Robert Berwick & Noam Chomsky in The Inference Review:

In 1866, the Linguistic Society of Paris issued a stern injunction: “The Society does not accept any communication concerning either the origin of the language or the creation of a universal language.”¹ On peut facilement imaginer pourquoi. The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, as Giorgio Graffi observed, marked the blossoming of modern comparative linguistics.² William Jones, a British judge in India, and Jacob Grimm, the author of a collection of morbid German fairy tales, were among the pioneering linguists studying Indo-European languages. They aimed collectively to discover historical connections among languages and to reconstruct their origins in an Indo-European Ursprache. But their work focused on the external features of individual languages, rather than on the origin of language as a cognitive faculty; and it was conducted, as Sylvain Auroux has emphasized, against a backdrop of evolutionary and phylogenetic thought.³ Linguists told themselves many stories about the evolution of language, and so did evolutionary biologists; but stories, as Richard Lewontin rightly notes, are not hypotheses, a term that should be “reserved for assertions that can be tested.”⁴

The human language faculty is a species-specific property, with no known group differences and little variation. There are no significant analogues or homologues to the human language faculty in other species.

More here.

Eric Levitz in New York Magazine:

It should be “okay” for Americans who want their country to have a close alliance with a foreign power to form political organizations that advance their views. The problem with AIPAC is not that it pushes American lawmakers to show deference to the interests of another country. The problem is that it pushes them to show deference to a country that practices de facto apartheid rule in much of the territory it controls. If there were a lobby pushing Congress to put the humanitarian needs of Bangladesh over the immediate economic interests of Americans — by imposing a steep carbon tax and drastically increasing foreign aid to that low-lying nation — would the left decry the idea that such lobbying was “okay?” Of course not. Because progressives aren’t hypernationalists. And I don’t think Omar is either. So she shouldn’t frame her opposition to the Israel lobby in nationalist terms. The problem isn’t Congress’s “allegiance to a foreign country,” but its complicity in Jewish supremacy in the West Bank, an inhuman blockade in Gaza, and discrimination against Arab-Israelis in Israel proper.

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Aziz Al-Azmeh at The Marginalia Review of Books:

Current scholarship on Paleo-Islam was strongly marked by the publication in 1977 of Hagarism: The Making of the Islamic World by Crone and Michael Cook. This domain of history had then for decades attracted little consolidated academic energy, its themes generally considered plain and uncomplicated, corresponding to a grand narrative pervading classical Arabic sources. Hagarism proposed that Arabic historical sources should be disregarded, that other sources, including an Armenia chronicle, should be preferred, and that at its inception Islam was really a Jewish sectarian movement. The book’s cognitive harvest was scant, but its warning against uncritical reliance on classical Arabic sources, and its narrative revisionism, were carried forth by a sprightliness altogether uncommon in Islamic studies. Hagarism’s unfledged source-critical skepticism, and consequences drawn from it, came together to define the major commonplaces of what rapidly came to be regarded as the mainstream studies of Paleo-Islam since. A default setting of hyper-scepticism congealed rapidly into an academic orthodoxy that came to project an air of assurance, self-evidence and effortless repeatability. This setting was reinforced by relative institutional isolation of the field from the broader reaches of the historical sciences, by inbred, tribal habits of reading, and dedication to in-house issues and concerns.

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Dmitri Levitin at Literary Review:

The discovery of Newton’s alchemical manuscripts – containing no fewer than a million words, some of the pages mutilated by the acids used during his quest for the philosopher’s stone – led to a flurry of scholarly activity. This culminated in the 1980s in the work of Richard Westfall, still Newton’s greatest biographer, and Betty Jo Teeter Dobbs. In a spectacular rejection of Butterfield’s dismissiveness, they argued that alchemy underpinned Newton’s whole world-view. Newton’s belief in transmutation, Dobbs claimed, was akin to a religious quest, with the ‘philosophic mercury’, believed to be ableto break down metals into their constituent parts, acting as a spirit mediating between the physical and divine realms. Westfall suggested that it was assumptions born in Newton’s alchemical researches about invisible forces acting at a distance that allowed him to develop his greatest theory: that of universal gravitation, which he announced to the world in his Principia of 1687.

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Peter Schjeldahl at The New Yorker:

“Painting,” painted by Joan Miró in 1933, in Barcelona, is a composition of black, red, and white blobby shapes and linear glyphs on a ground of bleeding and blending greens and browns. It hangs in “Joan Miró: Birth of the World,” an enchanting show at the Museum of Modern Art that draws on the museum’s immense holdings of Miró’s work, along with a few loans. “Painting” is a bit sombre, for him, but it has the ineffably friendly air of nearly all his art: adventurous but easy-looking, an eager gift to vision and imagination. It invokes a word inevitably applied to Miró: “poetic,” redolent of the magic, residual in us, of childhood rhymes, with or without figurative elements. Never unsettling in the ways of, say, Matisse or, for heaven’s sake, Picasso, Miró is a modernist for everybody. (He died in 1983, at the age of ninety.) This has given him a peculiar trajectory in the modern-art canon: he was considered majestic at points in the past, in ways that feel somewhat flimsy now. Looking at “Painting” helps me think about the art world’s shifting estimation of the “international Catalan,” as Miró termed himself. It stirs a personal memory.

more here.

Rachel Cooke in The Guardian:

What do little girls like? As a child, I preferred Lego to dolls and, if asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, was apt to reply: a detective, or a reporter. My parents were scientists, so our household was in some ways less obviously gendered than most (though I went on to do an arts degree, two of my sisters read biochemistry and maths at university). Nevertheless, it was always in the air: the way girls should be, and therefore are. By the time I was a teenager, I’d learned to feel quite odd about certain of my tastes and aptitudes. I’d also internalised various stereotypes. I took great pride, for instance, in my map-reading – not because map-reading is intrinsically difficult, but because some small part of me accepted that women are not supposed to be any good at it.

No wonder, then, that reading Gina Rippon’s careful and prolonged demolition of the myth of the “female brain” left me with a powerful sense of relief. Here, at last, are things I’ve long felt instinctively to be true, presented as demonstrable facts. Professor Rippon is a researcher in the field of cognitive neuroscience at the Aston Brain Centre at Aston University, Birmingham, and an advocate for initiatives to mitigate the under-representation of women in Stem subjects. In The Gendered Brain, she shows how we first arrived at the conviction that the female brain is “different” (and thus inferior), how this misperception persists into the 21st century, and how the latest breakthroughs in neuroscience can, and should, dispel such fallacies for ever. It is a highly accessible book. It’s also an important one. Quite apart from how interesting the science contained within it is, it has the power – if only people would read it – to do vastly more for gender equality than any number of feminist “manifestos”.

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Matthew Warren in Nature:

A person with HIV seems to be free of the virus after receiving a stem-cell transplant that replaced their white blood cells with HIV-resistant versions. The patient is only the second person ever reported to have been cleared of the virus using this method. But researchers warn that it is too early to say that they have been cured. The patient — whose identity hasn’t been disclosed — was able to stop taking antiretroviral drugs, with no sign of the virus returning 18 months later. The stem-cell technique was first used a decade ago for Timothy Ray Brown, known as the ‘Berlin patient’, who is still free of the virus. So far, the latest patient to receive the treatment is showing a response similar to Brown’s, says Andrew Freedman, a clinical infectious-disease physician at Cardiff University in the UK who was not involved in the study. “There’s good reason to hope that it will have the same result,” he says. Like Brown, the latest patient also had a form of blood cancer that wasn’t responding to chemotherapy. They required a bone-marrow transplant, in which their blood cells would be destroyed and replenished with stem cells transplanted from a healthy donor.

But rather than choosing just any suitable donor, the team — led by Ravindra Gupta, an infectious-disease physician at the University of Cambridge, UK — picked a donor who had two copies of a mutation in the CCR5 gene that gives people resistance to HIV infection. This gene codes for a receptor which sits on the surface of white blood cells involved in the body’s immune response. Normally, the HIV binds to these receptors and attacks the cells, but a deletion in the CCR5 gene stops the receptors from functioning properly. About 1% of people of European descent have two copies of this mutation and are resistant to HIV infection.

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The Clothes Shrine

It was a whole new sweetness
In the early days to find
Light white muslin blouses
On a see-through nylon line
Drip-drying in the bathroom
Or a nylon slip in the shine
Of its own electricity-
As if St. Brigid once more
Had rigged up a ray of sun
Like the one she’d strung on air
To dry her own cloak on
(Hard-pressed Brigid, so
Unstoppably on the go)-
The damp and slump and unfair
Drag of the workday
Made light of and got through
As usual, brilliantly.

by Seamus Heany
from Electric Light
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001

Mark Rowlands in The Hedgehog Review:

Imagine you are on a bus ride to an unknown destination. The road is little more than a dirt track, littered with potholes, and you are constantly bounced around in your seat. There is no air conditioning. Sweat is dripping down your back and you are starting to smell. The same is true of your fellow travelers. Some of them have brought livestock and other animals on board. Kids are screaming; the bathrooms are blocked and overflowing. It is clear that no one on the bus has any idea where you are going, and only the haziest idea of where you are coming from. Nevertheless, all around you people are making up stories—ungrounded in logic and untethered to evidence—about where they are going to alight and what their prospects will be once they get there.

This situation might give rise to feelings of difference and superiority: I am not like these others; I am better. But suppose, out of the corner of your eye, you caught one of your fellow passengers looking at you, and you looked back. In that person’s eyes, you would see the same anguish, the same recognition of hopelessness and futility, the same disgust, the same fear. At that moment, you would realize that you were both in this together—indeed, that everyone on the bus was in this together.

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Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe:

Quantum mechanics is our best theory of how reality works at a fundamental level, yet physicists still can’t agree on what the theory actually says. At the heart of the puzzle is the “measurement problem”: what actually happens when we observe a quantum system, and why do we apparently need separate rules when it happens? David Albert is one of the leading figures in the foundations of quantum mechanics today, and we discuss the measurement problem and why it’s so puzzling. Then we dive into the Many-Worlds version of quantum mechanics, which is my favorite (as I explain in my forthcoming book Something Deeply Hidden). It is not David’s favorite, so he presents the case as to why you should be skeptical of Many-Worlds. (The philosophically respectable case, that is, not a vague unease at all those other universes.)

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Emmanuel Macron in The Guardian:

Citizens of Europe, if I am taking the liberty of addressing you directly, it is not only in the name of the history and values that unite us, but because time is of the essence. A few weeks from now the European elections will be decisive for the future of our continent.

Never since the second world war has Europe been so essential. Yet never has Europe been in such danger. Brexit stands as the symbol of that. It symbolises the crisis of a Europe that has failed to respond to its peoples’ need for protection from the major shocks of the modern world. It also symbolises the European trap. The trap lies not in being part of the European Union; the trap is in the lie and the irresponsibility that can destroy it. Who told the British people the truth about their post-Brexit future? Who spoke to them about losing access to the EU market? Who mentioned the risks to peace in Ireland of restoring the border? Retreating into nationalism offers nothing; it is rejection without an alternative. And this is the trap that threatens the whole of Europe: the anger mongers, backed by fake news, promise anything and everything.

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Adam O’Fallon Price at The Millions:

But beyond the pleasure of Dreyer’s prose and authorial tone, I think there is something else at play with the popularity of his book. To put it as simply as possible, the man cares, and we need people who care right now. Dreyer’s English is, beyond a freakin’ style guide, the document of a serious person’s working life. At sixty, Dreyer is at the top of his game and profession, an honorable profession he has worked diligently at for more than three decades. To write a book is to care deeply and in a sustained way about something; to copyedit a book is to care deeply and in a sustained way about someone else’s deep and sustained caring. And to have copyedited books for one’s adult life is to have spent one’s adult life caring about other people’s words and the English language. As he writes in the introduction:

I am a copyeditor… my job is to lay my hands on [a] piece of writing and make it… better. Not rewrite it, not to bully and flatten it into some notion of Correct Prose, whatever that might be, but to burnish and polish it and make it the best possible version of itself that it can be—to make it read even more like itself than it did when I got to work on it.

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Nick Pinkerton at Artforum:

GASPAR NOÉ’S CLIMAX is an encyclopedia of ways in which the human body can bend and break, a sailor’s knot guide of the contortions possible with four limbs, a trunk, and a head, skulls seemingly empty here of thoughts other than sex and death. Set in an isolated school somewhere outside of Paris where a troupe of hip-hop dancers have assembled for intensive rehearsals before an impending American tour, the movie unravels in something like real-time as, cutting loose at the end of a day’s work, they dip into a punchbowl of sangria before discovering that one of their group has spiked it with LSD, precipitating a collective freak-out.

The film opens with a premonition of catastrophe: an indifferent-God’s-eye-view of a bloodied young woman wading through a field of snow before collapsing and flailingly tracing an angel in the powder.

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James McAuley at the NYRB:

The gilets jaunes are more than a protest. This is a modern-day jacquerie, an emotional wildfire stoked in the provinces and directed against Paris and, most of all, the elite. French history since 1789 can be seen as a sequence of anti-elite movements, yet the gilets jaunes have no real precedent. Unlike the Paris Commune of 1871, this is a proletarian struggle devoid of utopian aspirations. Unlike the Poujadist movement of the mid-1950s—a confederation of shopkeepers likewise opposed to the “Americanization” of a “thieving and inhuman” state and similarly attracted to anti-Semitic conspiracy theories—the gilets jaunes include shopkeepers seemingly content to destroy shop windows. There is an aspect of carnival here: a delight in the subversion of norms, a deliberate embrace of the grotesque.

Many have said that the gilets jaunes are merely another “populist movement,” although the term is now so broad that it is nearly meaningless. Comparisons have been made to the Britain of Brexit, the United States of Donald Trump, and especially the Italy of Cinque Stelle. But the crucial difference is that the gilets jaunes are apolitical, and militantly so.

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Two Poems by Gary Snyder and one by Lew Welsh

For Lew Welsh in a Snowfall

Snowfall in March:
I sit in the white glow reading a thesis
About you. Your poems, your life.

The author’s my student,
He even quotes me.

Forty years since we joked in a kitchen in Portland
Twenty since you disappeared.

All those years and their moments—
Crackling bacon, slamming car doors,
Poems tried out on friends,
Will be one more archive,
One more shaky text.

But life continues in the kitchen
Where we still laugh and cook,
Watching snow.

For/From Lew

Lew Welch just turned up one day,
live as you and me. “Damn, Lew” I said,
“you didn’t shoot yourself after all.”
“Yes I did” he said,
and even then I felt the tingling down my back.
“Yes you did, too” I said—”I can feel it now.”
“Yeah” he said,
“There’s a basic fear between your world and
mine. I don’t know why.
What I came to say was,
teach the children about the cycles.
The life cycles. All other cycles.
That’s what it’s all about, and it’s all forgot.”

I saw Myself

I saw myself
a ring of bone
in the clear stream
of all of it

and vowed,
always to be open to it
that all of it
might flow through

and then heard
“ring of bone” where
ring is what a

bell does

by Lew Welsh
from Ring of Bone

Eric Boehlert in AlterNet:

If over the weekend you saw a rambling madman give a frighteningly incoherent, sweaty, two-hour shoutfest of a speech at a right-wing summit, then you viewed a president coming unglued on national television in a way that has probably never been seen before in United States history. And that is extraordinary cause for alarm. But if, instead, you saw nothing more than a “fiery” Donald Trump give a “zigzagging,” “wide-ranging,” “campaign-like” address where the Republican really “let loose,” then you likely work for the D.C. press, which once again swung and missed when it came to detailing the escalating threat that Trump represents to the country.

Specifically, newsrooms today nearly uniformly refuse to address the mounting, obvious signs that Trump is a deeply unstable man, as the CPAC meltdown so obviously demonstrated. Most reporters simply do not want to mention it. “In most ways, it was just another campaign rally for the president, in flavor, content, and punchlines,” the Daily Beast reported, summing up Trump’s CPAC calamity. In other words: Nothing to see here, folks. That was typical of CPAC coverage. “Trump derides Mueller probe, mocks Democrats and his former attorney general,” the Washington Post headline announced. The accompanying article didn’t include even the slightest hint that Trump’s speech was a flashing neon-red sign of a man teetering on the edge. That is a bionic-level attempt to normalize Trump and his CPAC disaster, where he referred to 2020 Democratic candidates as “maniacs,” suggested they “hate their country,” and accused the Democratic Party of supporting “extreme late-term abortion.”

That wasn’t just some “long-winded” or “rambling” speech. That was pure insanity, and the fact that a sitting president unleashed such a bizarre performance, punctuated by so many incomprehensible nonsequiturs, means his stability and capacity ought to be questioned—and it ought to be a pressing news story. Don’t just take my word for it. Daniel Dale of the Toronto Star, who has spent more time than most listening to Trump speeches and meticulously detailing his relentless lies, confidently declared that the CPAC address was the most bizarre of Trump’s presidency, and that was only halfway into Trump’s marathon presentation of mangled gibberish on Saturday.

More here.

Carl Zimmer in The New York Times:

High in the mountains of Central America lives a little known creature called Alston’s singing mouse. This rodent, which spends its life scuttling around the floor of the cloud forest, may not seem like it has much to tell us about ourselves. But the mouse produces remarkable songs, and researchers have discovered some profound similarities to our own conversations. This ability may be linked evolutionarily to the ancient roots of human language. Scientists have struggled for over a century to work out the origin of language in our mammal ancestors. “Until very recently there was still this belief that human speech and mammalian vocalizations are two completely different things,” said Steffen R. Hage, a neurobiologist at the University of Tubingen in Germany. No other mammal has a brain capable of doing what is required for human language — from understanding the rules of grammar to coordinating quick, complex commands to muscles in the mouth and throat. Early studies suggested that mammals used much simpler brain circuits for communicating.

…In 2011, Michael A. Long, a neuroscientist at N.Y.U. Medical School, first heard about Alston’s singing mice and realized that when it comes to sound, they’re a lot more interesting than lab mice. Singing mice produce arias of loud chirps that can last as long as 16 seconds, and each mouse produces its own distinctive song.

“This is their bar code that says, ‘This is me,’” said Dr. Long.

More here.