Eric Bulson at the TLS:

In May 1975, Michel Foucault watched Venus rise over Zabriskie Point while Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Gesang der Jünglinge (Song of the Youths) blared from the speakers of a nearby tape recorder. Just a few hours earlier he had ingested LSD for the first time and was in the process of undergoing what he saw as “one of the most important experiences” of his life. And he wasn’t alone. Two newly acquired companions had brought Foucault to Death Valley for this carefully choreographed trip complete with a soundtrack, some marijuana to jumpstart the effects, and cold drinks to combat the dry mouth. It was all spurred on by the hope that Foucault’s visit to “the Valley of Death”, as he called it, would elicit “gnomic utterances of such power that he would unleash a veritable revolution in consciousness”.

For decades, the details of this trip have remained sketchy. The most extensive account appeared in James Miller’s 1993 biography, The Passion of Michel Foucault, but anyone following the footnotes would have realized that the specifics, the ones above included, were based almost entirely on the documentary evidence of a self-proclaimed disciple, Simeon Wade.

more here.

Ian Sample in The Guardian:

Scientists have created the world’s first living organism that has a fully synthetic and radically altered DNA code.

The lab-made microbe, a strain of bacteria that is normally found in soil and the human gut, is similar to its natural cousins but survives on a smaller set of genetic instructions.

The bug’s existence proves life can exist with a restricted genetic code and paves the way for organisms whose biological machinery is commandeered to make drugs and useful materials, or to add new features such as virus resistance.

More here.

Ben Ehrenreich in Topic:

Ashraf had been gone for more than a decade when he and Fat’hiya first heard about a fertility clinic in Ramallah that had begun helping the wives of Palestinian prisoners become pregnant with sperm smuggled out of Israeli jails. (Israeli prisoners are permitted conjugal visits; Palestinians are not.) The couple discussed it, Fat’hiya says, but neither of them was convinced it was a good idea.

The next time she visited Ashraf, she says with a smile, “he surprised me.” Prisoners are allowed to buy gifts of food for their visitors. Ashraf handed her a bag of cookies. “He had it there,” already prepared, she said. “He said, ‘Do it.’”

Fat’hiya stands, jogs suddenly from the room, and comes back with the wrapper from a pack of chocolate hazelnut Quadratini wafers, the very pack she smuggled out of the prison that day. Her son, Amir, who is now five, wide-eyed and serious, squirms on the sofa beside her. “That’s why he’s so sweet,” she says, pulling the boy to her lap.

More here.

Maya Jasanoff at the NYRB:

To understand this Calcutta—a city in decline—it’s helpful to start from a different beginning. In her innovative new book, Empire and Ecology in the Bengal Delta, Debjani Bhattacharyya, a professor of history at Drexel University, describes how Bengalis had their own story about Calcutta’s origins. “Legend has it that the city was born when the ocean started churning, and a tortoise,” pressed between the mountains and the force of Ananta, the infinite, “gasped out a deep breath.” Its breath made the Bengal Delta, a vast 40,000-square-mile area where the Ganges and Brahmaputra rivers seep into the Bay of Bengal. This legend, like the legend of Job Charnock, also carries an element of truth: Calcutta rests on shifting ground. It should be no surprise that its fortunes have shifted too.

Bengalis have many words for the kinds of terrain that emerge and disappear between the river’s shifting channels, including char, for the new sedimentary deposits turned up by every monsoon; chechra bhanga, for the silt that emerges when the floodwaters recede; and chapa bhanga, for large chunks of land that the water breaks off and carries away.

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Beauty

Art, poetry
Strive for beauty

To bring alive
The henna on a hand
The anklet on a foot
To make immortal
A beloved’s look
A lover’s torment

This is my canvas
What I do best
With color and line
With rhythm and rhyme

Wait, you say
There are worlds
Beyond henna and anklet
Beyond lovers and beloveds
Pestilence, war, death, deprivation
Inequality, injustice, oppression, starvation
Will you not speak
of such worlds?

I hesitate
Afraid
With color and line
With rhythm and rhyme
To render them so beautiful
That looking over your shoulder
You might say
Guernica
Ah, what a lovely painting
And leaving
Pass me an Iliad
To enjoy on the way

by Anjum Altaf
from Transgressions, Poems inspired by Faiz Ahmen Faiz
LG Publishers, 2019

From Phys.Org:

In the first large-scale analysis of cancer gene fusions, which result from the merging of two previously separate genes, researchers at the Wellcome Sanger Institute, EMBL-EBI, Open Targets, GSK and their collaborators have used CRISPR to uncover which gene fusions are critical for the growth of cancer cells. The team also identified a new gene fusion that presents a novel drug target for multiple cancers, including brain and ovarian cancers. The results, published today (16 May) in Nature Communications, give more certainty for the use of specific gene fusions to diagnose and guide the treatment of patients. Researchers suggest existing drugs could be repurposed to treat some people with pancreatic, breast and lung cancers, based on the gene fusions found in their tumours.

Gene fusions, caused by the abnormal joining of two otherwise different genes, play an important role in the development of cancer. They are currently used as diagnostic tools to predict how particular cancer patients will respond to drugs, as well as prognostics, to estimate the outcome for a patient given the best possible care. They are also the targets of some of the latest targeted treatments for cancer. Researchers have identified around 20,000 gene fusions so far, however their exact function and role in developing cancer remains poorly understood. Discriminating between fusions that have a role in cancer survival and those that do not has important clinical implications. In the first large-scale study of gene fusion function, researchers at the Wellcome Sanger Institute, EMBL-EBI, Open Targets, GSK and their collaborators analysed more than 8,000 gene fusions in over 1,000 human cancer cell lines, from 43 different cancer types, including paediatric cancers and cancers with unmet clinical need. The team tested the cell lines against more than 350 anti-cancer drugs to see which existing drugs could be repurposed to potentially treat cancer patients with gene fusions, and employed CRISPR as a tool to discover which key gene fusions are critical for cancer cell survival.

More here.

Alan Lightman in Aeon:

Somewhat surprisingly, nature not only requires disorder but thrives on it. Planets, stars, life, even the direction of time all depend on disorder. And we human beings as well. Especially if, along with disorder, we group together such concepts as randomness, novelty, spontaneity, free will and unpredictability. We might put all of these ideas in the same psychic basket. Within the oppositional category of order, we can gather together notions such as systems, law, reason, rationality, pattern, predictability. While the different clusters of concepts are not mirror images of one another, like twilight and dawn, they have much in common.

Our primeval attraction to both order and disorder shows up in modern aesthetics. We like symmetry and pattern, but we also relish a bit of asymmetry. The British art historian Ernst Gombrich believed that, although human beings have a deep psychological attraction to order, perfect order in art is uninteresting. ‘However we analyse the difference between the regular and the irregular,’ he wrote in The Sense of Order (1979), ‘we must ultimately be able to account for the most basic fact of aesthetic experience, the fact that delight lies somewhere between boredom and confusion.’

More here.

Rodney A. Brooks at Edge:

I’m going to go over a wide range of things that everyone will likely find something to disagree with. I want to start out by saying that I’m a materialist reductionist. As I talk, some people might get a little worried that I’m going off like Chalmers or something, but I’m not. I’m a materialist reductionist.

I’m worried that the crack cocaine of Moore’s law, which has given us more and more computation, has lulled us into thinking that that’s all there is. When you look at Claus Pias’s introduction to the Macy Conferences book, he writes, “The common precondition of the three foundational concepts of cybernetics—switching (Boolean) algebra, information theory and feedback—is digitality.” They go straight into digitality in this conference. He says, “We considered Turing’s universal machine as a ‘model’ for brains, employing Pitts’ and McCulloch’s calculus for activity in neural nets.” Anyone who has looked at the Pitts and McCulloch papers knows it’s a very primitive view of what is happening in neurons. But they adopted Turing’s universal machine.

How did Turing come up with Turing computation? In his 1936 paper, he talks about a human computer. Interestingly, he uses the male pronoun, whereas most of them were women. A human computer had a piece of paper, wrote things down, and followed rules—that was his model of computation, which we have come to accept.

More here.

Randall Kennedy in the New York Times:

I have been a professor at Harvard University for 34 years. In that time, the school has made some mistakes. But it has never so thoroughly embarrassed itself as it did this past weekend. At the center of the controversy is Ronald Sullivan, a law professor who ran afoul of student activists enraged that he was willing to represent Harvey Weinstein.

Mr. Sullivan is my friend and colleague. He is the director of the Criminal Justice Institute at Harvard Law School and the architect of a conviction-review program in Brooklyn that has freed a score of improperly convicted individuals. He is also a sought-after lawyer who has represented plaintiffs (including the family of Michael Brown, whose death at the hands of a police officer fueled the Black Lives Matter movement) as well as defendants (including Rose McGowan, the actress who faced drug charges and is, ironically, one of Mr. Weinstein’s accusers).

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Will Self at Prospect Magazine:

And it is here—at the level of physics—that the fates of the characters in The Secret Agent are truly decided: for they all—the criminal and the legitimate—run things too close, or simply let them fall. Conrad, surely, in his depiction of Verloc’s murder and its aftermath, surpassed all others—contemporary or otherwise—in his evocation of what it might be like to take a life, and the immediate psychic consequences for the killer: the complete and utter loneliness of Winnie Verloc after the murder is foreshadowed by this beautifully exact evocation of a psychic state, seen from within: “Her personality seemed to have been torn into two pieces, whose mental operations did not adjust themselves very well to each other.” A deracinated Polish aristocrat who tried to reinvent himself as a tweedy English country gentleman—the pseudonymous and multilingual Conrad knew all about being torn in pieces.

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Doreen St. Félix at The New Yorker:

The works in “Darkening,” a new exhibit of paintings by the artist Lorna Simpson, at Hauser & Wirth, are monumental panels that drown the viewer in blues—some shades so potent that they are black, purple. Using graduated saturations of ink-wash over gesso, Simpson builds landscapes and seascapes that recall J. M. W. Turner or Chinese shan shui compositions. But within these views of nature she plants artifacts of culture. Thin strips of what look like newspaper text are layered into a mountain in the painting “Blue Turned Temporal,” the meaning disintegrated. The heads and bodies of models from the pages of Ebony magazine are choked in inky waters. One day, not long ago, I lost myself staring into the series’ tallest work, “Specific Notation,” which, at twelve feet, threatens to reach the gallery’s ceiling. The lower two-thirds of the canvas feature circular stains that suggest underwater rock formations. Then, as if bursting from the mineral, the head of a woman appears suspended in the upper third of the frame, her face screwed into an expression of coy glowering. By the style of her hair, and by the manicuring of her eyebrows, we know that she is a figure of recent human history. But, in Simpson’s painting, frozen in the icy blue canvas, she seems eternal, outside of time.

more here.

Jonathan Meades at Literary Review:

If I were a shrink, I’d worry about Robert Macfarlane – his dicing with eschatology, his claustrophilia, his recklessness, some of the company he keeps (sewer punks, cavist ultras, grotto mystics). But I’m not: I’m merely a repeatedly delighted fan of a true original. Macfarlane is a poet with the instincts of a thriller writer, an autodidact in botany, mycology, geology and palaeontology, an ambulatory encyclopedia – save that much of the time (a dodgy word in this context) Macfarlane does not ambulate but hauls himself feet first through tunnels the circumference of a child’s bicycle wheel in absolute darkness where day, night, maps and GPS do not exist. That’s when he is not being driven at absurdly high speed through potash mines beneath the North Sea’s shipping lanes by a gung-ho security specialist or lifting a rust-flaked manhole cover to gain admittance to some nether world or trespassing in a government’s subterranean chambers. When this orphic mole comes up for air he relaxes by climbing the transporter bridge high across the Usk at Newport.

more here.

Poet’s Obligation

To whoever is not listening to the sea
this Friday morning, to whoever is cooped up
in house or office, factory or woman
or street or mine or harsh prison cell;
to him I come, and, without speaking or looking,
I arrive and open the door of his prison,
and a vibration starts up, vague and insistent,
a great fragment of thunder sets in motion
the rumble of the planet and the foam,
the raucous rivers of the ocean flood,
the star vibrates swiftly in its corona,
and the sea is beating, dying and continuing.

So, drawn on by my destiny,
I ceaselessly must listen to and keep
the sea’s lamenting in my awareness,
I must feel the crash of the hard water
and gather it up in a perpetual cup
so that, wherever those in prison may be,
wherever they suffer the autumn’s castigation,
I may be there with an errant wave,
I may move, passing through windows,
and hearing me, eyes will glance upward
saying ‘How can I reach the sea?’
And I shall broadcast, saying nothing,
the starry echoes of the wave,
a breaking up of foam and quicksand,
a rustling of salt withdrawing,
the grey cry of the sea-birds on the coast.

So, through me, freedom and the sea
will make their answer to the shuttered heart.
.
by Pablo Neruda
from The Vintage Book of Contemporary World Poetry
Vintage Books, 1996

Colm Toibin in The Guardian:

In the summer of 1892 the poet John Addington Symonds took his lover, a Venetian gondolier called Angelo Fusato, on a tour of Britain, including visits to country houses where Fusato posed as Symonds’s manservant. Symonds’s wife Catherine and his daughter were living safely in Davos at the time. After his first meeting with Fusato, Symonds wrote: “He was tall and wiry, but very slender … he was rarely in repose but moved with singular brusque grace … Great fiery eyes, gazing intensely, with compulsive effluence of electricity … He fixed and fascinated me.” Love, however, did not transform itself automatically into art. Symonds wrote a bad sonnet in Fusato’s honour. (“Till, mother-naked, white as lilies, laid / There on the counterpane, he bade me use / Even as I willed, his body.”) When Symonds died in 1893, Fusato went to work for the writer Constance Fenimore Woolson in Venice. After her suicide the following year, he became Henry James’s gondolier, as James, who had been a close friend of Woolson’s, sought to deal with her papers. While it is not clear if Woolson knew about Fusato and Symonds, James certainly did. He was fascinated by Symonds’s efforts to grapple with his homosexuality and was, in 1896, one of the early readers of Symonds’s privately printed pamphlet A Problem in Modern Ethics.

…Naomi Wolf’s Outrages establishes the context for Symonds’s desperate efforts to justify his own sexual feelings. Since he was born in 1840, he was 15 when the first edition of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass appeared, the same year that legislation in Britain streamlined the laws against sodomy and ensured that men found guilty of it served long prison sentences. With intelligence and flair, Wolf uses the various responses to Whitman to show the levels of intense need in the decades after the publication of Leaves of Grass for images and books that would rescue homosexuality from increasing public disapproval.

More here.

Traci Watson in Nature:

Every mythology needs a good trickster, and there are few better than the Norse god Loki. He stirs trouble and insults other gods. He is elusive, anarchic and ambiguous. He is, in other words, the perfect namesake for a group of microbes — the Lokiarchaeota — that is rewriting a fundamental story about life’s early roots. These unruly microbes belong to a category of single-celled organisms called archaea, which resemble bacteria under a microscope but are as distinct from them in some respects as humans are. The Lokis, as they are sometimes known, were discovered by sequencing DNA from sea-floor muck collected near Greenland¹. Together with some related microbes, they are prodding biologists to reconsider one of the greatest events in the history of life on Earth — the appearance of the eukaryotes, the group of organisms that includes all plants, animals, fungi and more.

The discovery of archaea in the late 1970s led scientists to propose that the tree of life diverged long ago into three main trunks, or ‘domains’. One trunk gave rise to modern bacteria; one to archaea. And the third produced eukaryotes. But debates soon erupted over the structure of these trunks. A leading ‘three-domain’ model held that archaea and eukaryotes diverged from a common ancestor. But a two-domain scenario suggested that eukaryotes diverged directly from a subgroup of archaea. The arguments, although heated at times, eventually stagnated, says microbiologist Phil Hugenholtz at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia. Then the Lokis and their relatives blew in like “a breath of fresh air”, he says, and revived the case for a two-domain tree.

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Philippe Lemoine in Nec Pluribus Impar:

Karl Popper famously defended the view, known as falsificationism, that what distinguishes science from non-science is falsifiability. On this view, a theory is scientific if and only if it’s falsifiable, at least in principle. What this means for a theory to be falsifiable is that one can think of a possible observation that would be inconsistent with the theory. For instance, since Newton’s law of universal gravitation implies that every particle exerts a force of attraction on every other particle, it would be falsified if we observed a particle that repels another particle. Since it’s at least conceivable that we could observe this, Newton’s law of universal gravitation is falsifiable and therefore scientific. Popper wants to contrast this with theories like psychoanalysis, which according to him can be reconciled with any conceivable observation, hence is not scientific.

I have often been struck, when talking to scientists, by the influence that Popper seems to have among them. I would go as far as saying that, in many scientific fields, falsificationism has become the official philosophy of science. It’s drummed into the heads of scientists when they’re in graduate school and, with a few exceptions, they never learn anything else about philosophy of science and spend the rest of their career thinking that Popper’s conception of science is still the gold standard. In fact, however, not only is falsificationism not the gold standard, but it never was.

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Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe:

Most of us have no trouble telling the difference between a robot and a living, feeling organism. Nevertheless, our brains often treat robots as if they were alive. We give them names, imagine that they have emotions and inner mental states, get mad at them when they do the wrong thing or feel bad for them when they seem to be in distress. Kate Darling is a research at the MIT Media Lab who specializes in social robotics, the interactions between humans and machines. We talk about why we cannot help but anthropomorphize even very non-human-appearing robots, and what that means for legal and social issues now and in the future, including robot companions and helpers in various forms.

More here.

Peter Conrad in The Guardian:

Liberalism has become a tricky and even dirty term, which may be why it is banished to the subtitle of Adam Gopnik’s supremely intelligent but tortuous polemical essay. American leftwingers nowadays avoid the adjective and prefer to call themselves “progressive”.

And just what kind of “moral adventure” does Gopnik have in mind? Amoral options abound: liberality sounds spendthrift and libertinism is certainly decadent. Delacroix envisaged Liberty as a bare-breasted free spirit storming the revolutionary barricades; Bartholdi, designing the statue in New York harbour, dressed her in a ballgown, gave her a spiked crown and made her balefully scowl. Is she a permissive mistress or an antiquated matron whose torch looks like a bludgeon?

These are more than semantic queries, because Gopnik alerts us to an emergency. “Gangster-style authoritarianism” threatens the US, Russia, Hungary, Brazil, the Philippines and Saudi Arabia, while our own lying Brexiters prate about national grandeur and use “parliamentary proceduralism”, as Gopnik shrewdly says, to “corrupt and co-opt potential resistance”. Can liberal values be revived to save us?

More here.