learn things, how economies are structured, and how novel uses of data will transform how we live.

More here.