Ann Gibbons in Science:

Ask medieval historian Michael McCormick what year was the worst to be alive, and he’s got an answer: “536.” Not 1349, when the Black Death wiped out half of Europe. Not 1918, when the flu killed 50 million to 100 million people, mostly young adults. But 536. In Europe, “It was the beginning of one of the worst periods to be alive, if not the worst year,” says McCormick, a historian and archaeologist who chairs the Harvard University Initiative for the Science of the Human Past.

A mysterious fog plunged Europe, the Middle East, and parts of Asia into darkness, day and night—for 18 months. “For the sun gave forth its light without brightness, like the moon, during the whole year,” wrote Byzantine historian Procopius. Temperatures in the summer of 536 fell 1.5°C to 2.5°C, initiating the coldest decade in the past 2300 years. Snow fell that summer in China; crops failed; people starved. The Irish chronicles record “a failure of bread from the years 536–539.” Then, in 541, bubonic plague struck the Roman port of Pelusium, in Egypt. What came to be called the Plague of Justinian spread rapidly, wiping out one-third to one-half of the population of the eastern Roman Empire and hastening its collapse, McCormick says.

Historians have long known that the middle of the sixth century was a dark hour in what used to be called the Dark Ages, but the source of the mysterious clouds has long been a puzzle. Now, an ultraprecise analysis of ice from a Swiss glacier by a team led by McCormick and glaciologist Paul Mayewski at the Climate Change Institute of The University of Maine (UM) in Orono has fingered a culprit. At a workshop at Harvard this week, the team reported that a cataclysmic volcanic eruption in Iceland spewed ash across the Northern Hemisphere early in 536. Two other massive eruptions followed, in 540 and 547. The repeated blows, followed by plague, plunged Europe into economic stagnation that lasted until 640, when another signal in the ice—a spike in airborne lead—marks a resurgence of silver mining, as the team reports in Antiquity this week.

More here.

her grandmother called her from the playground
“yes, ma’am”
“i want chu to learn how to make rolls” said the old
woman proudly
but the little girl didn’t want
to learn how because she knew
even if she couldn’t say it that
that would mean when the old one died she would be less
dependent on her spirit so
she said
“i don’t want to know how to make no rolls”

Daniel Nester in Barrelhouse:

I’ve never cried to “We Are The Champions.”

I’ve never cried to “We Are The Champions,” that is, until watching Rami Malek, playing the role of Freddie Mercury, reenact its performance at the 1985 Live Aid concert. The song appears after a series of life events so dramatic it could give a telenovela a run for its money. Band fights abound. Mercury’s solo album, Mr. Bad Guy, tanks (total U.S. sales around 100,000). Managers summarily are fired. Freddie enters an AIDS clinic to get his test results.

To hear and see “Champions” on screen at Live Aid after all that Sturm and Drang, the first and only time the song is performed in the film, just broke me. Along with everyone in the theatre, I’d gone through the Freddie Mercury stations of the cross after two hours and change, and it occurred to me that, despite historical errors both minor and glaring along the way, despite reading reviews so over-the-top negative you would think they were reviewing actual Queen albums and not a biopic of its lead singer, and despite knowing this movie would represent an attempt to tell the story of Freddie Mercury in all its shapeshifting, codeswitching, gender-bending and globetrotting glory, I needed to keep my shit together.

More here.  [Thanks to Asad Raza.]

Peter Woit in Not Even Wrong:

Way back in 1996 science writer John Horgan published The End of Science, in which he made the argument that various fields of science were running up against obstacles to any further progress of the magnitude they had previously experienced. One can argue about other fields (please don’t do it here…), but for the field of theoretical high energy physics, Horgan had a good case then, one that has become stronger and stronger as time goes on.

A question that I always wondered about was that of what things would look like once the subject reached the endpoint where progress had stopped more or less completely. In the book, Horgan predicted:

A few diehards dedicated to truth rather than practicality will practice physics in a nonempirical, ironic mode, plumbing the magical realm of superstrings and other esoterica and fret­ting about the meaning of quantum mechanics. The conferences of these ironic physicists, whose disputes cannot be experimentally resolved, will become more and more like those of that bastion of literary criticism, the Modern Language Association.

This is now looking rather prescient.

More here.

Hardeep Singh in Quillette:

Among the string of resignations triggered by the draft Brexit agreement with the European Union (EU), one stood out. In a double whammy for an embattled Prime Minister, Rehman Chishti the MP for Gillingham and Rainham resigned as both Vice Chairman of the Conservative Party as well as the PM’s Trade Envoy to Pakistan. Aside from citing Theresa May’s shambolic handling of Brexit negotiations, Chishti said the British government’s failure to give Asia Bibi asylum had been a motivating factor in his decision.

Bibi’s case is a cause célèbre. She is a Christian who had been languishing on death row for nine years in Pakistan for blasphemy charges. To Christians worldwide, Bibi is a symbol of fortitude, faith, and unflinching commitment. After all, a conversion to Islam would have exonerated her, but she refused to recant her faith. She was imprisoned after fetching drinking water for fellow berry pickers on a Punjab farm in Pakistan in 2009. Her Muslim co-workers accused her of contaminating the water, because she was Christian. Following a verbal dispute, a complaint was lodged with a local Imam, alleging that Bibi had blasphemed against the Prophet—a capital offense under sections 295B/295C of the Pakistan Penal Code, introduced under the military regime of General Zia-ul-Haq. Earlier this month, the Supreme Court of Pakistan acquitted her of the charges and said the accusations levelled against her were “concoction incarnate.”

Regardless of the Supreme Court decision, Muslim extremists believe Bibi must still be executed. They staged mass protests in major cities like Islamabad and Karachi threatening to kill the judges who acquitted her.

More here.

Catherine Keyser at Cabinet Magazine:

In 2015, General Mills reformulated Trix with “natural” colors. Customers complained that the bright hues of their childhood cereal were now dull yellows and purples. Two years later, the company released Classic Trix to stand on store shelves alongside so-called No, No, No Trix, the natural version. This nickname, promising “no tricks,” sounds abstemious; the virtuous customer says no to technicolor temptation. But Trix customers wanted their colors back. As one Tweet put it: “I mean, I get that artificial flavors are bad and all that shiz, but man I miss neon colored Trix.”

What can (or should) the scholar of American culture make of this desire for color? Bright foods are in some sense an invention of a modern food industry that uses dye to intensify visual aesthetics. They also, however, evoke the tropics, brilliant fruits like bananas and oranges that became more broadly available in the United States in the early twentieth century thanks to corporate imperialism and cold storage. Though its colors came from industrial dyes, General Mills hoped to associate Trix with this tropical paradise.

more here.

T.J. Clark at nonsite:

The line of French painting that stretches from Eugène Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People to Pablo Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon (or from Camille Corot early in the 1820s to Henri Matisse on the eve of the First World War) is a unique episode in recent history. It has established itself as “world-historical,” to borrow a term from G. W. F. Hegel. That is, it continues to speak to aspects—distinctive features—of the modern condition which succeeding ages seem unable to bring into focus, or go on valuing and properly criticizing, without its aid. The tradition’s only rival, if this is the standard, may be German music from Johann Sebastian Bach to Richard Wagner.

The essay that follows is an attempt to speak to the “world-historical” character of French art—to speak to the subject as Hegel himself might have done. Such an account does not displace, or even “go deeper than,” the more familiar ones we have.

more here.

Heidi Ledford in Nature:

The stunning failure of a once-promising cancer drug has got some researchers arguing that the field has moved too fast in its embrace of therapies that unleash the immune system. The drug, epacadostat, blocks a protein called IDO that hobbles immune cells if left unchecked. Early trials suggested that the drug could be a powerful weapon against some advanced cancers when paired with existing therapies that bolster the body’s immune response to tumours. But a large, controlled study of epacadostat was halted in April after the drug failed to show benefits. Now, a researcher who helped to conduct some of the first trials of the drug says that it was pushed into large clinical studies too soon — and that the same could be true of other cancer immunotherapies in development. “People ask me right now, ‘What are you excited about?’” says Jason Luke, an oncologist at the University of Chicago in Illinois who aired his concerns last week at a meeting of the Society for Immunotherapy of Cancer in Washington DC. “And I say, ‘Unfortunately, little to nothing,’ because almost none of this is done properly.”

Early data from small trials of epacadostat, which is made by Incyte of Wilmington, Delaware, excited researchers. Luke recalls one trial participant with advanced cancer who was so weak that it was difficult for him to travel to the clinic. From the first dose, the man showed improvement. But Luke now attributes those gains to the treatment given alongside epacadostat in the trial: an approved immunotherapy called pembrolizumab, made by Merck of Kenilworth, New Jersey.

After Incyte and Merck reported in April that a larger trial of epacadostat and pembrolizumab had failed, other companies announced that they were halting their own programmes to develop cancer drugs that block the IDO protein. “The field has completely evaporated,” says Luke, who notes that more than 1,000 participants were once enrolled across various studies of IDO-inhibiting drugs. This failure should be a wake-up call for other cancer researchers, says Felipe Campesato, a cancer immunologist at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City. “We can take that challenge as an opportunity for improvement, and maybe a turning point in the field.”

More here.

Kelly and Zach Weinersmith in Delancyplace:

Let’s talk about mirror humans: “Oh, you haven’t heard of mirror humans? Let’s back up a moment.

“Life is made of lots of little molecules, and these molecules make up import­ant bigger molecules, like DNA, RNA, and proteins. Some molecules exhibit what is called chirality, from the Greek word for ‘hand.’ If a molecule has chirality that basically means there is a mirror version of it. “To wrap your head around ‘mirror versions’ of things, think about your hands. They look exactly the same, but no matter how you rotate your left hand, it won’t be exactly the same as the right. If you have your palms up, your left thumb will point left and your right thumb will point right. Each hand has all the same parts, but they are flipped, as if through a mirror. “When you have two molecules that are mirror images of one another, one of these molecules is designated as the left-handed version and the other as the right-handed version. Intriguingly, life seems to favor a certain handedness for particular tasks. For example, almost all amino acids (which you may remember from previous chapters are the building blocks of proteins) are in the left-handed form. Why nature abhors right-handed amino acids is a topic of debate, but even the amino acids we find in space tend to be left-handed.

“But screw nature. Whatever her reasoning is, there is no known physical reason we couldn’t create an organism out of completely opposite-handed molecules in the lab — a ‘mirror organism,’ if you like. Some scientists, including Dr. [George] Church­ [of Harvard], are working to create (simple) mirror organisms, with the hope creating larger and larger such creatures. Why exactly would we want this? Well, for one, it’s awesome. You create something that looks like a nice little kitty, but is totally incompatible with the rest of the life on the planet, perhaps even the universe. For example, mirror-opposite organisms would need to eat mirror food in order to be able to digest it. They would also be undigest­ible to all predators. Best of all, a mirror-opposite organism would be com­pletely immune to all diseases, because all living parasites and pathogens evolved to infect organisms with normal chirality.

“And if it worked, hey, we could scale up to making mirror-opposite humans.

More here.

February 11

The moon is out. The ice is gone. Patches of white
lounge on the wet meadow. Moonlit darkness at 6 a.m.

Again from the porch these blue mornings I hear an eagle’s cries
like God is out across the bay rubbing two mineral sheets together
slowly, with great pressure.

A single creature’s voice—or just the loudest one.
Others speak with eyes: they watch—
the frogs and beetles, sleepy bats, ones I can’t see.
Their watching is their own stamp on the world.

I cry at odd times—driving, or someone touches my shoulder
or has a nice voice on the phone.

I steel myself for the day.
.
by Nellie Bridge
from Echotheo Review

Bianca Bosker in The Atlantic:

One afternoon in the summer of 2013, Anna Todd was in the checkout line at Target when, as most of us do, she pulled out her phone. Then she propped her elbows on her shopping cart and began to type.

Todd was 24 years old and living near Fort Hood, Texas, with her husband, a soldier she had married a month after graduating high school, and their newborn, who suffered daily seizures. While caring for her son and taking online community-college courses, she helped support the family by babysitting for a neighbor and working the beauty counter at Ulta. For fun, she read. Wuthering Heights, Twilight, The Things They Carried. Since the previous fall, she’d also indulged an addiction to One Direction fan fiction—stories featuring the boy band in imagined scenarios. After blazing through all that she could find online and then tiring of waiting for updates from erratic authors (many of them teens juggling writing and school), Todd decided to attempt her own series. She called it After and wrote on her smartphone whenever she could steal a moment—while shopping for groceries, waiting to get her teeth cleaned, riding in friends’ cars. She used a pseudonym (imaginator1D) and hid her alter ego from family and friends. “My husband just thought I had a phone addiction or something,” she has said.

More here.

Kevin Hartnett in Quanta:

Elliptic curves seem to admit infinite variety, but they really only come in two flavors. That is the upshot of a new proof from a graduate student at Harvard University.

Elliptic curves may sound exotic, but they’re unspectacular geometric objects, as ordinary as lines, parabolas or ellipses. In a paper first posted online last year, Alexander Smith proved a four-decade-old conjecture that concerns a fundamental trait of elliptic curves called “rank.” Smith proved that, within a specific family of curves, and with one qualification, half of all curves have rank 0 and half have rank 1.

The result establishes baseline characteristics of objects that have intrigued mathematicians for centuries, and that have increased in importance in recent decades.

“We’ve been thinking about this for over 1,000 years, and now we have some probabilistic sense about [elliptic curves]. That’s super important,” said Shou-Wu Zhang, a mathematician at Princeton University who advised Smith at the outset of the work, when Smith was an undergraduate at Princeton.

More here.

Barry Latzer in the National Review:

New York’s governor, Andrew Cuomo, just announced a bail-reform program. Details were not yet available at press time, but it’s clear that Cuomo intends to release thousands of arrested persons, even suspected felons, without bail.

Meanwhile, across the Hudson, New Jersey has already launched its bail-reform plan. It replaces money bail with an algorithm that scores recently arrested defendants on dangerousness plus the likelihood of their appearance at court hearings. In the first three months of operation, three-quarters of the state’s defendants were released. After six months, New Jersey’s non-sentenced jail population declined 20 percent and was 35 percent lower than it had been two years earlier.

That’s good for the defendants, who don’t have to spend time in jail in the event that they’re unable to make bail. But is it safe for the public? As with virtually every other criminal-justice reform, these experiments increase public risk. Any reform that keeps parolees, probationers, or pretrial defendants out of jail or prison, either by making their sentences shorter or by replacing incarceration with release to the community, is risky.

More here.

The Cutting Reason

I go back to the island,
see the house, no longer home,
breathe the sea, to breathe the sea.

Walking the streets, Belfast on Orange
Eve. The two of you, sipping tea. Bewley’s.
Pane of glass, the glass between –

and when my skinned heart finally stops
beating and beating, a lambeg drum,

I know, having walked away,
the cutting reason why I came.

by Catherine Graham
from  Pupa
Insomniac Press, Toronto 2003

Micah Meadowcroft at The New Atlantis:

Hannah Arendt reflected on the significance of humanity’s desire for the stars in her 1963 essay “The Conquest of Space and the Stature of Man.” Man, she said, has not found a new place for himself after his self-displacement in modernity’s rejection of old orders. We stand alienated from ourselves and nature. And as we see deeper into the firmament, and account for more of nature, we only better know the scale of our disorientation, the smallness of our vision. Science cannot bound the cosmos into a comfortable domain, for “this observed universe, the infinitely small no less than the infinitely large, escapes not only the coarseness of human sense perception but even the enormously ingenious instruments that have been built for its refinement.” But neither does modern science really wish to find a place for man in all this space, for the questions that would require would produce answers for man that act “as definitions and hence as limitations of his efforts.”

This alienation calls for some kind of transcendence — a need to find ourselves and discover where we are.

more here.

Philippa Snow at The Baffler:

It occurred to me, when thinking about Ronnie’s bathroom scene, that this is not McQueen’s first time depicting the repressed, deep-seated trauma of a wealthy but unhappy individual on film: that Shame, whose central character appeared to have developed sex-addiction in the wake of some unspecified, formative trauma—maybe psychic, maybe physical—addressed a similar, if not entirely symmetrical, ache. The sex addict, Brandon, as played in the key of Patrick Bateman by the Irish actor Michael Fassbender, also contained his introspection and his self-injurious anger within the confines of the bathroom. Often, his releases there were masturbatory. So, on some level, was the movie; lacking detailed and elucidating background information, Brandon’s tragedy became the tragedy of a successful, very handsome white man tortured by the need to regularly have sex with one or more women who resemble fashion models. (Brandon’s kookily sad sister, Sissy, is so white that she is played by Carey Mulligan, and is called Sissy. His apartment, in what might be seen as a reflection of his inner turmoil, is white and expensive, but lit so that above all else, it looks blue.)

more here.

Matthew Aucoin at the NYRB:

For modern listeners, Debussy practically defines French music, by which I mean that the essential qualities of his music—not only his sensuous delicacy but also his aversion to the harmonic behavior characteristic of late-nineteenth-century German music, a dense chromatic motion that tends to constantly, restlessly build to orgiastic climaxes, as in Wagner and Strauss—have come to be seen as also essentially “French” qualities. Walsh makes clear, however, that Debussy, far from simply amplifying or exemplifying the dominant tendencies of his musical milieu, consciously and stubbornly swam against the current, especially when it came to the heavy influence of German music on French composers. Wagner was the unavoidable presence in late-nineteenth-century Paris, but Debussy traced the blame for that influence further back, to Gluck. Debussy was quietly radical in his preference for Rameau’s “delicate and charming tenderness” over what he perceived as the Germanic “affectation of profundity or the need to double underline everything.”

more here.