Ed Yong in The Atlantic:

When the last of a species disappears, it usually does so unnoticed, somewhere in the wild. Only later, when repeated searches come up empty, will researchers reluctantly acknowledge that the species must be extinct. But in rare cases like George’s, when people are caring for an animal’s last known representative, extinction—an often abstract concept—becomes painfully concrete. It happens on their watch, in real time. It leaves behind a body. When Sischo rang in the new year, Achatinella apexfulva existed. A day later, it did not. “It is happening right in front of our eyes,” he said.

Hawaii was once known for its snails, or kāhuli. Most are smaller than the average garden snail, and far more beautiful. Their shells swirl with the palette of a chocolate box—dark brown, chestnut, white, the occasional splash of mint. Sischo compares them not only to candy but also, because many live in trees, to Christmas ornaments. All of them descended from ancestral mollusks that arrived in Hawaii millions of years ago, perhaps on the bodies of birds. Those stowaways gave rise to more than 750 species—an incredible radiation that turned the snails into exemplars of evolution’s generative prowess.

But in recent decades, kāhuli have come to exemplify the opposite force: extinction.

More here.

Usha Alexander in Pangyrus:

Human beings are the type of animal that depend upon the diversity and plenitude of other life to sustain us. It’s no coincidence that our presence arrived concomitant with the richest biota the earth has ever developed. This wealth of life created the complex and flexible niche that we’ve come to fill, not only passively, as our food source, but even actively, as symbionts living on our skin and in our guts, literally as part of us. Beyond this too, our fellow living things each play their part in providing what we call “ecosystem services,” like preparing the soil, adding in nutrients, oxygenating the air and water, pollinating plants, breaking down waste, and sustaining one another in an environmental balance that supports our survival. Without them, we would have no food to eat nor air to breath.

Microbiota, fungi, plants, and other animals, including those of which we remain unaware, constitute an interdependent web of life, complex beyond our ken. This rich diversity of species is essential for maintaining this world as we know it. And to sustain resilient, adaptable populations of each kind of living thing, each must remain in great enough number and genetic variety to represent a diversity within species, as well.

More here.

Joseph Epstein at First Things:

Perhaps Stefan Zweig’s current low reputation as a storyteller is owing to his not having written a single great work of fiction of novel length, unlike his friend Joseph Roth (whom Zweig financially supported for nearly a decade) with The Radetzky March, or Ivan Goncharov with Oblomov, or Boris Pasternak with (his one novel) Dr. Zhivago. In The World of Yesterday, Zweig provides a clue to why he never wrote a great novel, and it lies in his method of composition. One of the many divisions among writers is that between those who endlessly add to their manuscripts (Balzac and Proust spring to mind) and those who cut them down. Zweig was one of the latter. Calling himself an impatient reader, suffering keenly from tedium—“anything long-winded, high-flown, or gushing irritates me, so does everything that is vague and indistinct”—he readily took the cleaver to his own writing. (Though not everywhere: His excellent biographies of Marie Antoinette and of Balzac both come in at around four hundred pages.) “If I have mastered any kind of art,” Zweig wrote, “it is the art of leaving things out. . . . So if anything at least partly accounts for the success of my books, it is my strict discipline in preferring to confine myself to short works of literature, concentrating on the heart of the matter.” But the concision that made for popular success in his day may have hurt his reputation in ours.

more here.

Jiayang Fan at The New Yorker:

Liu’s tomes—they tend to be tomes—have been translated into more than twenty languages, and the trilogy has sold some eight million copies worldwide. He has won China’s highest honor for science-fiction writing, the Galaxy Award, nine times, and in 2015 he became the first Asian writer to win the Hugo Award, the most prestigious international science-fiction prize. In China, one of his stories has been a set text in the gao kao—the notoriously competitive college-entrance exams that determine the fate of ten million pupils annually; another has appeared in the national seventh-grade-curriculum textbook. When a reporter recently challenged Liu to answer the middle-school questions about the “meaning” and the “central themes” of his story, he didn’t get a single one right. “I’m a writer,” he told me, with a shrug. “I don’t begin with some conceit in mind. I’m just trying to tell a good story.”

The trilogy’s success has been credited with establishing sci-fi, once marginalized in China, as a mainstream taste. Liu believes that this trend signals a deeper shift in the Chinese mind-set—that technological advances have spurred a new excitement about the possibilities of cosmic exploration.

more here.

Siddhartha Deb at The Paris Review:

I first came across the work of Nabarun Bhattacharya (1948–2014) about a decade ago in Calcutta, after a long afternoon of wandering conversation of the kind that Bengalis call adda, a session that no doubt included numerous cups of tea, many cigarettes, much talk about books, films, and politics before peaking, in the evening, with kebabs and cheap Indian rum. These freewheeling hours of aimless mental flaneurie that make no concessions to modernity’s iron cage of productivity and self-improvement have their own usefulness. Somewhere in the course of that day, from the recommendations of my companions, I ended up buying a copy of Harbart.

The book was printed, in the manner characteristic of Bengali publishing, as an emaciated hardboard volume that resembled a pamphlet more than a hardback. Yet appearances can be deceptive, and in this case, in more ways than one. The slimness of Harbart, like the seeming fragility of its eponymous protagonist, was mere camouflage. It wasn’t a book so much as a bomb, assembled with precision and intent.

more here.

In Goya’s greatest scenes we seem to see
………………………………………….. the people of the world
…………. exactly at the moment when
………………………. they first attained the title of
……………………………………………….  ‘suffering humanity’
………..…….They writhe upon the page
……………………………………………….. in veritable rage
…………………………………………………………….. of adversity
…………..………..Heaped up
…………………………………… groaning with babies and bayonets
……………………………………………………………………… under cement skies
……………………….. In an abstract landscape of blasted trees
     …..bent statues bats wings and beaks
………slippery gibbets
………………………….cadavers and carnivorous cocks
……………………… and all the final hollering monsters
,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,of the
…………………………………….‘imagination of disaster’
…………………..they are so bloody real
………………………………………………..it is as if they really still existed

……And they do

…………………….only the landscape has changed

They still are ranged along the roads
…………. plagued by legionaires
…………………………………….false windmills and demented roosters

They are the same people
………………………………….. only further from home
….. On freeways fifty lanes wide
…………………………… on a concrete continent
…………………………………… spaced with bland billboards
……………………….illustrating imbecile illusions of happiness

The scene shows fewer tumbrils
………………………..but more maimed citizens
 …………………………………………… in painted cars
…………. and they have strange license plates
….and engines
…………………… that devour America

by Lawrence Ferlinghetti
from A Coney Island of the Mind
New Direction Books, 1958

A Conversation with Barbara Tversky in Edge:

How do we structure our moving, changing thoughts and how do we structure the world we design and move and act in?

The venerable view of the movement of thought is association; thought is associative. Sure, but a three-year-old would ask, “Where do the associations come from?” They’re not random, they’re organized, and in many ways, and three-year-olds have long begun to form them. Chair-table, both in the category furniture. Or the theme, dining room. Early on, we form categories: stuff we eat, stuff we wear, stuff we play with. More formally: food, with sub-categories like fruit and cheese and bread; clothing, with sub-categories like shirts and pants and pajamas; toys, with sub-categories like cars and blocks and dolls. There are also themes, stuff that gets used together, like bathtubs and sinks and towels, or pots and pans and dishes, and refrigerators and stoves, or paper and pencil and scissors and glue. Typically, we arrange our homes around both categories and themes. Food is in the kitchen, fruit in one place, cheese in another, together with pots and pans and refrigerators. Toys are in a bedroom (or more realistically for three-year-olds, all over the house) along with books and clothing and beds. Think now of word associations, a standard measure: do we respond “chair” to “table” because they’re in the same category or because they’re used together, they’re in the same theme? For years, cognitive and developmental psychologists thought that categorical associations were more sophisticated than thematic ones. That view is being challenged, and surely we need both.

More here.

Vanessa Ruta in Phys.Org:

As animals explore their environment, they learn to master it. By discovering what sounds tend to precede predatorial attack, for example, or what smells predict dinner, they develop a kind of biological clairvoyance—a way to anticipate what’s coming next, based on what has already transpired. Now, Rockefeller scientists have found that an animal’s education relies not only on what experiences it acquires, but also on when it acquires them. Studying fruit flies, the researchers showed that a single odor can become either appealing or disgusting to an animal, depending on when the smell is encountered relative to a reward. The study, described in a report in Cell, also reveals that animals can quickly revise these memories, and shows how this process unfolds on a cellular level—insights that likely pertain not just to flies, but to learning across the animal kingdom.

Memory, at its most fundamental level, amounts to a series of associations: Ring a bell before feeding a dog, and eventually the dog will learn to salivate at the sound of the bell alone. “In this case, the bell comes before the food and is therefore predictive of reward,” says Annie Handler, a graduate fellow in the lab of Vanessa Ruta, the Gabrielle H. Reem and Herbert J. Kayden Associate Professor. “But we suspected that there isn’t just one order of events that animals find significant. They should also be able extract meaning from cues that follow a reward.”

More here.

Peter Martin in Aeon:

In the United States, the name Noah Webster (1758-1843) is synonymous with the word ‘dictionary’. But it is also synonymous with the idea of America, since his first unabridged American Dictionary of the English Language, published in 1828 when Webster was 70, blatantly stirred the young nation’s thirst for cultural independence from Britain.

Webster saw himself as a saviour of the American language who would rescue it from the corrupting influence of British English and prevent it from fragmenting into a multitude of dialects. But as a linguist and lexicographer, he quickly ran into trouble with critics, educators, the literati, legislators and much of the common reading public over the bizarre nature of his proposed language reforms. These spelling reforms – for example, wimmen for ‘women’, greeve for ‘grieve’, meen for ‘mean’ and bred for ‘bread’ – were all intended to simplify spelling by making it read the way that words were pronounced, yet they brought him the pain of ridicule for decades to come.

His definitions were regarded as his strong suit, but even they frequently rambled into essays, and many readers found them overly aligned with New England usage, to the point of distortion. Surfeited with a Christian reading of words, his religious or moral agenda also shaped many of his definitions into mini-sermons or moral lessons rather than serving as clarifications of meaning.

More here.

Pamela B. Paresky in Psychology Today:

Jordanian-American Natasha Tynes is an award-winning author who faced government prosecution in Egypt for her work defending free speech and a free press. In May, Tynes saw a Washington, D.C. Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA) worker eating on the train—something she understood to be prohibited for all riders. She asked the employee about it. The woman responded, “Worry about yourself.” Frustrated that she rides the Metro hungry in order to comply with the rules while someone she understood to have the power to ticket her for eating was not complying with the rules, herself, Tynes “tweet-shamed” the employee by writing a complaint to WMATA and posting it on Twitter along with a photo of the woman eating.

Horrible behavior? I’d say so. Disappointing to see someone behave that way? Sure. But in a world in which online shaming is the new norm, it’s not surprising. What is surprising is that less than 45 minutes after posting the tweet, Tynes deleted it, apologized for what she called a “short-lived expression of frustration,” and contacted WMATA to say it was an “error in judgment” for her to report the employee. She even asked that WMATA not discipline the employee.

But Twitter’s outrage machine turned on her. She became “Metro Molly.” The independent publishing company set to distribute her novel tweeted that Tynes had done “something truly horrible” and they had “no desire to be involved with anyone who thinks it’s acceptable to jeopardize a person’s safety and employment in this way.” Her publishing deal was canceled.

Does this seem like a high price to pay for a 45-minute lapse in judgment? Or even for acting like, well, a jerk?

More here.

Peter Beinart in The Atlantic:

The conventions of mainstream journalism make it difficult to challenge America’s self-conception as a peace-loving nation. But the unlovely truth is this: Throughout its history, America has attacked countries that did not threaten it. To carry out such wars, American leaders have contrived pretexts to justify American aggression. That’s what Donald Trump’s administration—and especially its national security adviser, John Bolton—is doing now with Iran.

The historical examples abound. William McKinley’s administration sought a pretext for war in 1898, when—driven by the desire to evict Spain from its colonies in the Caribbean—it ignored evidence that an internal explosion, not a Spanish attack, had blown up the USS Maine in Havana’s harbor. In 1964, Lyndon Johnson exaggerated a North Vietnamese attack on U.S. destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin to win congressional approval to escalate the Vietnam War. In 1986, Ronald Reagan’s administration sent warplanes toward Libya’s coast to provoke the missile fire that would justify an American bombing campaign.

More here.

R. Jeffrey Smith in the New York Times:

Griffin was referring to a revolutionary new type of weapon, one that would have the unprecedented ability to maneuver and then to strike almost any target in the world within a matter of minutes. Capable of traveling at more than 15 times the speed of sound, hypersonic missiles arrive at their targets in a blinding, destructive flash, before any sonic booms or other meaningful warning. So far, there are no surefire defenses. Fast, effective, precise and unstoppable — these are rare but highly desired characteristics on the modern battlefield. And the missiles are being developed not only by the United States but also by China, Russia and other countries.

Griffin is now the chief evangelist in Washington for hypersonics, and so far he has run into few political or financial roadblocks.

More here.

Howard W. French at The New York Review of Books:

There is a broad strain in Western thought that has long treated Africa as existing outside of history and progress; it ranges from some of our most famous thinkers to the entertainment that generations of children have grown up with. There are Disney cartoons that depict barely clothed African cannibals merrily stewing their victims in giant pots suspended above pit fires.¹ Among intellectuals there is a wealth of appalling examples. Voltaire said of Africans, “A time will come, without a doubt, when these animals will know how to cultivate the earth well, to embellish it with houses and gardens, and to know the routes of the stars. Time is a must, for everything.” Hegel’s views of Africa were even more sweeping: “What we properly understand by Africa, is the Unhistorical, Undeveloped Spirit, still involved in the conditions of mere nature, and which had to be presented here only as on the threshold of the World’s History.” One can hear echoes of such views even today from Western politicians. Donald Trump referred to a number of African nations as “shithole countries” in 2018, and French president Emmanuel Macron said in 2017, “The challenge Africa faces is completely different and much deeper” than those faced by Europe. “It is civilizational.”

more here.

James Parker at The Atlantic:

It was the event of his lifetime, and yet it had been a dull event. The language which now would sing of this extraordinary vault promised to be as flat as an unstrung harp.” In such terms did Norman Mailer, 50 years ago, frame the first landing of men on the moon. And in such terms did he also frame himself, the shaky, earthbound Homer who had to write about it. Mailer was in a funk. Low-grade depression had unstrung his harp. His marriage was going down the tubes; his just-concluded campaign for mayor of New York City (he came in fourth in a five-man race) had left him with “a huge boredom about himself”; he felt fat. Now Life magazine had given him a heavyweight assignment: Go to Houston and then Cape Kennedy to cover the Apollo 11 mission. Mailer on the moonshot: loads of words, loads of money. A big deal for Life magazine. And for Mailer? Grim opportunism. Out of tune, bardically bereft, plucking (as it were) flaccid strands of sheep’s gut, he was ripe for anticlimax. But he needed the cash.

more here.

Tom Holland at Literary Review:

Herculaneum, a town on the Bay of Naples that was buried beneath volcanic ash when Vesuvius erupted in AD 79, has only been partially excavated. Some buildings stand open to the sky; others, such as the theatre, can only be accessed through cramped and winding tunnels; many lie entirely entombed within rock. A visitor’s reaction to this can be an interesting gauge of character. The glass-half-full person will exult in the chance to walk the streets of an ancient city. The glass-half-empty person will wish there were more streets to walk. In Herculaneum, where furniture, bread and figs were all carbonised by the pyroclastic surge, the trace elements of life as it was lived in the heyday of the Roman Empire can serve to tantalise as well as satisfy the curious. To study the distant past is always to be greedy. It is to be like Orpheus, snatching after ghosts.

We can never know enough. This is not an exclusively modern feeling. Two thousand years ago, when Vesuvius erupted, a longing to make sense of what was happening lured antiquity’s most celebrated encyclopedist to his death.

more here.

Erin O’Donnell in Harvard Magazine:

HOW DID LIFE begin on Earth? On a young, rocky planet, how might chemicals have come together in just the right way to form the very first cells? How did those primitive cells start behaving like life: growing, dividing, and passing on advantageous traits to the next generation? The origins of life are especially murky because the geological record—the layers of rock and embedded fossils that hold clues about the history of Earth and life—disappears at roughly 3.9 billion years ago, erased by movements in the planet’s crust. As a result, scientists lack direct evidence for conditions on early Earth, including proof of the molecules that might have swirled in primordial ponds and formed the building blocks of life. This presents a host of questions, precisely the kind of big questions to which Jack Szostak is drawn. He and others believe they can reconstruct in the lab the long pathway that led from chemicals in space, to Earth’s formation, to pre-life chemistry on the planet, to early protocells, and finally to advanced cells with metabolism and protein synthesis. Sprawling explorations like these require expertise in many fields, including chemistry and biochemistry, geology and geophysics, and astronomy.

Szostak (pronounced SHAH-stak) may be the ideal person to pursue answers. A Nobel laureate, professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School, professor of chemistry and chemical biology in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, the Rich Distinguished Investigator at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator, he is described by others as a brilliant, driven scientist. But he’s also known for mild-mannered humility, including a willingness to dive deeply into subjects that are new to him, and for his collegiality, for helping to foster idea-sharing that is moving science forward.

His own research focuses on one segment of the pathway to life: the protocell, “a really, really simple primordial cell that could assemble from chemicals that were around early on, on the surface of Earth,” Szostak explains. He hopes to understand how it would grow and divide and start to replicate, and eventually evolve. “We may not know what actually happened, but maybe we can work out different possible paths,” he says. “All we can do is try to assemble things in the lab that seem plausible.”

More here.

Matthew Warren in Nature:

Some time in the past 160,000 years or so, the remains of an ancient human ended up in a cave high on the Tibetan Plateau in China. Perhaps the individual died there, or parts were taken there by its kin or an animal scavenger. In just a few years, the flesh disappeared and the bones started to deteriorate. Then millennia dripped by. Glaciers retreated and then returned and retreated again, and all that was left behind was a bit of jawbone with some teeth. The bone gradually became coated in a mineral crust, and the DNA from this ancient ancestor was lost to time and weather. But some signal from the past persisted.

Deep in the hominin’s teeth, proteins lingered, degraded but still identifiable. When scientists analysed them earlier this year, they detected collagen, a structural support protein found in bone and other tissues. And in its chemical signature was a single amino-acid variant that isn’t present in the collagen of modern humans or Neanderthals — instead, it flagged the jawbone as belonging to a member of the mysterious hominin group called Denisovans¹. The discovery of a Denisovan in China was a major landmark. It was the first individual found outside Denisova Cave in Siberia, where all other remains of its kind had previously been identified. And the site’s location on the Tibetan Plateau — more than 3,000 metres above sea level — suggested that Denisovans had been able to live in very cold, low-oxygen environments.

But the finding also marked another milestone: it was the first time that an ancient hominin had been identified using only proteins. It is one of the most striking discoveries yet for the fledgling field of palaeoproteomics, in which scientists analyse ancient proteins to answer questions about the history and evolution of humans and other animals. Proteins, which stick around in fossils for much longer than DNA does, could allow scientists to explore whole new eras of prehistory and use molecular tools to examine bones from a much broader part of the world than is currently possible, according to the field’s proponents.

More here.

Sanjukta Paul in The American Prospect:

Antitrust law, established originally to limit corporate power, has become its friend. Think about the following anomalies:

• If a group of independent truck drivers forms an association to jointly bargain their prices, that combination is a cartel: automatically illegal, perhaps criminal. But if the same truck drivers go to work for a company that charges customers for their services on a single price schedule, there is no antitrust violation, even though this arrangement suppresses price competition precisely to the same extent. What is illegal outside a corporation is legal within it.

• If a group of small suppliers gets together to jointly bargain with Amazon for a better deal, that too is an illegal cartel. But if Amazon contracts with them and charges the same price for their goods, there is nothing illegal about it.

• If drivers for Uber join in an association to demand higher pay, the competition authorities currently assume that their joint action is illegal. But Uber itself has evaded antitrust scrutiny even though it fixes the prices that customers pay for the drivers’ services.

All these anomalies stem from the same double standard. Antitrust law has come to reinforce the power of large business firms, while preventing workers, small producers, and micro-enterprises from exercising collective power.

More here.