Katy Guest at the TLS:

Publishing loves a trend, and the current one is for books by and about women. As many women as possible, in some cases: books such as Can We All Be Feminists?: Seventeen writers on intersectionality, identity and finding the right way forward for feminism (Virago), edited by the activist June Eric-Udorie, anthologize many voices to better illustrate the complexities of modern “feminisms”. Eric-Udorie’s title is a response to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s lecture-cum-essay We Should All Be Feminists from 2014, and in its tone, language and criticisms of feminism, it makes even Adichie seem a little old school. Its content will come as a wake-up call to some middle-aged feminists, with its focus on and nuanced understanding of “intersectionality”, and its foregrounding of marginalized voices. Many of these young women reject conventional feminism, and that, it turns out, is feminists’ fault. “Do these so-called feminists ever stop to consider”, asks Eric-Udorie, “that there are women who can’t even get through the door – whether because of racism, fatphobia, homophobia or transphobia – let alone into the boardroom?” One contributor, a trans woman called Gabrielle Bellot, addresses comments made by Adichie in an interview on Channel 4 News in 2017, that “if you’ve lived in the world as a man with the privileges that the world accords to men and then sort of change gender, it’s difficult for me to accept that then we can equate your experience with the experience of a woman who has lived from the beginning as a woman and who has not been accorded those privileges”.

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Talking in Tongues

Colin Wright in Quillette:

The philosopher Daniel Dennett has described evolution as a sort of “universal acid” that “eats through just about every traditional concept, and leaves in its wake a revolutionized world-view, with most of the old landmarks still recognizable, but transformed in fundamental ways.” Fearing this corrosive idea, opposition in the US to evolution mainly came from Right-wing evangelical Christians who believed God created life in its present form, as described in Genesis.

In the 1990s and 2000s there were repeated attempts by evangelicals to ban evolution in public schools or teach the so-called “controversy” by including Intelligent Design—the belief that life is too complex to have evolved without the aid of some “Intelligent Designer” (i.e. God)—in the biology curriculum alongside evolution. But these attempts failed when scientists demonstrated in court that Intelligent Design was nothing more than Biblical Creationism gussied up in scientific-sounding prose. Since then, however, Creationism and Intelligent Design have lost a tremendous amount of momentum and influence. But while these right-wing anti-evolution movements withered to irrelevancy, a much more cryptic form of left-wing evolution denialism has been slowly growing.

More here.

Ed Yong in The Atlantic:

Before last week, few people had heard the name He Jiankui. But on November 25, the young Chinese researcher became the center of a global firestorm when it emerged that he had allegedly made the first crispr-edited babies, twin girls named Lulu and Nana. Antonio Regalado broke the story for MIT Technology Review, and He himself described the experiment at an international gene-editing summit in Hong Kong. After his talk, He revealed that another early pregnancy is under way.

It is still unclear if He did what he claims to have done. Nonetheless, the reaction was swift and negative. The crispr pioneer Jennifer Doudna says she was “horrified,” NIH Director Francis Collins said the experiment was “profoundly disturbing,” and even Julian Savulescu, an ethicist who has described gene-editing research as “a moral necessity,” described He’s work as “monstrous.”

Such a strong reaction is understandable, given the many puzzling and worrying details about the experiment. Even without any speculation about designer babies and Gattaca-like futures that may or may not come to pass, the details about what has already transpired are galling enough. If you wanted to create the worst possible scenario for introducing the first gene-edited babies into the world, it is difficult to imagine how you could improve on this 15-part farce.

More here.

Henry Farrell and Bruce Schneier in Lawfare:

Democracy is an information system.

That’s the starting place of our new paper: “Common-Knowledge Attacks on Democracy.” In it, we look at democracy through the lens of information security, trying to understand the current waves of Internet disinformation attacks. Specifically, we wanted to explain why the same disinformation campaigns that act as a stabilizing influence in Russia are destabilizing in the United States.

The answer revolves around the different ways autocracies and democracies work as information systems. We start by differentiating between two types of knowledge that societies use in their political systems. The first is common political knowledge, which is the body of information that people in a society broadly agree on. People agree on who the rulers are and what their claim to legitimacy is. People agree broadly on how their government works, even if they don’t like it. In a democracy, people agree about how elections work: how districts are created and defined, how candidates are chosen, and that their votes count—even if only roughly and imperfectly.

We contrast this with a very different form of knowledge that we call contested political knowledge, which is, broadly, things that people in society disagree about.

More here.

Connor Linnie at the Dublin Review of Books:

Bacon’s various London studios became notorious for their chaotic admission of decadence and squalor. The most famous of these was his studio at 7 Reece Mews in South Kensington, which was posthumously donated in its entirety to the Hugh Lane Gallery in 1998. The first-floor studio at Reece Mews was reached by climbing a steep wooden staircase with a thick rope used as a makeshift handrail. Visitors entering through the narrow studio door were immediately confronted by a deluge of materials. Detritus mounds of old paint tins, tubes and slashed canvasses reached up toward the pale skylight. The floorboards were covered in a congealing mass of magazines, photographs, catalogues. Bacon’s maxim was that “chaos breeds images” and he absorbed the anarchic atmosphere of his studio space into his developing art practice and aesthetic. Spontaneity and chance were portals of discovery. He drew inspiration for his nightmarish scenes from the photographic collage of screaming dictators, hysterical patients, bullfighters and wrestlers strewn beneath his easel across the studio floor. Images suddenly suggested themselves on the rough unprimed canvass in the slip of a brush or an accidental spatter of pigment. A single strong stroke could define the outline of a man’s jaw, a cloth smearing animate a recoiling movement. Bacon even brashly mixed dust from the floorboards into one of his early paintings to capture the charcoal texture of a suit lapel.

more here.

Rachel Donadio at The Atlantic:

All creators of fiction contain multitudes. Writers write to discover themselves, and to hide themselves. “I know that my books can only be female,” you have written. “But I also know that female (or male) absoluteness is inconceivable. We are tornadoes that pick up fragments with the most varied historical and biographical origins.” No matter who is writing under your name, Elena, your work loses none of its urgency, none of its power. Sometimes I think back to the last passage of The Story of the Lost Child, the final Neapolitan novel. Lenù has again found traces of Lila. “Unlike stories, real life, when it has passed, inclines toward obscurity, not clarity,” Lenù thinks. This is precisely the feeling I have after reading your books. It’s the fiction that offers the clarity. The real life, the lived experience that might drive the imagination, remains a mystery.

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David Shulman at the NYRB:

Peter van Ham’s Alchi, the third volume of a monumental trilogy published by Hirmer on the Buddhist art of western Tibet, must be one of the finest art books ever produced. Its subject, the site of Alchi, sits on the bank of the Indus River in Ladakh, in the high mountain ranges to the east in what is now the Indian state of Kashmir, some thirty-five miles northwest of the capital city of Leh. Unlike Guge, the subject of van Ham’s second volume, Alchi is relatively accessible—good roads now connect Alchi to Leh and (a little less smoothly) to the haunting monastery of Lamayuru, still farther to the north and west.

I visited there with my wife in 2004. A caretaker monk unlocked for us the eleventh-century carved doorway to the Dukhang, every inch of which is painted with Buddhas, Buddhas-to-Be, gods, goddesses, demons, hungry ghosts, imps, flying nymphs, other celestial beings, royal hunters and patrons, monks, Yogi magicians, and many hallucinatory figures that seem to have floated up from the stuff of our dreams. The monk was bored and impatient; after some thirty minutes, he shooed us away. Needless to say, we had no time to unravel even one of the painted tableaux. But I was left, then as now, after spending some weeks with van Ham’s book, with a sense of a dizzying proliferation of vital beings mobbing my eyes. In all of South Asian art, there is nothing quite like these densely painted murals.

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Rafael Behr in The Guardian:

Is it possible to have mild tyranny? It sounds like an oxymoron, and certainly not the kind of thing citizens in a democracy might choose. But when you consider the relationship many of us have with technology there is something gently tyrannical involved. In theory we are free to abandon our computer screens, at liberty not to check our phones. In practice we are ensnared in digital networks for most of our waking hours (and longer, for those with smart watches that monitor sleep patterns). In submission to devices, we surrender vast quantities of personal data. Somewhere in the information harvested by powerful tech companies – Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google – there is a reliable account of where you are, where you are going and who you will see. With a bit of algorithmic extrapolation, it is possible also to predict how you feel.

This knowledge goes beyond any monitoring apparatus established by an authoritarian state. Jamie Susskind writes about a new era of mass “scrutability”, a degree of penetration into our private realms more profound than old-fashioned surveillance. And we sign up for it. We tick the box confirming we have read the terms and conditions, although, of course, we haven’t, because the immediate utility outweighs any abstract cost. Susskind defines this as the “data deal” – a new form of social contract, insufficiently understood by most who enter into it, that entrenches an imbalance of power between the givers of information (you and me) and those who benefit from it (companies and states). He quotes the legal scholar Tim Wu: “Consumers on the whole seem content to bear a little totalitarianism for convenience.”

More here.

Frankie Schembrie in Science:

CRISPR bombshell: Chinese researcher claims to have created gene-edited twins

This week, on the eve of the International Summit on Human Genome Editing in Hong Kong, China, He Jiankui, a Chinese researcher, shocked many with claims that his team had used CRISPR-Cas9 to engineer the DNA of twin baby girls born recently to cripple a key receptor on white blood cells to make them HIV-resistant. The claim—yet to be reported in a scientific paper—was met with a firestorm of criticism, with some scientists and bioethicists calling the work “premature,” “ethically problematic,” and even “monstrous.”

Mars mission got lucky: NASA lander touched down in a sand-filled crater, easing study of planet’s interior

NASA’s InSight spacecraft survived its harrowing descent through the thin atmosphere of Mars and successfully landed on the planet’s surface this week. Although InSight didn’t hit the bull’s-eye of its target landing zone, the soil-filled crater into which the craft touched down offers a good environment for the lander to deploy instruments for studying the planet’s interior.

‘I feel an obligation to be balanced.’ Noted biologist comes to the defense of gene-editing scientist

This week, only one prominent scientist quickly spoke out in defense of He Jiankui, the Chinese research who claimed to have created the first gene-edited children: geneticist George Church, whose Harvard University lab played a pioneering role in developing CRISPR, the genome editor used to engineer embryonic cells in the controversial experiment. Although Church has reservations about He’s actions, he also says the frenzy of criticism surrounding the experiment was extreme.

More here.

A Young Man

We stand together on our block, me and my son,
Neighbors saying our face is the same, but I know
He’s better than me: when other children move

Toward my daughter, he lurches like a brother
Meant to put them down. He is a bodyguard
On the playground. He won’t turn apart from her,

Empties any enemy, leaves them flimsy, me
Confounded. I never fought for so much—
I calmed my daughter when I could cradle

My daughter; my son swaggers about her.
He won’t have to heal a girl he won’t let free.
They are so small. And I, still, am a young man.

In him lives my black anger made red.
They play. He is not yet incarcerated.

by Jericho Brown
from the Academy of American Poets

Ursula Lindsey in The Nation:

I met Naguib Mahfouz once. It was in the winter of 2006, and I’d been living in Cairo for three and a half years. The writer Gamal Al-Ghitani, an old friend of Mahfouz’s, provided me with an introduction to one of his weekly gatherings. I went to a Holiday Inn in the suburb of Maadi. The hotel faced the Nile across four lanes of traffic. There was a metal detector at the front door. Ever since he was nearly killed by a young fundamentalist in 1994, Mahfouz no longer frequented the downtown cafés where he had met friends and fellow writers for half a century.

It was a small group; I can’t remember any names. There must have been a few of Mahfouz’s old friends and a few new admirers such as myself. Also in attendance was a well-known Cairo character, a middle-aged American who favored white suits and who claimed, for decades now, to be writing Mahfouz’s biography.

Mahfouz was 94 then. He was enveloped in an overcoat that was too big for him and made him look like a small, wizened, sympathetic turtle.

More here.

Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe:

The “Easy Problems” of consciousness have to do with how the brain takes in information, thinks about it, and turns it into action. The “Hard Problem,” on the other hand, is the task of explaining our individual, subjective, first-person experiences of the world. What is it like to be me, rather than someone else? Everyone agrees that the Easy Problems are hard; some people think the Hard Problem is almost impossible, while others think it’s pretty easy. Today’s guest, David Chalmers, is arguably the leading philosopher of consciousness working today, and the one who coined the phrase “the Hard Problem,” as well as proposing the philosophical zombie thought experiment. Recently he has been taking seriously the notion of panpsychism. We talk about these knotty issues (about which we deeply disagree), but also spend some time on the possibility that we live in a computer simulation. Would simulated lives be “real”? (There we agree — yes they would.)

More here.

John D. Dingell in The Atlantic:

In my six decades in public service, I’ve seen many changes in our nation and its institutions. Yet the most profound change I’ve witnessed is also the saddest. It is the complete collapse in respect for virtually every institution of government and an unprecedented cynicism about the nobility of public service itself.

These are not just the grumblings of an angry old man lamenting the loss of “the good old days.” In December 1958, almost exactly three years after I entered the House of Representatives, the first American National Election Study, initiated by the University of Michigan, found that 73 percent of Americans trusted the federal government “to do the right thing almost always or most of the time.” As of December 2017, the same study, now conducted by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center, found that this number had plummeted to just 18 percent.

There are many reasons for this dramatic decline: the Vietnam War, Watergate, Ronald Reagan’s folksy but popular message that government was not here to help, the Iraq War, and worst of all by far, the Trumpist mind-set.

More here.

Sean O’Brien at Literary Review:

The earliest letters are sometimes very funny, as Larkin tries on attitudes. At Oxford he claims to be lumbered with ancient and/or mentally defective tutors; his work appears in magazines but is no good; he is upbraided when he reads for pleasure. He tailors his tone to the recipient: bluff and undeluded for Sydney Larkin (‘Pop’), safely and tenderly domestic for Eva (‘Mop’) and affectionately satirical for his older sister, Kitty. He includes some moody Oxford scenery: ‘the playing fields wait for the games of this afternoon; through the unecstatic street the gowned bicycles are whirling.’ This is pretty sophisticated for an eighteen-year-old – partly a parody of the promised bicycle races in Auden’s ‘Spain’, partly the kind of ‘real’ thing that finds its way into Larkin’s poetry and fiction. His description of trying to access a copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover at the Bodleian is a small-scale classic that would slot perfectly into Lucky Jim. You enjoy the voice without ever quite believing what Larkin says, but ‘what he says’, the making over of the humdrum world of college and digs into curmudgeonly comedy, is what matters. This spirit of negation persists into his maturity, but it hardens from playfulness into habit.

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Linda Rodriguez McRobbie at The Boston Globe:

Culture shapes who we are, so it follows that it would also shape our manifestations of stress, mental disorder, emotion. Yet, that also implies a kind of messiness that modern psychology and psychiatry, particularly the American kind, have spent the last 100 years struggling to tidy up.

Since their founding, psychology and psychiatry have strove to standardize the diagnosis and treatment of mental disorders — to bring some certainty to what can feel like a very uncertain field.

But increasingly, clinicians are recognizing the downside of those strictures. Delivering the best care for patients will require something broader and more adaptable — mental health care models that can accommodate hundreds of individual cultures. And because no individual patient experiences a culture the same way, those models will ultimately have to do something even more radical: create the sort of super-personalized mental health care that the profession has aspired to — or, perhaps, should have aspired to — all along.

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Patricia Lockwood at the LRB:

It is worth noting how unerring Berlin’s taste was. She spoke of both Chekhov and William Carlos Williams as models. Her characters read Middlemarch the way other people read Flowers in the Attic: dangling from one hand. The editor of A Manual for Cleaning Women, Stephen Emerson, describes exchanging books with her. He gave her Dreiser once and she hated it, saying he wrote like a guy. I have a soft spot for Dreiser, but it’s because half his writing is made up of descriptions of girls’ trim waists in tight suits twinkling up the steps. The only reason to read Dreiser at age 11 is to become bisexual, and Lucia was far too straight to fall for that. Or perhaps I’m talking about keeping it classy. Do you read Racine when you’re drunk? No, I read a novelisation of One Tree Hill called A Heart So True and it’s awesome, and that’s the reason I’ll never have a story in the Atlantic Monthly.

There is less to say about writers who know what to leave out. Even Davis, in her introduction to A Manual for Cleaning Women, seems somewhat at a loss, though their affinity is a given: a woman who writes a story like Davis’s ‘Mown Lawn’ is going to like a woman who writes: ‘There are certain perfect particular sounds. A tennis ball, a golf ball hit just right. A fly ball in a leather glove. Lingering thud of a knockout. I get dizzy at the sound of a perfect pool break, a crisp bank shot followed by three or four muffled slides and consecutive clicks.

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Timothy Aubry in The Chronicle of Higher Education:

However inclined by their training to vacillate, scholars in the humanities are increasingly being asked to take sides. Should they support or oppose their students’ efforts to ban a reactionary speaker from campus? Should they defend the feminist philosopher who affirms the possibility of transracial identity or join those demanding her article be retracted? Should they remove an influential writer from the syllabus because of his fascist sympathies? Should they sign the petition urging their professional organization to join the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions campaign against Israel? So much of academic life seems colored by high-stakes political struggles, and so many decisions large and small are now treated as gestures of allegiance to particular ideological camps and as betrayals of others. It’s difficult to even list these polarizing campus scenarios without attracting political labels.

Literary scholars will very likely regard this situation as nothing new. Their discipline, after all, has been insisting for decades that everything is political. As far back as 1968, a group of radical scholars sought to take over the Modern Language Association’s annual conference. Louis Kampf was arrested for taping a poster to the wall of the conference hotel announcing that “The Tygers of Wrath are Wiser than the Horses of Instruction,” and Noam Chomsky led a Vietnam War teach-in with 500-plus attendees. Then, as anyone even glancingly familiar with the culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s knows, the emphasis on politics gave birth to an attitude of suspicion toward the canon. While authors like Shakespeare and Woolf were sometimes celebrated for their works’ subversive power, many others, like Conrad, were condemned for reinforcing dominant ideologies. The urge to dethrone literary heroes on the basis of their bad politics has persisted up to the present moment, gaining strength as the Black Lives Matter and #MeToo movements have emerged. The past year witnessed an especially heated debate about how to treat Junot Diaz’s work in light of allegations that he sexually harassed several women, with many now identifying conspicuous signs of misogyny in his fiction, while other scholars have maintained that he is being scapegoated because of his ethnic background.

More here.