Editorial in Nature:

There is a classic narrative that stresses the importance and value of fundamental science. To make progress, one must take persistence by researchers, mix in patient financial support and then add creative imagination and logic (important for creating hypotheses and testing predictions). Then sprinkle on some unpredictable outcomes and stew for a century, or perhaps even longer. The 2016 announcement of the detection of gravitational waves is a fine product of this recipe for success. It was borne of theories of relativity that were esoteric but which now, unforeseeable at the time of their origin in 1916, underpin technologies such as global navigation. Readers of Nature probably have their own favourite examples of such success stories. Support for fundamental research remains essential, both as a signal of cultural values and as a driver of future societal progress. But research with a shorter-term or more-local vision of practical outcomes deserves reward and prestige, too — a fact perhaps taken for granted by engineers or clinical scientists, but less so in some other disciplines.

Take, for instance, the way in which regulatory authorities, commercial organizations and physical geographers at the University of Leeds, UK, collaborated to boost water quality and company performance by developing innovative catchment-management strategies in the north of England. Another example is how local health authorities partnered with a digital-media-production company to disseminate content related to a self-help technique developed by psychiatry researchers at King’s College London to combat bulimia. Both these examples are included in a database of case studies collected by the Higher Education Funding Council for England in its pioneering 2014 Research Excellence Framework (REF; see go.nature.com/2zags87). The council assesses the impact of research retrospectively, and rewards high performers with extra funds. This approach has increased financial support for some universities that pursue ‘useful’ research, but that did not fare well in previous, more-traditional funding frameworks. The next REF, which will be conducted in 2021, will allocate more weight (25% up from 20%) to impact assessments — a move that Nature supports. Other funders have signalled that they believe in direct impact, and demand a prospective view of such benefits in funding applications. The database of REF case studies is interesting partly because it highlights straightforward ways of documenting impacts through explicit description and endorsement by researchers’ partners in delivery, and partly because it reveals the variety of pathways to impact.

More here.

James Risen in The Intercept:

My case was part of a broader crackdown on reporters and whistleblowers that had begun during the presidency of George W. Bush and continued far more aggressively under the Obama administration, which had already prosecuted more leak cases than all previous administrations combined. Obama officials seemed determined to use criminal leak investigations to limit reporting on national security. But the crackdown on leaks only applied to low-level dissenters; top officials caught up in leak investigations, like former CIA Director David Petraeus, were still treated with kid gloves.

Initially, I had succeeded in the courts, surprising many legal experts. In the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, Brinkema had sided with me when the government repeatedly subpoenaed me to testify before a grand jury. She had ruled in my favor again by quashing a trial subpoena in the case of Jeffrey Sterling, a former CIA officer who the government accused of being a source for the story about the ill-fated CIA operation. In her rulings, Brinkema determined that there was a “reporter’s privilege” — at least a limited one — under the First Amendment that gave journalists the right to protect their sources, much as clients and patients can shield their private communications with lawyers and doctors.

But the Obama administration appealed her 2011 ruling quashing the trial subpoena, and in 2013, the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals, in a split decision, sided with the administration, ruling that there was no such thing as a reporter’s privilege. In 2014, the Supreme Court refused to hear my appeal, allowing the 4th Circuit ruling to stand. Now there was nothing legally stopping the Justice Department from forcing me to either reveal my sources or be jailed for contempt of court.

But even as I was losing in the courts, I was gaining ground in the court of public opinion. My decision to go to the Supreme Court had captured the attention of the nation’s political and media classes. Instead of ignoring the case, as they had for years, the national media now framed it as a major constitutional battle over press freedom.

More here.

Phillip Maciak, Jane Hu, Aaron Bady over at the LA Review of Books:

Here’s the thing about Mrs. Maisel, though: it’s perfect. I don’t even mean that in a strictly evaluative way. Like, I don’t think it’s the best show of the year (hey,The Leftovers!). What I mean is that perfection is a compositional quality and aspiration of the show. Its arguments, as Aaron has also tweeted, are “symphonic,” its visual aesthetic is flawless, the casting is so sharp it feels likeHarry Potter for Jewish American character actors, the stand-up sets are exactly as solid and charming as they are diegetically supposed to be, everybody says either the perfectly right thing or the perfectly wrong thing, its complications are precisely calibrated, its surprises are precisely spring-loaded, its best jokes all have call-backs, and Midge Maisel’s ankles are always the same circumference. There’s nothing messy or ragged or loose or baggy about this show. And that makes it good, but that also makes it a very particular type of show.

Gilmore Girls, for instance, was not perfect in this way. Neither was The Leftovers. Neither was Friday Night Lights. Frasier was perfect. So was Breaking Bad, and so was The West Wing. In other words, perfect and not-perfect are aesthetic categories here. Perfect shows do what they’re supposed to do; not-perfect shows do what they’re going to do. Not-perfect shows can be better than perfect shows and vice versa, but it’s a risk to do either. There were moments when The Leftovers did something so seemingly ill-advised that it could have derailed the whole series. But, in the—frequent—case that The Leftovers pulled it off, the show was transcendent. On the other hand, the perfect shows operate at such great heights and require such high-wire execution that, when they falter, it’s very very noticeable. Gilmore Girls was a long, meandering, free-associative, sometimes rapturous monologue; Mrs. Maisel is a tight ten.

The other thing, though, is that Mrs. Maisel is a perfect show about perfection.

More here.

Ahmad Sadri over at Al Jazeera:

The Islamic Republic of Iran is the platypus of humanity's political evolution.

Episodic Iranian unrest, from the focused, reformist uprising of 2009 (led by middle-class protesters of Tehran) to the current, wildly rejectionist riots (spearheaded by the underclass and the unemployed in the poor neighborhoods of provincial towns) cannot be understood in isolation from that melange of procedural democracy and obscurantist theocracy that was crammed into the constitution of revolutionary Iran, four decades ago.

Deep within Iran's authoritarian system there is a tiny democratic heart, complete with elective, presidential and parliamentary chambers, desperately beating against an unyielding, theocratic exoskeleton. That palpitating democratic heart has prolonged the life of the system – despite massive mismanagement of the domestic and international affairs by the revolutionary elites.

But it has failed to soften the authoritarian carapace. The reform movement has failed in its mission because the constitution grants three quarters of the political power to the office of the "Supreme Leader": an unelected, permanent appointment whereby a "religious jurist" gains enormous powers, including command of the armed forces and foreign policy, veto power over presidential cabinets and parliamentary initiatives, and the world's most formidable Pretorian Guard (IRGC), with military, paramilitary, intelligence, judicial and extrajudicial powers to enforce the will of its master.

More here.

Corey Robin in Crooked Timber:

A question for the political theorists, intellectual historians, and maybe public law/con law experts. The question comes at the very end of this post. Forgive the build-up. And the potted history: I’m writing fast because I’m hard at work on this Clarence Thomas book and am briefly interrupting that work in order to get a reading list.

In the second half of the 1980s, Clarence Thomas is being groomed for a position on the Supreme Court, or senses that he’s being groomed. He’s the head of the EEOC in the Reagan Administration and decides to beef up on his reading in political theory, constitutional law, and American history. He hires two Straussians—Ken Masugi and John Marini—to his staff on the EEOC. Their assignment is to give him a reading list, which they do and which he reads, and to serve as tutors and conversation partners in all things intellectual, which also they do.

These are West Coast Straussians. Both Masugi and Marini hail from the Claremont orbit in California (Masugi was in the think tank, Marino was a student). Unlike the East Coast Straussians—the Blooms and Pangles, who champion a Nietzschean Strauss who’s overtly celebratory of the American Founding but is secretly critical of natural law, natural rights, and the Framers—these West Coast Straussians follow Harry Jaffa, arguing that the American Founding is the consummation of ancient virtue in a modern idiom.

But what’s also true of these West Coast Straussians is that they are intensely interested in race.

More here.

Julian Baggin in Prospect Magazine:

From Phys.Org:

We and all other animals wouldn't be here today if our planet didn't have a lot of oxygen in its atmosphere and oceans. But how crucial were high oxygen levels to the transition from simple, single-celled life forms to the complexity we see today? A study by University of California, Berkeley geochemists presents new evidence that high levels of oxygen were not critical to the origin of animals. The researchers found that the transition to a world with an oxygenated deep ocean occurred between 540 and 420 million years ago. They attribute this to an increase in atmospheric O2 to levels comparable to the 21 percent oxygen in the atmosphere today. This inferred rise comes hundreds of millions of years after the origination of animals, which occurred between 700 and 800 million years ago.

Allan Massie at the TLS:

Vonnegut (1922–2007), as the editors Jerome Klinkowitz and Dan Wakefield point out, started writing, and trying to publish, short stories in commercial magazines with a high circulation: Collier’s, Cosmopolitan, the Saturday Evening Post, Esquire, Argosy, Ladies’ Home Journal and Galaxy Science Fiction. For years he received more rejection slips than acceptances. That’s how it was then, and how it had been for more than a hundred years. Editors of such magazines knew what they wanted, and knew what their readers wouldn’t care for. It was a market place, and the writer had to please the customer. You might be a star, as F. Scott Fitzgerald was between the wars; your story still came back if tone and content didn’t suit. So, nearly half a century after he first sold a story (to Collier’s, in 1950), Vonnegut was able to write in the New York Times that, “thanks to popular magazines, I learned on the job to be a fiction writer . . . . Listen, there were creative writing teachers long before there were creative writing courses, and they were called and continued to be called ‘editors’”. Given that, even at his best, Vonnegut was inclined to be whimsical and self-indulgent, the discipline demanded by the commercial magazines was doubtless good for him.

First sentences were important. “Miss Temptation” (1956) begins: “Puritanism had fallen into such disrepair that not even the oldest spinster thought of putting Susanna in a ducking stool”. This is immediately engaging. The story turns out to be slight and improbable, but also neat and charming. Despite the implication of the opening, it steers clear of sex.

more here.

J. W. McCormack at The Baffler:

THREE-HUNDRED-AND-SEVENTY PAGES OF ENDNOTES would be excessive for most novels, let alone one that runs to just under one-hundred pages by itself, but that is how we are invited to view the new Everyman’s Library edition of Marguerite Duras’s The Lover, which comes packaged with her Wartime Notebooks and an essay collection, Practicalities. These supplementary texts contain the astonishingly accomplished French novelist, screenwriter, and director’s reflections on her films, her association with the Resistance and later the PFC (the French Communist Party), fragments of aborted novels, and records of her long struggle with alcoholism—but it is around The Lover that everything revolves, as we return again and again to the 1920s Indochina (now Vietnam) of Duras’s youth and the transformative affair with a much older, wealthy Asian man (Chinese in the novel, Vietnamese in the journals, and prefiguring the Japanese lover of Duras’s screenplay for 1959’s Hiroshima Mon Amour) that forms the basis of the novel, written when its author was seventy years old. The result is a book that flows out of itself, gradually decompressing the layers of memory, fiction, and history—though it is none of these things altogether—packed into The Lover’s pithily enigmatic prose, which disarms from one of its much-quoted opening lines: “Very early in my life it was too late.”

more here.

Louis Menand at The New Yorker:

Robert Kennedy is one of the great what-ifs of American political history. In 1968, he was just forty-three years old. He had the most glamorous name in politics; he wore the mantle of martyrdom; and he had transformed himself from a calculating infighter—he had managed his brother’s Presidential campaign, in 1960, and served as his Attorney General after the election—into a kind of existentialist messiah. At the 1964 Democratic National Convention, in Atlantic City, he had received a twenty-two-minute standing ovation just by appearing at the lectern.

There was a rawness in Kennedy’s face and voice that seemed to match the national mood. He was the personification of the country’s pain over its fallen leader. And he had the ability to reflect back whatever voters projected onto him. He seemed to combine youth with experience, intellect with heart, street sense with vision. He was a hero to Chicano grape pickers, to inner-city African-Americans, to union workers. He was a man of the times when the times they were a-changin’. Kennedy had haters. Having haters is part of the job of being a messiah. But he was salvific. He could rouse audiences to a frenzy and he could make hardened politicos weep. People thought that he could go to the Convention and steal the nomination from Johnson. People thought that he could beat Nixon.

more here.

.

Primordial Alliance

Home alone (J. on the road)
living small in our little house
tucked in the woods
A frozen stream ribbon
out back
…………… Midnight Zero
Taken during near full moon
while on the way down
from dragging garbage cans
up the hill

Dogs on the dark flanks sniffing,
fulfilling a primordial alliance
A touching the earth

Buddha
guards the door

Next
an armful of firewood
.

Harry Walsh
January 2018

Emily Gould at Bookforum:

Early in Stephen Davis’s workmanlike unauthorized biography of Stevie Nicks, we witness the circumstances of her most enduring creation’s birth. Twenty-six-year-old Nicks—sick and tired of waitressing; struggling with the controlling behavior of her boyfriend, Lindsey Buckingham; fighting to keep their flailing band, Buckingham Nicks, alive—was holed up in sound engineer Keith Olsen’s house. High on LSD—“the only time I ever did it,” Nicks says—she spent three straight days listening to Joni Mitchell’s just-released album Court and Spark on Olsen’s giant speakers. The record inspired her on both a technical and a thematic level. What Mitchell was describing, with unusual candor, were the perks and pitfalls of being a female rock star. When she heard it, Nicks had a premonition, or received a warning. After she came down, she composed the song that would make the prophecy of megafame real and that she would perform in various versions for decades to come. She left the demo cassette of “Rhiannon” for Buckingham with a note: “Here is a new song. You can produce it, but don’t change it.”

This story, like many of the tales people tell about Nicks and that Nicks tells about herself, is goofy and vague but still suffused with genuine magic. The Stevie Nicks legend is full of prophecies: She has always had dreams that literally come true.

more here.

Rachel Monroe at The Believer:

On the second day I spent with the Manson Bloggers, we found a tongue hanging from a tree. This was in the northwestern fringes of Los Angeles County, the half-wild, half-suburban part of the city that the Manson Family once called home. These days, most of the land is owned by the state and nearby there is a church; on top of a hill, a ten-foot cross looms in right-angled judgment. The Manson Bloggers did not seem to notice the cross, because they had another mission in mind: finding the Manson Tree, a gnarled oak that’s notable because Charles Manson used to perch in its crook and strum the guitar.

We had to scramble over a highway railing to reach the old oak. As we got close, I saw that some previous visitor had thrown a white rope over one of the tree’s branches. Something was dangling from the rope—a sweet potato, I thought. Or some sort of lumpy, orangish doll. The Manson Bloggers knew better. “It’s a cow’s tongue,” Deb said. She was right. Up close, it was unmistakable, a length of moist muscle, obscene and obscurely violent.

more here.

Richard Carwardine at Literary Review:

Ron Chernow’s Grant brings an eloquent voice to the ongoing work of rehabilitation. Only last year Ronald C White’s American Ulyssesextolled Grant’s deep faith, sense of honour, commitment to racial justice and essential decency. But in Chernow’s hands Grant becomes an even more heroic figure. A prizewinning biographer with a gift for placing his American subjects in grand but intimate narratives (his Alexander Hamilton inspired Lin-Manuel Miranda’s stonkingly successful musical), Chernow takes as an emblematic starting point the final challenge of Grant’s life. Financially ruined by fraud in 1884, determined not to leave his family destitute and suffering from the onset of throat and tongue cancer (the legacy of lifelong cigar smoking), Grant agreed to write his memoirs. Racked with pain, the taciturn commander managed to complete, just days before his death in July 1885, a stunning literary masterpiece that has remained in print to this day. The talent it illuminated would have remained hidden but for this adversity. Chernow finds in this last great triumph of Grant’s life a metaphor for the ‘surprising comebacks and stunning reversals’ of his career as a whole. Sophisticates too easily underrated a plain, unassuming man with a rich but unobtrusive set of qualities: ‘a shrewd mind, a wry wit, a rich fund of anecdotes, wide knowledge, and penetrating insights’.

more here.

.
When I consider how my light is spent,
…. Ere half my days in this dark world and wide,
…. And that one talent which is death to hide
…. Lodged with me useless, though my soul more bent
To serve therewith my Maker, and present
…. My true account, lest He returning chide;
…. “Doth God exact day-labor, light denied?”
…. I fondly ask. But Patience, to prevent
That murmur, soon replies, “God doth not need
…. Either man’s work or His own gifts. Who best
…. Bear His mild yoke, they serve Him best. His state
Is kingly: thousands at His bidding speed,
…. And post o’er land and ocean without rest;
…. They also serve who only stand and wait.”

John Milton; 1608-1674

Carl Zimmer in The New York Times:

A diet of fiber-rich foods, such as fruits and vegetables, reduces the risk of developing diabetes, heart disease and arthritis. Indeed, the evidence for fiber’s benefits extends beyond any particular ailment: Eating more fiber seems to lower people’s mortality rate, whatever the cause. That’s why experts are always saying how good dietary fiber is for us. But while the benefits are clear, it’s not so clear why fiber is so great. “It’s an easy question to ask and a hard one to really answer,” said Fredrik Bäckhed, a biologist at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden. He and other scientists are running experiments that are yielding some important new clues about fiber’s role in human health. Their research indicates that fiber doesn’t deliver many of its benefits directly to our bodies. Instead, the fiber we eat feeds billions of bacteria in our guts. Keeping them happy means our intestines and immune systems remain in good working order. In order to digest food, we need to bathe it in enzymes that break down its molecules. Those molecular fragments then pass through the gut wall and are absorbed in our intestines.

Laila Lalami in the New York Times:

In 1978, a year before the Iranian revolution overthrew the shah and an Islamic republic was declared, the artist Ardeshir Mohassess drew a cartoon showing a king in a turban and sash hanging from the gallows, as a crowd beneath him presents itself to the viewer’s eye. “The king is always above the people,” the caption read. Even in death, the artist seemed to say, the rulers are different from you and me — we may survive them, but all of us remain an indistinguishable mass while their authority guarantees they will be remembered, and later recorded in our history books.

This cartoon so resonated with Daniel Alarcón that he used its caption as a title for a short story, which also gives its name to his new collection, “The King Is Always Above the People.” Nearly all the stories in this slim, affecting book are set in “the capital” or the “old city” of an unnamed country, at a time when power has shifted from dictatorship to fragile democracy. The protagonists are young men, suddenly forced to face a separation or a divorce, an abusive father or the unpleasant task of settling an estate left behind by a distant uncle. But whatever happens to them, it will involve a displacement. Only through the experience of displacement, whether voluntary or involuntary, do they come to truly know their intimate selves.

More here.

Olivia Goldhill in Quartz:

Some 2,000 years ago, the Ancient Greek scholar Hippocrates argued that all ailments, including mental illnesses such as melancholia, could be explained by imbalances in the four bodily fluids, or “humors.” Today, most of us like to think we know better: Depression—our term for melancholia—is caused by an imbalance, sure, but a chemical imbalance, in the brain.

This explanation, widely cited as empirical truth, is false. It was once a tentatively-posed hypothesis in the sciences, but no evidence for it has been found, and so it has been discarded by physicians and researchers. Yet the idea of chemical imbalances has remained stubbornly embedded in the public understanding of depression.

Prozac, approved by the US Food and Drug Administration 30 years ago today, on Dec. 29, 1987, marked the first in a wave of widely prescribed antidepressants that built on and capitalized off this theory. No wonder: Taking a drug to tweak the biological chemical imbalances in the brain makes intuitive sense. But depression isn’t caused by a chemical imbalance, we don’t know how Prozac works, and we don’t even know for sure if it’s an effective treatment for the majority of people with depression.

More here. [Thanks to Yohan J. John.]

Puzhong Yao in American Affairs:

The Evangelical Christians I have met in the United States often talk about how reading the Bible changed their lives. They talk about being born again.

I am not an Evangelical Christian. I am a Chinese atheist who came to the West to study at the world’s best universities and, later, to work at one of capitalism’s greatest companies, Goldman Sachs.

But, like the Evangelical Christians, my life was changed by a book. Specifically, Robert Rubin’s autobiography In an Uncertain World (Random House, 2003). Robert Rubin was Goldman Sachs’s senior partner and subsequently secretary of the Treasury. Only later did I learn that certain people in the United States revere him as something of a god.

I first bought the book because I was puzzled by the title, especially coming from a man who had achieved so much. I had always thought that things happen for reasons. My parents taught me that good people get rewarded while evil gets punished. My teachers at school taught me that if you work hard, you will succeed, and if you never try, you will surely fail. When I picked up the book, I was studying math at Cambridge University and, as I looked back at the standardized tests and intense study that had defined my life until then, I could see no uncertainty.

But since reading Rubin’s book, I have come to see the world differently. Robert Rubin never intended to become the senior partner of Goldman Sachs: a few years into his career, he even handed in his resignation. Just as in Rubin’s career, I find that maybe randomness is not merely the noise but the dominant factor. And those reasons we assign to historical events are often just ex post rationalizations. As rising generations are taught the rationalizations, they conclude that things always happen for a reason.

More here. [Thanks to Omar Ali.]