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.

Jacob Hamburger in The Point:

By 2014, many Americans had forgotten about New Atheism. For liberal Americans in the depths of the Bush years, anti-religious best sellers by Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens came as—for lack of a better word—a godsend. With the Christian right in the White House, and jihadist terrorism perceived to be a constant danger in the wake of 9/11, a vocal rationalist atheism appeared to many a natural and necessary counterweight. But after nearly six years of Barack Obama’s presidency, Bush and his born-again gang were far from the high seats of power, the War on Terror was no longer a feature of most people’s daily lives, and there was a widespread impression of leftward progress on social issues. The services of the anti-religious crusaders were no longer needed.

2014 was nonetheless the year a number of New Atheism’s celebrities began making their comeback. Chief among them was Sam Harris, who appeared in October on Bill Maher’s comedy talk show Real Time (Maher himself having contributed to the New Atheist phenomenon with his 2008 documentary Religulous), and the two entered into a heated argument with the actor Ben Affleck on the subject of Islam and the rise of ISIS. Affleck’s unwillingness to criticize conservative views held by Muslims, the two agreed, was a sign that self-described liberals were willing to sacrifice “liberal principles” like freedom of speech or the equality of women at the altar of cultural sensitivity. The following year saw a wave of terrorism in Europe, as well as the launch of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and the return of media scandals over “political correctness” on American college campuses. New Atheist celebrities formed a vocal contingent of an emerging collective which has sought to link these disparate developments into a common narrative. According to this narrative, a return of irrationalism in the Western world had rendered many mainstream liberal politicians, commentators and voters incapable of defending or even recognizing their core principles. At the forefront of this new attack against reason, they allege, are not only jihadists and the populist right, but also a radical left obsessed with equality and diversity.

More here.

Ethan Siegel in Forbes:

One of the greatest puzzles in the entire Universe is the dark matter mystery. In theory, for every bit of normal matter (like us) in the Universe, there should be approximately five times as much dark matter. Both normal and dark matter should experience gravitation equally, meaning that the largest structures in the Universe — galaxies, clusters of galaxies, and cosmic filaments — should contain and be dominated by dark matter. When we measure the motions of individual galaxies, both isolated and in clusters, the normal matter alone is not enough to explain what we see. Dark matter is also required.

But the Universe is also a violent place, full of mergers, collisions, and cosmic smash-ups. Some of these events should expel enough normal matter to create new, small, dark-matter-free galaxies: with normal matter alone. For the first time, scientists believe they’ve found one such galaxy with no dark matter, solving an enormous cosmic puzzle.

More here.

Kenan Malik in Pandaemonium:

So, there you are, having worked your way through a crowd denser than a Brexit negotiation, standing in front of your prize. The Mona Lisa in the Louvre. What do you do? Look more closely at that enigmatic smile? Wonder at the subtle gradations of light and shadow in Leonardo’s rendering of the face? Admire the illusion of depth?

No, of course not. You turn your back on the painting, whip out your phone and take a selfie.

And then you move on to your next prize.

You could be forgiven, amid the Brexit fracas, for not having noticed that Wednesday was Museum Selfie Day, a ‘fun day to encourage people to visit museums’, in the words of Mar Dixon, whose brainchild it was.

A fun day? Not to the critics. ‘Art is serious. It is not light entertainment,’ the Guardian’s Jonathan Jones wrote sternly in 2015, adding that selfies were a ‘spiritual menace’ to museums and galleries.

This might seem pompous and overwrought. For selfie enthusiasts, such critics are curmudgeonly snobs making ‘the age-old “us and them” divide: between those who use museum collections “properly” (for education or cultural self-improvement) and those who use them “incorrectly” (for mere distraction or entertainment).’

But who’s really being snobbish here?

More here.

Nathan J. Robinson in Current Affairs:

Sometimes my experiences with the Postal Service are almost enough to turn me into a right-wing libertarian. For instance: They offer a special discounted rate for sending magazines through the post. Which is good—I run a magazine that is sent through the post! In order to get the rate, however, you have to meticulously obey every single instruction in the 56 pages of Handbook DM-204, which governs Periodicals Mailing Privileges. There is an incredibly complicated application, and a $700 fee, and a seemingly endless set of potential pitfalls. I couldn’t figure out how to finish the application, so I hired someone to do it. That person eventually gave up in frustration. It ultimately took us a year to get the permit. Shortly afterward, the postal service threatened to revoke our permit (and send us back to step 1) because we had failed to print the contents of Form 3510-M in our magazine.

For every bad experience I’ve had with the post office, though, I’ve also had a good one. There are two post offices within a few blocks of Current Affairs HQ. At one, the staff are consistently ornery and chide you for doing something wrong. (I play a game with myself: “What have I done wrong this time?” in which I try to guess what I am going to be told I have done wrong. The last time I went in it was “failing to fold the priority envelope along the crease when sealing it.”) At the other post office, the staff are absolutely lovely. They apologize to you, they find fun stamps for you, they give you king cake during Carnival Season. I adore them.

On the left, we often talk about the importance of making things publicly owned and operated. But the structure and character of those institutions matters just as much as their being “public” versus “private.” There’s a reason why “Do you want your healthcare to be run like the post office and the DMV?” is a very effective conservative talking point against greater federal involvement in financing medical care.

More here.

Rachel Wetzler at The Baffler:

In his columns, Indiana skewered the art world’s bloated egos and grotesque superficiality, but he was interested, above all, in scrutinizing who held power and how it was deployed. In a particularly trenchant essay on Richard Serra’s lawsuit against the General Services Administration—the government agency that had commissioned his 1981 public sculpture Tilted Arc for the plaza outside the Jacob K. Javits Federal Building in Manhattan and, at the urging of the people who worked there, now planned to remove it against the artist’s wishes—Indiana chides Serra and his defenders for their naivete: “Who on earth did these people think they were dealing with in the first place?” he asks. “If you are so enamored of [power] that you regularly ornament its dinner tables, ride cackling through the night in its limousines, and sign worthless contracts with it, it is no problem of mine or anyone else’s if power decides, one bored afternoon, to add you to the menu instead of inviting you to eat.”

The timing of the book’s release in late November, just after the Voice was abruptly shut down by its billionaire owner, Peter Barbey—hailed as the struggling paper’s white knight when he bought it in 2015—was a depressing coincidence, but an appropriate one.

more here.

Geert Lovink at Eurozine:

Omnipresent social media places a claim on our elapsed time, our fractured lives. We’re all sad in our very own way. As there are no lulls or quiet moments anymore, the result is fatigue, depletion and loss of energy. We’re becoming obsessed with waiting. How long have you been forgotten by your love ones? Time, meticulously measured on every app, tells us right to our face. Chronos hurts. Should I post something to attract attention and show I’m still here? Nobody likes me anymore. As the random messages keep relentlessly piling in, there’s no way to halt them, to take a moment and think it all through.

Delacroix once declared that every day which is not noted is like a day that does not exist. Diary writing used to fulfil that task. Elements of early blog culture tried to update the diary form for the online realm, but that moment has now passed.

more here.

Sudip Bose at The American Scholar:

The title of Ferruccio Busoni’s 1907 manifesto Sketch of a New Aesthetic of Music might suggest that the Italian pianist-composer would be looking to the future, yet many of its philosophical passages find him lingering in the past. Writing out “of convictions long held and slowly matured” (he was 41 at the time), Busoni extolled the virtues of the Baroque and classical ages, Bach and Beethoven being the exemplars—in “spirit and emotion they will probably remain unexcelled.” Busoni’s embrace of the past, however, was no rejection of modernity. “Among both ‘modern’ and ‘old’ works,” he wrote, “we find good and bad, genuine and spurious. There is nothing properly modern—only things which have come into being earlier or later; longer in bloom, or sooner withered. The Modern and the Old have always been.” Past and present, tradition and experiment—all could happily coexist in art. Thus, in more or less the same breath, Busoni could praise the elegance of Mozartian classicism while pondering some avant-garde technique, such as microtonal harmony. What mattered most of all were spirit and emotion; “he who mounts to their uttermost heights,” the musician wrote, “will always tower above the crowd.”

more here.

Alison Abbott in Nature:

Neuroscientists have for the first time discovered differences between the ‘software’ of humans and monkey brains, using a technique that tracks single neurons. They found that human brains trade off ‘robustness’ — a measure of how synchronized neuron signals are — for greater efficiency in information processing. The researchers hypothesize that the results might help to explain humans’ unique intelligence, as well as their susceptibility to psychiatric disorders. The findings were published in Cell¹ on 17 January. Scientists say that this type of unusual study could help them to better translate research in animal models of psychiatric diseases into the clinic. The research exploited a rare set of data on the activity of single neurons collected deep in the brains of people with epilepsy who were undergoing neurosurgery to identify the origin of their condition. The technique is so difficult that only a handful of clinics around the world can participate in this type of research. The study also used similar, existing data from three monkeys and collected neuron information from two more.

Over the decades, neuroscientists have discovered many subtle and significant differences in the anatomy — the hardware — of the brains of humans and other primates. But the latest study looked instead at differences in brain signals. “There is a clear difference in behaviour and psychology between humans and non-human primates,” says Mark Harnett from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge who studies how the biophysics of neurons affect neural computation. “Now we see this difference in the brain’s biology — it’s a tremendously valuable study.”

More here.

Geneology

Outside, it’s cold like the day
my father’s grandpa drowned
while Sigrid salted cod on walls
of stacked antlers. Their sons
and daughter fled to Eden
Prairie. One, my father’s uncles, lost
a claim in Manitoba, another crashed
a Hupmobile. One died ice-fishing.

My father’s mother, pink and vicious, made
him cover the bidet with plywood
when we lived in Tehran. Made me drive
all over Fairfax County in search
of Carnival glass. Told me “Never
marry a woman for her looks.” My mother’s
dad lost his lungs to mustard gas. Her mom

never gambled. Betty lived in Hollywood
working at the studios, roller-skating
with a man who would later play
Tonto. She rented a room
in a house with a victory garden until
the Tamuras were shipped
to Utah, then married Dad, who left
to kill Koreans. On the ship

to Japan to join him in Kobe, my sister
scared me with stories of dwarves. My children’s
mom is small and pale, like the pages
of an appointment book, except when speaking
Spanish. Then, her hands become larakeets, her eyes
marcasite. Her grandfather knew the Franks
before they moved to Holland, and he
to Pasadena, where he never met

my mother who skis like she’s waltzing,
or my father, who came home and built
a barbeque of brick, or my sister the shrink,
or my brother who sells drugs, or my other sister
for that matter. They all live
in California and no one
ever dies. There’s a boy

at the bus stop who dances
in place: knit cap, heavy coat, an extra
chromosome, perhaps. Sometimes he raises
his arms and spins. The world starts with him.

by Jeffery Bahr
from Rattle Magazine
#16, Winter, 2001

Søren Wichmann in Aeon:

Simple questions often yield complex answers. For instance: what is the difference between a language and a dialect? If you ask this of a linguist, get comfortable. Despite the simplicity of the query, there are a lot of possible answers.

The distinction might depend on one’s point of view. From a political perspective, a language is simply that which is standardly spoken by a nation. From about 1850 to 1992, for instance, there was a language known as Serbo-Croatian, which had several dialects including Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian. But since Yugoslavia dissolved into several independent countries in the mid-1990s, those dialects have come to be recognised as distinct languages. This political definition works to some extent, though it poses more problems than solutions: there are languages that extend across different countries, notably Spanish in Latin America. Nobody would claim that Mexican Spanish and Colombian Spanish are different languages. Perhaps Spanish as spoken in some parts of Spain is different enough from the Latin American varieties that it deserves to be called a separate language, but that isn’t clear.

Perhaps the distinction between language and dialect can be made in terms of mutual intelligibility? Unfortunately, there are immediate problems with this approach. A Dane will understand Swedish somewhat better than a Swede will understand Danish. Similarly, someone speaking a peculiar, rural dialect of British English will understand an American from Los Angeles far better than the other way around. Mutual intelligibility often depends on exposure, a fairly uncontrollable variable, rather than anything intrinsic to language.

More here.

Emily Temple in Literary Hub:

If you can believe it, Japanese novelist, talking cat enthusiast, and weird ear chronicler Haruki Murakami turned 70 years old this weekend. 70! But I suppose we should believe it, despite the youthful gaiety and creative magic of his prose: the internationally bestselling writer has 14 novels and a handful of short stories under his belt, and it’s safe to say he’s one of the most famous contemporary writers in the world. To celebrate his birthday, and as a gift to those of you who hope to be the kind of writer Murakami is when you turn 70, I’ve collected some of his best writing advice below.

Read.

I think the first task for the aspiring novelist is to read tons of novels. Sorry to start with such a commonplace observation, but no training is more crucial. To write a novel, you must first understand at a physical level how one is put together . . . It is especially important to plow through as many novels as you can while you are still young. Everything you can get your hands on—great novels, not-so-great novels, crappy novels, it doesn’t matter (at all!) as long as you keep reading. Absorb as many stories as you physically can. Introduce yourself to lots of great writing. To lots of mediocre writing too. This is your most important task.

More here.