Stephen Elliott in Quillette:

I’m 47 and my apartment is 325 square feet. Of course, if you measure your life by the size of your apartment you’ve got bigger problems than squeezing between the door and the bed to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night. Bigger problems than spending too much time playing video games and an inability to love. If you’re going to judge your life by the size of your apartment then you’re better off not thinking of any of it. Just watch some docu-series on Showtime about prison breaks and plug into your twitter feed and let the time pass peacefully. Because the size of your apartment does not matter. Or it does, but it’s not a statement on whether or not you’re successful. But then how do we measure success? Or a better question might be, why?

More here.

Debora MacKenzie in New Scientist:

If you bled when you brushed your teeth this morning, you might want to get that seen to. We may finally have found the long-elusive cause of Alzheimer’s disease: Porphyromonas gingivalis, the key bacteria in chronic gum disease.

That’s bad, as gum disease affects around a third of all people. But the good news is that a drug that blocks the main toxins of P. gingivalis is entering major clinical trials this year, and research published today shows it might stop and even reverse Alzheimer’s. There could even be a vaccine.

Alzheimer’s is one of the biggest mysteries in medicine. As populations have aged, dementia has skyrocketed to become the fifth biggest cause of death worldwide.

More here.  [Thanks to Ali Minai.]

Hannes Grassegger in Buzzfeed News:

The glass tower that houses George Soros’s office in Manhattan is overflowing with numbers on screens, tracking and predicting the directions of markets around the world. But there’s one that’s particularly hard to figure out — a basic orange chart on a screen analyzing sentiment on social media.

The data, updated regularly since 2017, projects the reactions on the internet to the name George Soros. He gets tens of thousands of mentions per week — almost always negative, some of it obviously driven by networks of bots. Soros is pure evil. A drug smuggler. Profiteer. Extremist. Conspiracist. Nazi. Jew. It’s a display of pure hate.

The demonization of Soros is one of the defining features of contemporary global politics, and it is, with a couple of exceptions, a pack of lies. Soros is indeed Jewish. He was an aggressive currency trader. He has backed Democrats in the US and Karl Popper’s notion of an “open society” in the former communist bloc. But the many wild and proliferating theories, which include the suggestion that he helped bring down the Soviet Union in order to clear a path to Europe for Africans and Arabs, are so crazy as to be laughable — if they weren’t so virulent.

Soros and his aides have spent long hours wondering: Where did this all come from?

Only a handful of people know the answer.

More here.

Jon Henley at The Guardian:

Nearly a decade before the gilets jaunes rose up in their high-vis vests to shake France and grab global headlines, the French social geographer Christophe Guilluy foresaw their arrival in an essay called Fractures Françaises. In 2014 he developed his theory further in La France périphérique, or Peripheral France, earning himself national fame (Libération, the left-leaning daily, devoted its cover and two full pages to the work), unprecedented sales (13,000 copies in a fortnight) of a geography book and an audience with Elysée palace advisers. His argument is not especially complicated. France, an ostensibly unified country, is in fact divided in two, between globalised, culturally vibrant cities such as Paris, Bordeaux and Lyon – where careers, investment and wealth are concentrated – and all the rest.

This vast, depressed, “peripheral” France of small and medium-sized towns, un-chic suburbs, post-industrial wasteland and the all but forgotten countryside now encompasses, he reckons, roughly 60% of the country’s population.

more here.

Howard W. French at the NYRB:

The cursory familiarity that many people today have with Mandela’s story of moral courage and triumph has produced a near-universal secular beatification. Mandela enjoys an image akin to that of Martin Luther King Jr. The late South African has, in other words, become an easy-to-claim hero. And in keeping with the often invoked King quote about the arc of the moral universe being long but bent inescapably toward justice—a particular favorite of Barack Obama—from the perspective of the present, Mandela’s ultimate triumph can feel deceptively predestined.

Mandela’s political journey, like that of his country, was far more complex. The black South Africa of the early 1960s did not yet have an obvious leader: it lacked not just a stirringly popular figure, but someone who possessed the tactical acumen and tenacity that would be needed to withstand the assaults of a ruthless racial tyranny, while channeling his society’s energies—and those of the world—in the direction of peaceful liberation. Mandela’s given name was Rolihlahla, which is commonly translated as “troublemaker,” and some of the people closest to him worried that this was a bit too fitting.

more here.

Amanda Petrusich at The New Yorker:

Previously, Van Etten sang of the vagaries of loving too hard, or, worse, of loving the wrong person. “Remind Me Tomorrow” is focussed, lyrically, on how it feels to find peace after a long stretch of ache. It is full of glowing, grounded snapshots, as if Van Etten were trying to pause and capture fulfilled moments so that she might savor them longer. “Malibu,” a road-trip song that takes place on California’s Highway 1, is a slow encomium to a carefree couple steering a “little red number” along the Pacific Coast. Van Etten has written about these sorts of scenarios before—dreamy lost weekends, salty breezes, the world becoming so small and complete that it can only accommodate two people. The difference, this time, is that the fantasy turns real, domestic: “I walked in the door / The Black Crowes playin’ as he cleaned the floor / I thought I couldn’t love him any more.” Van Etten regards her present relationship with the wonderment and gratitude of someone who had perhaps briefly given up on love altogether.

more here.

Raven

Listen.
I’m not going to say this twice.
The sum and product of words
is no mark of intelligence.
Case in point – cousin Crow,
not half as smart as all his talk.

So listen,
I know three things:
Sky, that small kiss of warm air
that rises through my primaries;

the Water on its breath, ridgeblown mist
that bathes us all and makes springs
overflow into Inadu Creek;

and Earth, slope and cup of cove,
the steep that gathers with wide black wings
to draw down Sky,
draw Water up,
that sets free all things green
into a world first fledged.

But listen.
I know from twenty circles
of snowdeep and hungry moons
and twenty circles of fresh shoots
that Sky . . . Water . . . Earth . . .
none of them are mine.

And I know none are yours.

by Bill Griffen
from Snake Den Ridge —a beastiary
March Street Press , 2008

Jonathan Beckman in More Intelligent Life:

Every morning, I buy a black filter coffee from Pret A Manger. There is nothing refined about this. It looks and smells like something you would use to asphalt a road. But the slap of acrid liquid onto tongue is as invigorating as the caffeine itself. Yet though coffee is, ultimately, so much fuel, the means of its production are far from utilitarian: the essence of character and identity are laid bare over the decision to pop a pod in a Nespresso machine (a device whose brilliance lay in convincing Americans that George Clooney was an adequate substitute for sugar and cream) or listen to a Bialetti pot rattle and bubble on the stove top.

During the 1990s, coffee machines were hulking, chrome-clad things that steam-tortured coffee grinds into relinquishing their caffeinated liqueur. The artisanal revolution has made brewing a gentler, more tactile experience. The Rok has a multi-limbed arachnid look. Pour the water in the top, raise the levers then press them down to force out a cup of espresso. Coffee making feels like a minor triumph of competence, like changing the tyre on your car or delivering a lamb.

More here.

Mitch Leslie in Science:

Curing the childhood eye cancer retinoblastoma often comes at a cost. The tumor, which sprouts in the retina and primarily occurs in children under the age of 5, is fatal if not treated. Yet chemotherapy can cause permanent vision loss, and patients sometimes need surgery to remove one or both eyes. Now, scientists have found that a cancer-slaying virus seems to combat this cancer in mice without serious side effects. A clinical trial has also shown early signs of promise. “It’s potentially a game-changer,” says ophthalmic oncologist David Abramson of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City, who wasn’t connected to the study. Researchers have tested cancer-targeting viruses in other types of tumors, but no one had pitted them against retinoblastoma. The tumors grow when there are defects in a molecular pathway that keeps cells from dividing out of control. Oncology researcher Ángel Montero Carcaboso of the Sant Joan de Déu Research Institute in Barcelona, Spain, and colleagues used a type of virus known as adenovirus that typically causes only mild respiratory infections in people. It had been genetically modified so it was missing a key gene and could only reproduce inside cells in which the retinoblastoma pathway had malfunctioned.

To determine whether such a virus would be safe, the scientists injected it into the eyes of rabbits without the tumor. The virus triggered side effects such as inflammation and fluid buildup in the eyes, but they disappeared within 6 weeks. Moreover, little of the virus escaped from the eyes, and it didn’t appear to reproduce elsewhere in the animals’ bodies, suggesting it wouldn’t cause harm in other organs.

…On the strength of those results, Carcaboso and colleagues have begun a clinical trial to test whether the virus is safe in children with retinoblastomas that haven’t responded to chemotherapy or radiation treatment. Two patients have received the virus so far. The researchers have noted preliminary signs that the virus is targeting the tumors.

More here.

Tyler Malone in Literary Hub:

The sixties were a decade of upheaval and progress, and one of the many areas where that revolutionary spirit reared its head was in the art of nonfiction. In previous decades, nonfiction—particularly if written for periodicals—had been seen mostly as ephemeral reportage. It was for catching up on world events, local matters, and human interest, usually read over a morning cup of coffee, stained with those wet, brown rings. Partially because it was churned out on deadline, factual writing was often pooh-poohed as a lesser art form than fictional writing, with the focus merely on the transfer of information, rather than aesthetic splendor, thematic heft, and formal precision.

In the sixties, writers like Truman Capote, Gay Talese, Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion, Hunter S. Thompson, and John McPhee changed that perception by imbuing the factual with as much artistry as the fictional. Of course, the “New Journalism,” as it has often been called, might not have been as revolutionary—as new—as our cultural myths imply. McPhee, for his part, thinks this narrative is a bit of hooey.

More here.

Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe:

It’s hardly news that computers are exerting ever more influence over our lives. And we’re beginning to see the first glimmers of some kind of artificial intelligence: computer programs have become much better than humans at well-defined jobs like playing chess and Go, and are increasingly called upon for messier tasks, like driving cars. Once we leave the highly constrained sphere of artificial games and enter the real world of human actions, our artificial intelligences are going to have to make choices about the best course of action in unclear circumstances: they will have to learn to be ethical. I talk to Derek Leben about what this might mean and what kind of ethics our computers should be taught. It’s a wide-ranging discussion involving computer science, philosophy, economics, and game theory.

More here.

Gordon Pennycook and David Rand in the New York Times:

What makes people susceptible to fake news and other forms of strategic misinformation? And what, if anything, can be done about it?

These questions have become more urgent in recent years, not least because of revelations about the Russian campaign to influence the 2016 United States presidential election by disseminating propaganda through social media platforms. In general, our political culture seems to be increasingly populated by people who espouse outlandish or demonstrably false claims that often align with their political ideology.

The good news is that psychologists and other social scientists are working hard to understand what prevents people from seeing through propaganda. The bad news is that there is not yet a consensus on the answer. Much of the debate among researchers falls into two opposing camps. One group claims that our ability to reason is hijacked by our partisan convictions: that is, we’re prone to rationalization. The other group — to which the two of us belong — claims that the problem is that we often fail to exercise our critical faculties: that is, we’re mentally lazy.

However, recent research suggests a silver lining to the dispute: Both camps appear to be capturing an aspect of the problem.

More here.

Jerry Saltz at New York Magazine:

In her new work, artist Dana Schutz takes back her painterly name. Her current canvasses are hyperassertive, full of operatic grandeur, self-mocking turbulence, acidified flooded color, disfigured hideousness, and the psychopathology of her figures — all clawing in some Malthusian struggle for existence. Like this work or not, Schutz is claiming a lot of visual territory for herself. This means more tenacity in the paint, irrepressible surfaces, ambitious scale, and mixed — conflicted — compositional structures.

The cosmic background radiation and explosive blowback of what Schutz triggered in 2017 are still here, of course. How could they not be? Painting is a kind of time machine: Just as the speed of light and sound are experienced after the fact so, too, is the speed of art — things like stress, shock, conflict, phobia, admissions of complicity, and crushing psychological weight emerge only later in one’s work.

more here.

Joan Dupont at Film Quarterly:

She has been called the Godmother of the New Wave, sometimes the Big Sister, even the Grandmother, but Agnès rides her own wave. She has never slowed down: a ceaseless creative force, she has been on the spot at historic moments. She never puts anything away for good, so old photos turn into films, and whatever she can’t use right away may turn up later in her short films, recycled with fresh invention. On a trip to Germany, the history of 4711 eau de cologne captivates her as much as the venerable cathedral and re-appears in her Agnès de ci de là Varda (Agnes Varda: From Here to There, 2012). She sees the world in a grain of sand—or in a heart-shaped potato. In her garden, she pays as much attention to a tree’s growth as to any honored guest.

In this house on the rue Daguerre in the fourteenth arrondissement, where she has lived since the 1950s, she raised children and tended cats, developed photos, cooked up movies and installations, filmed neighbors, plotted adventures, and received friends and famous artists, including at least one president of the Republic.

more here.

Christopher de Bellaigue at The Guardian:

The underlying problem with the advance directives is that they imply the subordination of an irrational human being to their rational former self, essentially splitting a single person into two mutually opposed ones. Many doctors, having watched patients adapt to circumstances they had once expected to find intolerable, doubt whether anyone can accurately predict what they will want after their condition worsens.

The second conflict that has crept in as euthanasia has been normalised is a societal one. It comes up when there is an opposition between the right of the individual and society’s obligation to protect lives. “The euthanasia requests that are the most problematic,” explains Agnes van der Heide, professor of medical care and end-of-life decision-making at the Erasmus Medical Centre in Rotterdam, “are those that are based on the patient’s autonomy, which leads them to tell the doctor: ‘You aren’t the one to judge whether I am to die.’”

more here.

Naming

I tell mom Forsythia is blooming in the neighbor’s yard.
She says, For-sith-a-what? I say, a golden bush burning like a fire.
She says, we call them Yellow Bell the other word is too hard.

The proper name pricks her tongue like a useless shard.
Her folklore lessons unfold like the bush that inspires.
I tell mom Forsythia is blooming in the neighbor’s yard.

The golden leaves aflame enchanting the heart of a bard.
She says, For-sith-a-what? I say, a golden bush burning like a fire.
She says, we call them Yellow Bell the other word is too hard.

Her looking back always carries me like a river forward.
The balm of her history flows from the heart without tire.
I tell mom Forsythia is blooming in the neighbor’s yard.

She listens, retrieves her past memories unmarred.
She’s still entranced by this bright beckoning spire.
She says, we call them Yellow Bell the other word is too hard.

Foreign words anguish her tongue and leave it scarred.
Yet her simple words heal and lift me gently higher.
I tell mom Forsythia is blooming in the neighbor’s yard.
She says, we call them Yellow Bell the other word is too hard.

by Glenis Redmond
from Under the Sun
publisher: Main Street Rag, 2008.
ISBN: 1599481332

Katy Guest in The Guardian:

It can be reassuring to reassess life by taking a long view. In this book about “how the Earth made us”, Lewis Dartnell considers the last billion or so years, in his mission to understand how our planet has been “a leading protagonist in the story of humanity”. Our human bodies are, inevitably, made from the elements of Earth: our blood, sweat and tears come from the rocky fabric of its crust; our hair is made from volcanic debris. But Dartnell also explains how humanity became early civilisation and then the societies we live in now: how the formation of the Channel, through megaflooding events hundreds of thousands of years ago, “has had profound ramifications through history for Britain”; how Labour votes have followed coal seams laid down in the Carboniferous period. Never has geological history seemed so current.

To cut a (very) long story short, we are the result of plate tectonics and ice ages. The crashing together of continents caused the cooling and drying of Earth, which enabled the growth of the grasses that form the basis of our diet, and humans to walk across the land out of Africa. The rocky hills of Greece demanded foot soldiers to fight battles there, each of whom had a say in events, helping to create democracy. A fascinating chapter explains trade winds, the age of exploration, colonisation and the “subsequent history of our world”. Dartnell is an eloquent, conversational guide to these daunting aeons of time. He writes of land masses swelling and bursting “like a huge zit”, and global warming “triggered by a great methane flatulence of the oceans”. And it is always useful to think about chronology. “Cleopatra lived closer in time to the modern world of iPhones,” he writes, “than she did to the ancient construction of the Great Pyramid at Giza.”

More here.

Catherine L. Caldwell-Harris in Scientific American:

Does the language you speak influence how you think? This is the question behind the famous linguistic relativity hypothesis, that the grammar or vocabulary of a language imposes on its speakers a particular way of thinking about the world. The strongest form of the hypothesis is that language determines thought. This version has been rejected by most scholars. A weak form is now thought to be obviously true, which is that if one language has a specific vocabulary item for a concept but another language does not, then speaking about the concept may happen more frequently or more easily. For example, if someone explained to you, an English speaker, the meaning for the German term Schadenfreude, you could recognize the concept, but you may not have used the concept as regularly as a comparable German speaker.

Scholars are now interested in whether having a vocabulary item for a concept influences thought in domains far from language, such as visual perception. Consider the case of the “Russian blues.” While English has a single word for blue, Russian has two words, goluboy for light blue and siniy for dark blue. These are considered “basic level” terms, like green and purple, since no adjective is needed to distinguish them. Lera Boroditsky and her colleagues displayed two shades of blue on a computer screen and asked Russian speakers to determine, as quickly as possible, whether the two blue colors were different from each other or the same as each other. The fastest discriminations were when the displayed colors were goluboy and siniy, rather than two shades of goluboy or two shades of siniy. The reaction time advantage for lexically distinct blue colors was strongest when the blue hues were perceptually similar.

More here.