Samantha Libby at New England Review:

The word “Chinko” means nothing. It is the name given to a river in a place where the river gets lost in thick brush and fields of termite mounds. Chinko Park, established to protect what little is left, is called a national park, but there is nothing national in a place without the rule of law. Chinko’s only defense is a handful of well-trained rangers who spend weeks at a time in the wild, waiting for poachers or armed groups to emerge from the thick bush and attack. This is a dangerous part of the world—everyone knows at least that much.

In war-torn Africa, outsiders often feel an obligation to dissect old clichés and invent new ones. But I show up empty-handed. After ten years working in human rights and humanitarian aid around the world, I can no longer be deluded as to my own relevance. I come for a reason startlingly few want to admit: I need to work and there is often work to be had in places where nobody wants to be. 

more here.

Anne Applebaum in The Atlantic:

On December 31, 1999, we threw a party. It was the end of one millennium and the start of a new one; people very much wanted to celebrate, preferably somewhere exotic. Our party fulfilled that criterion. We held it at Chobielin, the manor house in northwest Poland that my husband and his parents had purchased a decade earlier, when it was a mildewed ruin. We had restored the house, very slowly. It was not exactly finished in 1999, but it did have a new roof. It also had a large, freshly painted, and completely unfurnished salon—perfect for a party.

The guests were various: journalist friends from London and Berlin, a few diplomats based in Warsaw, two friends who flew in from New York. But most of them were Poles, friends of ours and colleagues of my husband, who was then a deputy foreign minister in the Polish government. A handful of youngish Polish journalists came too—none then particularly famous—along with a few civil servants and one or two members of the government.

You could have lumped the majority of them, roughly, in the general category of what Poles call the right—the conservatives, the anti-Communists. But at that moment in history, you might also have called most of my guests liberals—free-market liberals, or classical liberals—or maybe Thatcherites. Even those who might have been less definite about economics certainly believed in democracy, in the rule of law, and in a Poland that was a member of nato and on its way to joining the European Union—an integrated part of modern Europe. In the 1990s, that was what being “on the right” meant.

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David Pryce-Jones at The New Criterion:

The flight path of Muriel Spark is a wonder to behold. Her conviction was that the purpose of writing is to give pleasure, and in all her books she paid attention only to the innermost self that was her exclusive guide to that end. She had a poet’s instinct for the right form and a colloquial style all her own that allowed her to range the whole way from the comedy of manners up to the great unanswerable questions of the human condition. In an age when writers expect to be judged primarily by their sexual, social, and political commitments, and are therefore encouraged to be each one more shocking than the next, Muriel’s wit and independent mindset were conservative as well as revolutionary, that strange combination that surfaces when things go wrong. Since she was speaking for lots of people with hopes and fears like hers, she was successful—and deserved to be.

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Nick Paumgarten at The New Yorker:

Alejandro Escovedo, the singer and songwriter, likes to have a proper Mexican breakfast before a long drive. “Let’s go here,” he said. He pulled into the back lot of a restaurant called El Pueblo, across from the Tornado bus terminal on East Jefferson Boulevard, in the Oak Cliff section of Dallas. El Pueblo, he said, is where travellers arriving by bus from Mexico often go to eat and to get their bearings. He ordered in Spanish, then remarked that his Spanish was poor. The plates came quickly. Chorizo con huevos. “This is bad_ass_, man,” he said. An elderly vagrant looked in through the window and then walked in. Escovedo gave him a dollar. “When I was small, I used to be able to see the pain in people,” he said.

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Emilie Pine in The Guardian:

When I was 11, I read Little Women by Louisa May Alcott. Like every girl who wants to be a writer, I idolised Jo. Rereading it recently, I re-encountered so many things I’d loved, from Jo’s exuberant character to her ability to make an independent living from writing. But I stumbled when I came to these words from Marmee: “I am angry nearly every day of my life, Jo; but I have learned not to show it … I’ve learned to check the hasty words that rise to my lips; and when I feel that they mean to break out against my will, I just go away a minute, and give myself a little shake for being so weak and wicked.” Marmee’s advice to Jo is: repress your anger, because the cause is not the problem – it’s you.

…Rage is beginning to feel like a permanent state of being. The cultural turn towards listening to women’s anger is, obviously, a good thing. But there are times when it feels as if being vocally angry has become a requirement, rather than an option. Where once women’s emotional labour was invested in suppressing anger, now we work to display our pain for a public gaze that is often unsympathetic. Think of all the hashtags: #MeToo, #TimesUp, #WhyIStayed or #WhyIDidn’tReport. A lot is being asked of women – not only that they identify and labour to fix the problems of gender inequality, but also that they absorb the emotional and social consequences of protest. Protest is necessary. But it is also exhausting.

I thought about all these questions as I watched Hannah Gadsby’s standup show Nanette, a call to action to angry women. Gadsby reveals the damage done by the self-deprecating scripts gay women are forced into by our homophobic culture. She demands that the narrative changes – both her own, and ours – to accommodate her fury. But then, in the show’s final moments, Gadsby declares that she is wary of anger. Anger, she says, is a way to unite people, but ultimately it only serves to spread “blind hate”. It’s a double bind. We need anger to call out inequality and violence, we need anger to provoke a reaction, and we need anger to drive us towards change. But anger will scar and consume us. It’s a salutary warning. Gadsby’s invocation to tell our stories, but to resist anger, is worlds away from Marmee’s advice to Jo. No longer are women expected to shake themselves; instead, we are being asked to shake the world. But giving permission to women to be angry does not mean that we have divested ourselves entirely of 19th-century attitudes to women and power.

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Mitch Leslie in Science:

CRISPR, the genome editor celebrated as a potentially revolutionary medical tool, isn’t omnipotent. Mitochondria, the organelles that supply a cell’s energy, harbor their own mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) and mutations there can have devastating consequences including deafness, seizures, and muscle weakness. Genome editing might be a remedy, but mitochondria appear to be off-limits to CRISPR. Now, two studies published this week in Nature Medicine reveal that two older genome-editing tools can slash the amount of defective mtDNA in mice bred to have a mitochondrial disease, counteracting the effects of the mutation. The proof-of-principle results could open the way for the first treatments for mitochondrial diseases. “These are remarkable findings that make it possible to even consider doing this in humans,” says mitochondrial biologist Martin Picard of the Columbia University Irving Medical Center, who was not involved in the work.

Turning these results into a treatment will be tricky. The genes encoding the genome editors had to be introduced by viruses, and researchers have long struggled to make similar gene therapy efforts work. But, “These are the right experiments to get ready to go into people,” says molecular geneticist Stephen Ekker of the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, who wasn’t connected to either study. In fact, both groups are already aiming to launch clinical trials. Descendants of ancient bacteria that took up residence inside early eukaryotic cells, mitochondria sport their own small genomes and a distinct set of proteins not encoded by genes in the nucleus. Each cell can contain thousands of these organelles, and mutations in mtDNA cause a range of illnesses. “If you take all the mitochondrial diseases together, they are one of the most common causes of genetic disease in humans,” says molecular biologist Michal Minczuk of the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom, who led one of the research teams.

More here.

breaklight

light keeps on breaking.
i keep knowing
the language of other nations.
i keep hearing
tree talk
water words
and i keep knowing what they mean.
and light just keeps on breaking.
last night
the fears of my mother came
knocking and when i
opened the door
they tried to explain themselves
and i understood
everything they said.
.
Lucille Clifton
from good woman: poems and memoir 1969-1980
BOA Editions 1980

Kenan Malik in Pandaemonium:

One of the problems in discussing censorship is that we often don’t recognize censorship for what it is. There is no longer the Lord Chamberlain marking scripts and cutting out the unacceptable. Instead, we, in effect, ourselves mark them. And that, ironically, makes censorship not more, but less, visible.

In all my years campaigning for free speech, I’ve rarely heard anyone say ‘I’m for censorship’. Rather what many say is ‘I’m for free speech. But…’ I’m for free speech… but speech must be used responsibly. I’m for free speech… but speech should not offend. I’m for free speech… but don’t appropriate from other cultures. And so on. What was once recognized as straightforward censorship has now become a combination of moral obligation and social etiquette.

Even those who openly call for censorship often dress it up in moral terms. Thirty years ago, back in the midst of the Rushdie affair, Shabbir Akhtar, spokesman for the Bradford Council of Mosques, insisted that the real debate was not about ‘freedom of speech versus censorship’ but about ‘legitimate criticism versus obscenity and slander’. Exactly the same point has been made by every opponent of offnsove talk, from those who shut down Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti’s Behzti to those who would have shut down Caryl Churchill’s Seven Jewish Children.

But who makes that judgment call? Who decides what is legitimate criticism and what is obscenity and slander? Half a century ago, the answer was: the Lord Chamberlain. Today, the answer is each of us.

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Ed Yong in The Atlantic:

Around 558 million years ago, a strange … something dies on the floor of an ancient ocean. Its body, if you could call it that, is a two-inch-long oval with symmetric ribs running from its midline to its fringes. It is quickly buried in sediment, and gradually turns into a fossil.

While it sits in place, petrifying, waiting, the world around it changes. The Earth’s landmasses merge into a single supercontinent before going their separate ways. In the ocean, animal life explodes; for the first time, the world is home to eyes, shells, and mouths. Living things invade the land, coating it first in thin films of moss and lichens, and then covering it in huge forests. Insects rise, into existence, and then into the skies. A dinosaur empire rises and falls. Mammals finally take over, and one of them—a human by the name of Ilya Bobrovskiy—finally unearths the fossilized ribbed oval from its resting place.

All of which is to say: Five hundred fifty-eight million years is an incredibly long time.

But despite that almost unimaginable time span, and everything that happened within it, many of the simple molecules that once existed in the oval creature’s cells still persist. Bobrovskiy, a geochemist at Australian National University, has isolated, identified, and measured them. And they provide conclusive evidence that the creature, despite all appearances, is an animal. More specifically, it is the oldest animal ever discovered. It’s called Dickinsonia.

More here.

Jason Hickel in Foreign Policy:

Warnings about ecological breakdown have become ubiquitous. Over the past few years, major newspapers, including the Guardian and the New York Times, have carried alarming stories on soil depletion, deforestation, and the collapse of fish stocks and insect populations. These crises are being driven by global economic growth, and its accompanying consumption, which is destroying the Earth’s biosphere and blowing past key planetary boundaries that scientists say must be respected to avoid triggering collapse.

Many policymakers have responded by pushing for what has come to be called “green growth.” All we need to do, they argue, is invest in more efficient technology and introduce the right incentives, and we’ll be able to keep growing while simultaneously reducing our impact on the natural world, which is already at an unsustainable level. In technical terms, the goal is to achieve “absolute decoupling” of GDP from the total use of natural resources, according to the U.N. definition.

It sounds like an elegant solution to an otherwise catastrophic problem. There’s just one hitch: New evidence suggests that green growth isn’t the panacea everyone has been hoping for. In fact, it isn’t even possible.

More here.

Andrew Sullivan in New York Magazine:

It was entirely a coincidence that I found myself reading Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff’s The Coddling of the American Mind in the same week that Brett Kavanaugh was credibly accused of sexual assault in his teens, and Ian Buruma lost his job as editor of The New York Review of Books, after publishing an essay by a man credibly accused of 23 separate instances of sexual abuse, but cleared of all criminal charges. And the book does not, of course, address the specifics of either case. But it’s a sharp analysis of the toxic atmosphere in which our current debates take place, a reminder that it is close to impossible, in this polarized climate, to deal with the specifics and complexities of each scandal from a non-tribal perspective.

And so it seems that Kavanaugh is either a perfect exemplar of judicial expertise and impeccable moral conduct, or he is a lying rapist determined to destroy and control the lives of all women. Ghomeshi is evil, and granting any space for such a monster to defend or account for himself is itself an act of oppression, which must be shamed and punished. Those appear to be our choices, ladies and gentlemen, in this particular polarization cycle. There is little nuance in these battles and absolutely no mercy for anyone unlucky enough to get caught up in their swirling vortex.

More here.