Ed Yong in The Atlantic:

A small shark spots its prey—a meaty, seemingly defenseless octopus. The shark ambushes, and then, in one of the most astonishing sequences in the series Blue Planet II, the octopus escapes. First, it shoves one of its arms into the predator’s vulnerable gills. Once released, it moves to protect itself—it grabs discarded seashells and swiftly arranges them into a defensive dome.

Thanks to acts like these, cephalopods—the group that includes octopuses, squid, and cuttlefish—have become renowned for their intelligence. Octopuses, for example, have been seen unscrewing jar lids to get at hidden food, carrying coconut shells to use as armor, barricading their den with stones, and squirting jets of water to deter predators or short out aquarium lights. But why did they become intelligent in the first place? Why did this one group of mollusks, among an otherwise slow and dim-witted dynasty of snails, slugs, clams, oysters, and mussels, evolve into creatures that are famed for their big brains? These are hard questions to answer, especially because cephalopods aren’t just weirdly intelligent; they’re also very weird for intelligent animals. Members of the animal kingdom’s intelligentsia tend to be sociable; indeed, the need to remember and manage a complex network of relationships might have helped drive the evolution of their brains. Smart animals also tend to be long-lived, since a large brain both takes a long time to grow and helps an animal avoid danger. Apes, elephants, whales and dolphins, crows and other corvids, parrots: They all share these traits.

Cephalopods do not. With rare exceptions, most of them are solitary animals that aren’t above cannibalizing one another when they meet. Even those that swim in groups, like some squid, don’t form the kinds of deep social bonds that chimps or dolphins do. Cephalopods also tend to live fast and die young. Most have life spans shorter than two years, and many die after their first bout of sex and reproduction. This combination of short lives, solitude, and smarts is unique to cephalopods. And according to a recent paper by Piero Amodio from the University of Cambridge and five of his colleagues, the traits are all linked to a particular development in the octopus’s evolutionary history: Its ancestors lost their shells.

More here.

Ashley Yeager in The Scientist:

“Anytime we take Tylenol because we have the flu and we feel terrible, that’s actually you playing with tolerance,” says Stanford University microbiologist David Schneider, Ayres’s former advisor. By quieting the immune reaction that is making you feel sick, “you’re making yourself feel better, even though you might not be affecting how much of a pathogen is in your body.” As they come to appreciate that disease tolerance exists in animals, including humans, researchers want to tap into its mechanisms—analogous to the way they are tapping into the immune system to develop disease-fighting immunotherapies. Specific kinds of supplements, as Ayres has shown in mice, may be one solution. And bacteria that live in the body as part of its micro­biome have been shown to help mice tolerate malaria, Salmonella, and pneumonia infections. “During infection, we all appreciate that there are these immune defenses that largely are designed to get rid of an invading pathogen, and that’s been thought to be the only or main way that we deal with infections,” says Ruslan Medzhitov, an immunologist at Yale School of Medicine. “What’s being appreciated more recently . . . is that there is also this other mechanism, so-called tolerance to infection, where instead of trying to get rid of a pathogen we change something about the body, about the physiology, and that lets us tolerate the presence of a pathogen.”

Until about a decade ago, researchers had largely overlooked the idea of disease tolerance in animals. But the physiological strategy didn’t go unnoticed among plant biologists. In research dating to the late 1800s, for example, scientists described how one variety of wheat crop infected with a fungus called leaf rust fared better and produced more grain than other infected wheat crops.² Follow-up studies spanning the 20th century and into the 21st suggested that plants have internal ways to tolerate infections in addition to defending against them with immunity. These findings led researchers to wonder if a similar sort of tolerance exists in animals.

Researchers reported the first hints of disease tolerance in humans in 2006, when they found that people who have a type of alpha thalassemia, a blood disorder that typically reduces hemo­globin production, are somehow protected against the severe iron deficiency associated with a malarial infection. In a study published the following year, disease ecologist Andrew Read, then at the University of Edinburgh, and his former postdoc Lars Råberg found that certain strains of mice had genetic variations that boosted their tolerance to the malaria parasite Plasmodium chabaudi. Those mice had improved health, the researchers noted, but comparable numbers of P. chabaudi cells in their bodies to those in mice that weren’t as tolerant to the infection.³

More here.

—from “Nikes”

Just as the President
who could only say, “If I had a son
he’d look like Trayvon”

instead of, “If I had a son
he’d look just like me.” So often
the body is used

as a way to mediate chaos.
Just like the Statue of Liberty
looked “just like Trayvon”

but America couldn’t not swim
under the body of a black girl
& still feel free. And yes

this is a vulgar elegy. I ask:
What is it in you, that they
don’t want to look like you?

by Shayla Lawson
from I Think I’m Ready To See Frank Ocean
Saturnalia Books

Trayvon Martin

Elizabeth Winkler in The Atlantic:

On a spring night in 2018, I stood on a Manhattan sidewalk with friends, reading Shakespeare aloud. We were in line to see an adaptation of Macbeth and had decided to pass the time refreshing our memories of the play’s best lines. I pulled up Lady Macbeth’s soliloquy on my iPhone. “Come, you spirits / That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here,” I read, thrilled once again by the incantatory power of the verse. I remembered where I was when I first heard those lines: in my 10th-grade English class, startled out of my adolescent stupor by this woman rebelling magnificently and malevolently against her submissive status. “Make thick my blood, / Stop up th’ access and passage to remorse.” Six months into the #MeToo movement, her fury and frustration felt newly resonant.

Pulled back into plays I’d studied in college and graduate school, I found myself mesmerized by Lady Macbeth and her sisters in the Shakespeare canon. Beatrice, in Much Ado About Nothing, raging at the limitations of her sex (“O God, that I were a man! I would eat his heart in the marketplace”). Rosalind, in As You Like It, affecting the swagger of masculine confidence to escape those limitations (“We’ll have a swashing and a martial outside, / As many other mannish cowards have / That do outface it with their semblances”). Isabella, in Measure for Measure, fearing no one will believe her word against Angelo’s, rapist though he is (“To whom should I complain? Did I tell this, / Who would believe me?”). Kate, in The Taming of the Shrew, refusing to be silenced by her husband (“My tongue will tell the anger of my heart, / Or else my heart concealing it will break”). Emilia, in one of her last speeches in Othello before Iago kills her, arguing for women’s equality (“Let husbands know / Their wives have sense like them”).

I was reminded of all the remarkable female friendships, too: Beatrice and Hero’s allegiance; Emilia’s devotion to her mistress, Desdemona; Paulina’s brave loyalty to Hermione in The Winter’s Tale; and plenty more.

More here.  And also see replies here and here.

Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe:

What does it mean to be a good person? To act ethically and morally in the world? In the old days we might appeal to the instructions we get from God, but a modern naturalist has to look elsewhere. Today I do a rare solo podcast, where I talk about my personal views on morality, a variety of “constructivism” according to which human beings construct their ethical stances starting from basic impulses, logical reasoning, and communicating with others.

In light of this view, I consider two real-world examples of contemporary moral controversies:

• Is it morally permissible to eat meat? Or is there an ethical imperative to be a vegetarian?
• Do inequities in society stem from discrimination, or from the natural order of things? As a jumping-off point I take the loose-knit group known as the Intellectual Dark Web, which includes Jordan Peterson, Sam Harris, Ben Shapiro, and others, and their nemeses the Social Justice Warriors (though the discussion is about broader issues, not just that group of folks).

Probably everyone will agree with my takes on these issues once they listen to my eminently reasonable arguments.

More here.

Audrey Farley at Marginalia Review:

Under the influence of mind-altering drugs, individuals cannot distinguish between subjective experience and external objects. Even after the ego returns and normal cognitive processes resume, people have an unshakable belief in what they encountered in their altered cognitive state. This isn’t to say that psychedelic-users are deluded. To the contrary, Pollan suggests, they may have been granted access to hidden truths. Pollan invokes Aldous Huxley’s notion of a “mind at large” and philosopher Henri Bergson’s theory of distributed consciousness to explain this phenomenon. Both thinkers purported that the human brain does not singularly produce consciousness; rather the brain enables humans to “tune in” to certain frequencies like someone turning the dial of a radio. For Huxley and Pollan, psychedelics increase the number of stations available.

This philosophy raises important questions that Pollan doesn’t answer. For instance: do schizophrenics and others who experience hallucinations have greater access to hidden truths? Is it possible that these individuals are not “mad,” but instead clued in to facets of the universe not readily apparent to “healthy normals?”

more here.

Rita Koganzon at The Hedgehog Review:

Rosenblatt’s effort to vindicate liberalism by demonstrating that it was never what critics on the right and left said it was in the first place results in a highly readable and engaging history of nineteenth-century French politics, but it’s not entirely convincing. The distinction Rosenblatt relies on between “liberality” as an individual virtue and “liberalism” as a set of government policies is blurred by precisely those seventeenth- and eighteenth-century thinkers most often held up as the first liberals, and whom Rosenblatt is determined to exclude from that category. On Rosenblatt’s own account, Locke understood toleration as a personal virtue, but he also required the state to defend it as a matter of policy. Nineteenth-century French liberalism may well have been a more self-conscious political movement, but, in Rosenblatt’s telling, it was not notably more coherent in its substance than eighteenth-century British Whiggism, and certainly not more politically effective than its nineteenth-century British counterpart, which operated within a stable constitutional order and consequently achieved much more in practice than the French model. French liberalism is undoubtedly philosophically significant and deeply intertwined with other European liberalisms, but Rosenblatt does not definitively show that the precedence we tend to give to the British as progenitors and exemplars of liberalism is misplaced.

more here.

Alejandro Zambra at The Believer:

Its body is light blue and 100 percent synthetic. It’s a good-natured and naive octopus, and its smile is genuine. Its eyebrows are green, as are the two blushing spots on its cheeks. It weighs 11.4 ounces. It’s clearly intelligent—as nearly all octopuses are, of course. It wears a bow tie, and a sailor’s cap is cocked rakishly just a little to the left. If you squeeze the animal’s head (which is objectively small, but enormous compared to its body), a melody plays (Bach, I’m almost positive). Really, there are four melodies (all four by Bach, I think): to go from one to another, you just have to squeeze the creature’s head. 

There is much to be said about the octopus’s tentacles, with their matching, somewhat indecipherable images embroidered in eight different colors. When you press them, a surprisingly feminine voice recites the names of those colors.

more here.

Charles McGrath in The New Yorker:

Rudyard Kipling used to be a household name. Born in 1865 in Bombay, where his father taught at an arts school, and then exiled as a boy to England, he returned to India as a teen-ager, and quickly established himself as the great chronicler of the Anglo-Indian experience. He was Britain’s first Nobel laureate in literature, and probably the most widely read writer since Tennyson. People knew his poems by heart, read his stories to their children. The Queen wanted to knight him. But in recent years Kipling’s reputation has taken such a beating that it’s a wonder any sensible critic would want to go near him now. Kipling has been variously labelled a colonialist, a jingoist, a racist, an anti-Semite, a misogynist, a right-wing imperialist warmonger; and—though some scholars have argued that his views were more complicated than he is given credit for—to some degree he really was all those things. That he was also a prodigiously gifted writer who created works of inarguable greatness hardly matters anymore, at least not in many classrooms, where Kipling remains politically toxic.

In a prologue to “If: The Untold Story of Kipling’s American Years” (Penguin Press), Christopher Benfey, a professor at Mount Holyoke, writes that some of his friends, when they learned what he was working on, asked him what on earth he was thinking, and warned that he’d better be ready to defend himself. Benfey’s best defense turns out to be the book itself, which doesn’t attempt a full-throated rehab job. An Americanist who has written very good books about Emily Dickinson and Stephen Crane, among others, Benfey mostly steers clear of Kipling’s politics, and instead concentrates on a little-known chapter in Kipling’s life: the four years that this outspoken defender of the British Empire spent living just outside Brattleboro, Vermont, where he wrote some of his best work, including “The Jungle Book” and “The Second Jungle Book,” “Captains Courageous,” and the first draft of “Kim.” Kipling’s American sojourn is hardly an “untold story”—it figures in all the biographies—but Benfey tells it well, catching nuances that some biographers have missed. He argues that Kipling was profoundly altered by his experience of America, and that America, in turn, was altered by its experience of Kipling. But you could also make a case that neither was changed enough. Kipling never learned to lighten up—or to appreciate American humor and informality—and America, by his lights, never got over being headstrong and overly sure of itself.

More here.

Inspired by Frank Relle’s “Amano,” Jack Bedell
composed his ekphrastic poem of the same name.

Amano

Even what’s left of this broken cypress tree
hasn’t given up reaching for the sky.

Busted dead center, and toppled over
into the lake, its branches still climb

toward the stars bursting over this swamp.
The sun has surrendered its sky, glowing

just under the horizon line, the lake’s surface
stilled to exhaustion absent any breeze.

Even herons have tucked in for the night.
This old tree, though, standing tip-toed

on its roots, just won’t cede to the pull
of water, the notion that all things

must go to ground patiently. As long
as there is light somewhere, it’s worth the reach.

by Jack Bedell
from The Ecotheo Review

Carl Zimmer in The New York Times:

At three o’clock in the afternoon on September 4, 1882, the electrical age began. The Edison Illuminating Company switched on its Pearl Street power plant, and a network of copper wires came alive, delivering current to a few dozen buildings in the surrounding neighborhood. One of those buildings housed this newspaper. As night fell, reporters at The New York Times gloried in the steady illumination thrown off by Thomas Edison’s electric lamps. “The light was soft, mellow, and grateful to the eye, and it seemed almost like writing by daylight,” they reported in an article the following day. But nature invented the electrical grid first, it turns out. Even in 1882, thousands of miles of wires were already installed in the ground in the New York region — in meadows, in salt marshes, in muddy river bottoms. They were built by microbes, which used them to shuttle electricity. Electroactive bacteria were unknown to science until a couple of decades ago. But now that scientists know what to look for, they’re finding this natural electricity across much of the world, even on the ocean floor. It alters entire ecosystems, and may help control the chemistry of the Earth.

“Not to sound too crazy, but we have an electric planet,” said John Stolz, a microbiologist at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh. In the mid-1980s, Dr. Stolz was helping to study a baffling microbe fished out of the Potomac River by his colleague Derek Lovley. The microbe, Geobacter metallireducens, had a bizarre metabolism. “It took me six months to figure out how to grow it in the lab,” said Dr. Lovley, now a microbiologist at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

More here.

Daniel W. Drezner in the New York Times:

A diverting Beltway pastime during the heyday of the Washington Consensus was to gently mock Joseph E. Stiglitz. It was remarkably easy for pundits to wave away his prestigious awards (Nobel Prize in Economics) and positions (World Bank chief economist, chairman of Bill Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisers) and dismiss his warnings about “market fundamentalism” as overripe hyperbole. In 2004 the financial columnist Sebastian Mallaby described Stiglitz as “like a boy who discovers a hole in the floor of an exquisite house and keeps shouting and pointing at it.” Fifteen years later, the house that capitalism built looks rather shabby. Maybe, just maybe, more people should have taken Stiglitz seriously.

This is certainly what Stiglitz, now a professor of economics at Columbia, is hoping for with his latest book, “People, Power, and Profits.” He argues that the American system of capitalism has fallen down and needs government help to get back up again. “People, Power, and Profits” builds on Stiglitz’s earlier work and adds some pretty big ambitions. In the preface, he writes: “This is a time for major changes. Incrementalism — minor tweaks to our political and economic system — are inadequate to the tasks at hand.”

More here.

Claire Armitstead in The Guardian:

When Guy Gunaratne was a teenager he would catch the bus home from school in north-west London, listening out for the chat of his fellow passengers. “Like this one kid who said to his friend, ‘Come on, you’re moving like molasses.’ That rattled in my head for so long. It’s so inside,” he says. “London can be an unkind place to live and grow up in, but I just love the way we spoke, and to make something out of where you’re from, loving the kind of things people usually forget or dismiss, is a thrilling experience.”

Gunaratne’s debut novel, In Our Mad and Furious City, was longlisted for last year’s Man Booker prize and shortlisted for a string of others before winning the Jhalak prize and the International Dylan Thomas award for writers under 40 last month. The Dylan Thomas jury described it as astounding, provocative and enticing, but not an easy read. “People bring their own baggage to my baggage and that’s good,” responds the author, who packed his novel with things people would prefer to dismiss or forget, not least the murder of off-duty soldier Lee Rigby, who was hacked to death in broad daylight in a south London street in 2013.

More here.

Benjamin Neimark, Oliver Belcher, and Patrick Bigger in The Conversation:

The US military’s carbon bootprint is enormous. Like corporate supply chains, it relies upon an extensive global network of container ships, trucks and cargo planes to supply its operations with everything from bombs to humanitarian aid and hydrocarbon fuels. Our new study calculated the contribution of this vast infrastructure to climate change.

Greenhouse gas emission accounting usually focuses on how much energy and fuel civilians use. But recent work, including our own, shows that the US military is one of the largest polluters in history, consuming more liquid fuels and emitting more climate-changing gases than most medium-sized countries. If the US military were a country, its fuel usage alone would make it the 47th largest emitter of greenhouse gases in the world, sitting between Peru and Portugal.

More here.

Emma Brockes in The Guardian:

There is something very moving about the conversation between these young women, a sense of generational rise that, as we know from every precedent from the Renaissance onwards, has the power to ignite movements and change history.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez It’s such an honour to meet you!

Greta Thunberg You, too!

AOC Thank you. I’m so excited to be having this conversation. I remember first hearing your speech a few months ago – I was hanging out with a friend in Harlem, who said, “Have you listened to this young woman?” And I heard your speech and was thrilled, because here in the United States, even when I was running, people were saying there’s no need to convey this kind of urgency [about the climate], and it’s radical, and it’s unnecessary. To hear you articulate the belief that I’ve had as well is so exciting and validating. So I wanted to thank you for your work and your advocacy.

GT Thank you so much for standing up and offering hope to so many people, even here in Sweden.

More here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BXjv7Om-jjs

Brian Gallagher in Nautilus:

The popularity of video games is staggering. Last year, the top 25 public game companies—China’s Tencent, Sony, and Microsoft ranking highest—had annual earnings of more than $100 billion for the first time.¹ The United States video game industry earned more than global box office movie ticket sales, U.S. video streaming subscriptions, and the U.S. music industry.² By 2021, according to Statista, a market research firm, 2.7 billion people will be playing video games, up from 1.8 billion five years ago. A Pew survey reveals the age group that plays most often is 18 to 29.³In the 30 to 49 age group, nearly 50 percent of men and 40 percent of women play. A study in Europe shows people 45 and up are more likely to play video games than children aged 6 to 14.

…Pete Etchells, a professor of psychology and communications in England, and author of a new book, Lost in a Good Game, thinks video games tap into the reaches of emotional and moral faculties that traditional arts and entertainment can’t reach. The player can drive action, exert agency, and explore imagined worlds freely. Video games, Etchells says, “embody the principles of existentialism.” A story can be cathartic but only a game can make you feel guilty for what you’ve done or were compelled to do. A 2010 paper in Review of General Psychology states, “Compared with other media such as books, films, and radio, electronic games appear to have an unusually expansive appeal and serve a surprising number of emotional, social, and intellectual needs.”⁴ For Etchells, an avid gamer, video games are a “creative medium” that can “offer us unparalleled opportunities for exploring what it means to be human.”

More here.