Adolph Reed, Jr. at nonsite:

The symbiotic relation between antiracist politics and Democratic neoliberalism helps to make sense of the vitriol with which so many antiracist activists have reacted to Sanders and the renewed interest in challenging economic inequality. Notwithstanding copious evocations of the heroic period of black insurgent activism, this politics is not directed toward generating the deep and broad solidarities necessary for building an insurgent political movement. It is an insider, elite-driven interest group politics that is concerned less with reducing inequality than with establishing and maintaining what Kenneth Warren describes as “managerial authority over the nation’s Negro problem.” As West observed regarding the race relations framework’s emergence at the dawn of the twentieth century, claims to speak for black concerns in this politics do not depend on demonstration of accountability to any specific constituencies of black people. From Coates and other pundits to the many random Black Lives Matter activists those who expatiate about black Americans’ lack of interest in social-democratic politics claim interpretive authority based on the mysticism of organic racial representation and, most immediately, recognition by corporate media and elites as authentic voices.

That is a crucial context within which we should understand antiracists’ tendency to align with Wall Street Democrats in denouncing calls for general redistribution and their insistence that Trump’s victory most meaningfully expresses the depth of commitments to white supremacy, sexism, and homophobia particularly among “white working class” voters.

more here.

Jennie Erin Smith at the TLS:

The German forester Peter Wohlleben shares Young’s conviction that animal beh­aviour is often rooted in individual character and choice. In The Inner Life of Animals, a follow-up to his book on trees, Wohlleben’s subjects are woodland creatures: red deer, squirrels, boar, mice and ravens, along with domestic animals he has raised. He has seen courageous fawns, depressed does, conniving roosters. Unlike Young, he is anxious to show that his observations are objectively valid. To give them heft, he highlights findings from the past decade or so, many of them by German and Austrian researchers.

Writing about bees, Wohlleben recalls his experience as a keeper to attest that “there’s a lot more going on inside their little heads” than the conventional wisdom would have it. Bees will attack people who have annoyed them in the past, while allowing trusted ones to approach, he says. He cites research by a Berlin neurobiologist that subverts the old notion that a hive of bees acts as a collective super-organism. In fact, individual bees are capable of a limited form of decision-making and planning, Wohlleben writes, and they are “self-aware”.

more here.

Gaby Wood at the LRB:

What does it mean for a romance to take the shape of a murder investigation? In a Lonely Place, Nicholas Ray’s elegantly bitter film about damaged trust, throws that question at its viewers. If all love stories are inquiries of one kind or another, the movie seems to suggest, perhaps they differ only in their relative violence. When filming began, Ray was married to its female lead, Gloria Grahame; by the time it ended, they were living apart. Ray said it was ‘a very personal film’ – and as parting gifts go, it was both poisonous and immortal.

David Crow in the FT:

Crispr Therapeutics has already applied for permission from European regulators to test its most advanced product, code-named CTX001, in patients suffering from beta-thalassaemia, an inherited blood disease where the body does not produce enough healthy red blood cells. Patients with the most severe form of the illness would die without frequent transfusions.

The Switzerland-based company says it also plans to seek a greenlight from the US Food and Drug Administration this year so it can trial CTX001 in people with sickle cell disease, another inherited blood disorder.

Editas Medicine, Crispr’s US-based rival, says it plans to apply for permission from the FDA in the middle of the year so it can test one of its one of its own Crispr gene-editing products in patients with a rare form of congenital blindness that causes severe vision loss at birth. If the FDA agrees, it should be able to commence trials within 30 days of the application.

If those trials are successful, Crispr, Editas and a third company, Intellia Therapeutics, say they plan to study the technique in humans with a range of diseases including cancer, cystic fibrosis, haemophilia and Duchenne muscular dystrophy.

In China, where regulators have taken a more lenient approach to human trials, several studies are already under way, although they have yet to produce any conclusive data.

More here.

Lenore Palladino in Boston Review:

Executives decide which days to buy back shares and can then sell their own shares at the newly bumped up price. Top executives generally make the majority of their compensation through performance-based pay, which is either directly or indirectly tied to stock prices. Even though the rules of performance-based pay changed under tax reform, it is likely that executives will remain large shareholders.

But the problem with stock buybacks isn’t just frustration with the 1 percent getting even richer. Nor is it just the hypocrisy of how the tax bill was sold by the Republican Party—though there is plenty of that. While Republicans promised the bill would raise worker wages, all of the analyses about the ratio of spending on buybacks to spending on workers tell the same story: massive amounts of money are moving out to shareholders while very little is trickling down to workers. Moreover, Republicans promised improved innovation, but it should surprise no one that corporate investment as compared to profits has declined compared to historical levels—hurting corporate potential in the long-run—just as stock buybacks are on the rise.

Ending stock buybacks could be straightforward. Congress could amend the Securities and Exchange Act to simply make open-market share repurchases illegal. Or it could impose limits on buybacks for companies that aren’t investing in their employees or funding their pension commitments, or it could only allow buybacks when workers also receive a dividend. The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) could also repeal the “safe-harbor” rule, which lets companies spend massively on buybacks, or at the very least make companies justify why buybacks are a good use of corporate cash.

But the current surge of stock buybacks is a symptom of a much larger problem: how deeply corporate leaders are able to manipulate our economy for their own gain, without oversight from those who are supposed to hold them accountable. We’re in the grip of a shareholder primacy ideology, which posits that the purpose of corporate tax reform is to benefit shareholders because shareholders have the only right to the spoils.

More here.

An interview with Isabel Hilton in Jacobin:

Michael Greenberg in the New York Times:

Signe Dean in Science Alert:

Just when we thought octopuses couldn't be any weirder, it turns out that they and their cephalopod brethren evolve differently from nearly every other organism on the planet.

In a surprising twist, in April last year scientists discovered that octopuses, along with some squid and cuttlefish species, routinely edit their RNA (ribonucleic acid) sequences to adapt to their environment.

This is weird because that's really not how adaptations usually happen in multicellular animals. When an organism changes in some fundamental way, it typically starts with a genetic mutation – a change to the DNA.

Those genetic changes are then translated into action by DNA's molecular sidekick, RNA. You can think of DNA instructions as a recipe, while RNA is the chefthat orchestrates the cooking in the kitchen of each cell, producing necessary proteins that keep the whole organism going.

But RNA doesn't just blindly execute instructions – occasionally it improvises with some of the ingredients, changing which proteins are produced in the cell in a rare process called RNA editing.

When such an edit happens, it can change how the proteins work, allowing the organism to fine-tune its genetic information without actually undergoing any genetic mutations. But most organisms don't really bother with this method, as it's messy and causes problems more often that solving them.

More here.

Gábor Egry in Taxis:

In the early 2000s, many Hungarians took out mortgages in Swiss francs. The rates were low and it seemed like a good deal at the time. But when the 2008 financial crisis hit and the Hungarian currency tanked, mortgage holders discovered they owed much more than they had borrowed. Political upheaval ensued after the Hungarian press published a leaked recording of Socialist Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsány recounting how the party had lied repeatedly about the country’s fiscal status and potential. The right-wing conservative opposition swept the next election, and the new prime minister — Viktor Orbán — passed a law that relieved the pressure on Hungarians with mortgages in Swiss francs. But he didn’t stop there: he installed jurists loyal to his party throughout the judiciary and declared that Hungary would follow the example of countries like India, China, Russia, and Turkey in fashioning an “illiberal” state. Hungary’s economic crisis had become a political one.

When I first began to study economic history, it was 1993. I was a teenager, and everything looked simpler. That year I moved from my hometown, run-down, industrial Miskolc, to the more vibrant Budapest where I became a freshman student of history. Hungary was transitioning out of communism, and in that triumphal moment of human rights and economic liberalism, it seemed that East Central Europe was on its way to being firmly anchored in the West. The air of freedom was palpable; I felt that what I thought and did might truly matter. Granted, the government had lost popular support and the country was struggling with the economic and social effects of the transition from communism, but with Hungary headed westward, stability seemed inevitable.

Instead of stabilizing, however, for the next twenty years Hungary descended into a culture war over the legacy of the twentieth century.

More here.

The Duke of Nowhere
.

I was the son of the Duke of Nowhere.
Nowhere was home. The first sound I remember

was engines sawing steam, the butt
and squeal of wagons full of clunk

shunted cruelly. Lifted to the window sill
I had my first sight of our exile

as I thought: Here, me,
watching . . . There, trains going away . . .

*
He was living incognito
but his secret was safe with me.

I was the solitary heir to everything
he never once mentioned. I guessed

from his brooding, his whole silent days,
it must be vast. The lost estates

grew vaster in the weeks,
then months, he went away and stayed.

*

Beyond the roofs, beyond the dockyard wall
were cranes, then the edge of the world.

On a clear day I could watch grey frigates
climb it and slip over. I woke one night

to singing in the streets that suddenly
grew small as all the hooters of the fleet

brawled up together, blurting
Home . . . as if any such place

existed, over the horizon, anywhere.

by Philip Gross
from Changes of Address: Poems 1980-1998
Publisher: Bloodaxe, Tarset, 2001
ISBN: 1-85224-572-7

Meher Ahmad in Scientific American:

When Qaurat al-Ain brought her fever-stricken daughter Mariam to a doctor in this city 90 miles east of Karachi, she assumed the one-year-old had a chest cold. The doctor prescribed antibiotics and sent her on her way, but the fever persisted. Another doctor tried antimalarial drugs, also to no avail. That’s when al-Ain got really worried—the fever had already lasted two weeks. She sought a third opinion, and finally doctors at a specialized maternal and child care hospital in Hyderabad said her child likely had typhoid. That made sense: Pakistan is one of the few places where the bacterial infection remains endemic. Just over half a million people a year contract it here, often by consuming feces-contaminated food or water. Its hallmark symptom is a persistently high fever, and when left untreated it can cause intestinal perforation and fatal sepsis. “I remember having typhoid as a kid,” al-Ain says. “I just remember being out of school for a week, and other kids in my class having it, too.” But Mariam’s illness did not seem typical. “She would shake with fever chills for hours,” al-Ain recalls. “Seeing my baby like that was terrifying. It didn’t help that the doctors seemed so anxious, too.”

Lewis Lapham in Lapham's Quarterly:

To pick up on almost any story in the news these days—political, financial, sexual, or environmental—is to be informed in the opening monologue that the rule of law is vanished from the face of the American earth. So sayeth President Donald J. Trump, eight or nine times a day to his 47 million followers on Twitter. So sayeth also the plurality of expert witnesses in the court of principled opinion (media pundit, Never Trumper, think-tank sage, hashtag inspector of souls) testifying to the sad loss of America’s democracy, a once upon a time “government of laws and not of men.” The funeral orations make a woeful noise unto the Lord, but it’s not clear the orators know what their words mean or how reliable are their powers of observation. The American earth groans under the weight of legal bureaucracy, the body politic so judiciously enwrapped and embalmed in rules, regulations, requirements, codes, and commandments that it bears comparison to the glorified mummy of a once upon a time great king in Egypt.

Senior statesmen and tenured Harvard professors say the rule of law has been missing for three generations, ever since President Richard Nixon’s bagmen removed it from a safe at the Watergate. If so, who can be expected to know what it looks like if and when it shows up with the ambulance at the scene of a crime? Does it come dressed as a man or a woman? Blue eyes and sweet smile riding a white horse? Black uniform, steel helmet, armed with assault rifle? Or maybe the rule of law isn’t lost but misplaced. Left under a chair on Capitol Hill, in a display case at the Smithsonian, scouting locations for Clint Eastwood’s next movie. The confusion is in keeping with the trend of the times that elected Trump to the White House. In hope of clarification, this issue of Lapham’s Quarterly looks to the lessons of history. They are more hopeful than those available to the best of my own knowledge and recollection, which tend to recognize the rule of law as the politically correct term of art for the divine right of money.

Trump won the election because he didn’t pretend otherwise. He staked his claim to the White House on the proposition that he was “really rich,” unbought and unbossed and therefore free to say and do whatever it took to Make America Great Again. A deus ex machina descending by escalator into the atrium of his eponymous tower on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue in June 2015, Trump was there to say, and say it plainly, that money is power, and power, ladies and gentlemen, is not self-sacrificing or democratic. Never was, never will be. Law unto itself, name of the game; nature of the beast.

More here.

Alison Flood in The Guardian:

A glimpse at the “private, hidden face” of Albert Einstein, including the celebrated scientist’s thoughts on everything from his fears that his best work was behind him to his equivocal feelings about his fame, has been revealed in a cache of letters he wrote to his beloved younger sister, Maja.

The collection, which includes a previously unknown photograph of Einstein as a five-year-old and the only surviving letter written by Einstein to his father, comes from the archive of Maja Winteler-Einstein and her husband Paul Winteler. A mix of letters, postcards and photographs, many of which have not previously been published, the documents range in date from 1897 to 1951.

“What’s remarkable about them stems from the fact that he had this incredibly close relationship with his sister. It’s quite clear when he’s writing to her, there’s no role-playing at all,” said Thomas Venning at Christie’s, which will auction the letters at the start of May. “He was very conscious of what was expected of him after he became famous, and you don’t get any of that in letters to his sister. He says some things that I’ve never seen him say anywhere else, and I’ve catalogued many hundreds of his letters.”

In 1924, nine years after he completed the general theory of relativity in 1915, Einstein would write to Maja that “scientifically I haven’t achieved much recently – the brain gradually goes off with age, although that’s not so unpleasant. It also means that you’re not so answerable for your later years.” Ten years later, he would write to her: “I am happy in my work, even if in this and in other matters I am starting to feel that the brilliance of younger years is past.”

More here.

Ralph Nader in Lapham's Quarterly:

In the late 1970s, I had lunch with the head of the Internal Revenue Service. I broached a subject long on my mind: “I have been told that the section on insurance in the tax code is so complex that fewer people understand it than understand Einstein’s theory of relativity.” He replied that he wouldn’t doubt if that were true. So I followed up and asked, “How can it be enforced?” His answer was that it largely wasn’t.

If this seems shocking, beware—lawlessness is an overwhelming fact of American life, though little attention is paid to this many-unsplendored phenomenon. How many times have we been told that our country is under the rule of law and that nobody is above it? Yet the country’s legal life is defined instead by major zones of lawlessness created, in one aspect, by noncompliance and lack of enforcement and, in another, by raw power, which can be political, economic, or armed. These multiplying zones have pushed the rule of law into little more than a torrent of dysfunctional myths.

You might think attending one of Amer­ica’s 205 accredited law schools would help a person see through all this. But with few exceptions, law schools teach the rule of law as if it were the norm—as if public condemnations of criminal acts and sometimes prosecuted violations mean our culture really is defined by its laws. Courses push students to hone their analytic skills to find conflicts, inconsistencies, distinctions, ambiguities, and textual improvements in the formal legal system. Rarely is the rule of law exposed for what it is, though from time to time schools of legal thought do examine this—as did the “legal realists” at Yale Law School from the 1920s to the 1950s or the “critical legal studies” professors from the 1970s through the 1990s. But the language of these schools was too abstruse. The scholars did not focus enough on reaching outside their academic groves and were mostly unable to foster any kind of social justice movement that could make the law mean what it should—that is, justice.

More here.

Song In Space

When man first flew beyond the sky
He looked back into the world's blue eye.
Man said: What makes your eye so blue?
Earth said: The tears in the ocean do.
Why are the seas so full of tears?
Because I've wept many thousand years.
Why do you weep as you dance through space?
Because I am mother of the human race.

by Adrian Mitchell
from Greatest Hits
Bloodaxe Books Ltd., Newcastle, 1991
ISBN: 1 85224 164 0

Lindsay Turner at berfrois:

Deadpan, unhurried, and sensitive, Aki Kaurismäki’s 2017 film The Other Side of Hope tells the story of a young Syrian immigrant, Khaled. A stowaway who debarks in Finland accidentally, Khaled is now in search of his livelihood and his sister, who has been separated from him during the journey. Initially the film runs along double plotlines: in addition to Khaled’s story, we also have the plight of Wikstrom, a middle-aged Finnish shirt salesman who decides suddenly to change his life. He leaves his wife to her cigarettes and her nail polish, disposes of his plastic-wrapped merchandise, and gambles his way into a sum sizeable enough to buy himself a restaurant. These two stories converge quite late in the film. Khaled has been sleeping in a dumpster behind Wikstrom’s restaurant after having escaped the state-run reception center when his request for asylum is denied and deportation looms. The restaurant staff find him and take him in. What the New York Times calls “an old-fashioned humanistic fable” unfolds in a world of more-or-less hapless good will, real and unexpected warmth between characters, makeshift and often hilarious arrangements for help and protection against the forces of state and white nationalist violence, and a scruffy terrier. It’s not difficult to see why any viewer would find the movie a “declaration of faith in people and in movies.”

This description of the film hinges on a spatial binary: human decency and hospitality played out in the restaurant space versus the chill or hostile conditions Khaled finds outside it, in the street or the state-run reception center.

more here.

Pankaj Mishra at the NYRB:

Following Carl Jung, Peterson identifies “archetypes” in myths, dreams, and religions, which have apparently defined truths of the human condition since the beginning of time. “Culture,” one of his typical arguments goes, “is symbolically, archetypally, mythically male”—and this is why resistance to male dominance is unnatural. Men represent order, and “Chaos—the unknown—is symbolically associated with the feminine.” In other words, men resisting the perennially fixed archetypes of male and female, and failing to toughen up, are pathetic losers.

Such evidently eternal truths are not on offer anymore at a modern university; Jung’s speculations have been largely discredited. But Peterson, armed with his “maps of meaning” (the title of his previous book), has only contempt for his fellow academics who tend to emphasize the socially constructed and provisional nature of our perceptions. As with Jung, he presents some idiosyncratic quasi-religious opinions as empirical science, frequently appealing to evolutionary psychology to support his ancient wisdom.

Closer examination, however, reveals Peterson’s ageless insights as a typical, if not archetypal, product of our own times: right-wing pieties seductively mythologized for our current lost generations.

more here.

Lucy Lethbridge at Literary Review:

The title of Miranda Seymour’s vastly enjoyable new book is misleading. It suggests that Byron’s wife and daughter tumbled about in the slipstream of a volcanic genius. Yet although there was no escaping the blaze and shadow of Byron’s brilliance, the persona that he created and the fame that followed his life and death, their own lives were themselves rich in intellectual adventure. In very different ways, they were brave, bold, often hopelessly naive and sometimes maddening. It is one of the many pleasures of this book that Seymour makes the reader warm to their inconsistencies, to all the inexplicable oppositions of character and action that make them so familiar and human.

In Seymour’s account, angled to put the women centre stage, Byron is vain, narcissistic and self-pitying, his shallow affections most comfortably absorbed by Augusta, the half-sister even he called a ‘ninny’. He exits the scene early in the book, exiled from his wife and baby daughter in a sulphurous cloud of scandal. The courtship of Byron and Annabella Milbanke has been picked over by scholars for two hundred years; most have concluded that whichever way you look at it they made an odd couple. The doted-on only child of elderly Unitarians with progressive ideas, Annabella was clever, confident and allergic to criticism. She had a pronounced tendency to self-righteousness. At twenty-two and an heiress, she had many suitors but fell for Lord Byron. Well of course she did!

more here.