Adam Dalva in Guernica:

Roxane Gay’s Hunger is very, very good—the rare memoir that doubles as page-turner. I’m writing this on a flight (Gay’s passages on airplane issues are some of her best: the seatbelt extenders, having to buy two tickets) and the woman across the aisle is reading Difficult Women. “Book Twins!” she just said happily. This never happens. That Gay has reached so many is testament to her skill with empathetic connection. She writes early in Hunger that her “life is split in two, cleaved not so neatly. There is the before and after. Before I gained weight. After I gained weight. Before I was raped. After I was raped.”

I don’t know how to talk about rape and sexual violence when it comes to my own story. It is easier to say, “something terrible happened.”

Something terrible happened. That something terrible broke me. I wish I could leave it at that, but this is a memoir of my body so I need to tell you what happened to my body.

We are pulled in by the repetition, as we are by Gay’s hesitance. Hunger reaches this most difficult part of its narrative early, after a sequence of short introductory chapters: Twelve-year-old Gay falls in love with a boy. The boy brings her to a cabin where his friends are waiting, and a horrible sexual assault takes place. It remains secret. “All too often, what ‘he said’ matters more, so we just swallow the truth. We swallow it, and more often than not, that truth turns rancid. It spreads through the body like an infection.” One beautifully depicted consequence of this infection: Gay eats, hoping to disguise her body, disappear into armor. “I don’t know how I let things get so out of control, but I do.” She eventually weighs 577 pounds.

More here.

Richard Handler in Public Books:

Tim Watson’s Culture Writing surveys the border between anthropology and literature in the years following World War II. Watson provides illuminating readings of British social anthropology in relation to novels by Barbara Pym, and of North American cultural anthropology in relation to novels by Ursula Le Guin and Saul Bellow. There are also chapters on Édouard Glissant and Michel Leiris, working in the French tradition (in which the border between literary and ethnographic writing was configured differently than it was in the Anglo-American tradition). While anthropologists will find much of value in Watson’s individual readings, they may find his broader sketch of their disciplinary history to be seriously askew, as I shall suggest in what follows.

The main characters of Culture Writing are literary authors who had close connections to anthropology, the fictional anthropologists those authors created, and anthropologists who wrote about their work in literary genres that were not professionally conventional for them at the time. Discussing fictional anthropologists created by novelists who knew a lot about anthropology—and relating those characters and the novels in which they appear to the state of professional anthropology of the time—is a genuinely creative critical move.

More here.

Ed Yong in The Atlantic:

Last year, the world learned that researchers led by David Evans from the University of Alberta had resurrected a virus called horsepox. The virus hasn’t been seen in nature for decades, but Evans’s team assembled it using genetic material they ordered from a company that synthesizes DNA.

The work caused a huge stir. Horsepox is harmless to people, but its close cousin, smallpox, killed hundreds of millions before being eradicated in 1980. Only two stocks of smallpox remain, one held by Russia and the other by the United States. But Evans’s critics argued that his work makes it easier for others to re-create smallpox themselves, and, whether through accident or malice, release it. That would be horrific: Few people today are immunized against smallpox, and vaccine reserves are limited. Several concerned parties wrote letters urging scientific journals not to publish the paper that described the work, but PLOS One did so in January.

This controversy is the latest chapter in an ongoing debate around “dual-use research of concern”—research that could clearly be applied for both good and ill. More than that, it reflects a vulnerability at the heart of modern science, where small groups of researchers and reviewers can make virtually unilateral decisions about experiments that have potentially global consequences, and that everyone else only learns about after the fact.

More here.

Michael Spagat in The Conversation:

What happens when a scientific journal publishes information that turns out to be false? A fracas over a recent Washington Post article provides an illuminating case study in how, even years after they’re published, uncorrected false claims can still end up repeated time and again. But at the same time, it shows how simply alerting responsible journalists and news editors to repeated errors can do a lot to combat false claims that stubbornly live on even after they’ve been debunked.

It all started with a 2006 article published in the eminent journal The Lancet, entitled Mortality after the 2003 invasion of Iraq: a cross-sectional cluster sample survey. The article had many problems, but one of its graphs in particular stuck out. That one figure displayed new estimated numbers of violent deaths in the Iraq War, and came up with numbers massively higher than anything anyone had seriously suggested before.

And although the article’s reported violence numbers increased over time far more rapidly than those reported by other sources, including the Iraq Body Count (IBC) project, the graph gave the inaccurate impression that IBC trends actually tracked their new data quite closely – ostensibly validating what, at first glance, seemed like a very hard-to-swallow new dataset.

More here.

Aditya Chakrabortty in The Guardian:

What will a Corbyn government actually do? Brexit aside, British politics has no bigger known unknown. The prospect fills the rich with fear and the left with hope. Both sides assume that Prime Minister Jeremy Corbyn will be defined by his radicalism, yet in one corner of Britain an arm of the state is already ruling in his name. And the early results are sobering.

In the north London borough of Haringey, the Blairite council leadership was deposed by Labour members a few months ago and replaced with avowed leftwingers. Said the new council leader, Joe Ejiofor: “Over the next four years, it will be up to us to show everybody what this mythical beast the Corbyn council does.” The title may not have been of his making, but by God was he going to wear it. “It is for the many, not the few.”

Everybody cheering that May morning knew what he meant. No more slinging families out of their homes to clear way for multinational developers. No more machine politics and trampling over communities. No more of the politics of contempt.

It was the willingness of the previous leader, Claire Kober, to hand swaths of the borough over to giant building companies that forced her out of office.

More here.

Hayley Phelan in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

THERE HAS ALWAYS BEEN a lot of hand-wringing around erotica, especially erotica that centers on female submission. Feminists worry that it perpetuates harmful gender dynamics, while conservatives shudder at the frank depictions of female sexuality. Intellectuals usually dismiss it as smut. In the meantime, millions of people — mostly women — gobble it up. The box office success of Fifty Shades Freed, the third installment in the Hollywood trilogy based on E. L. James’s best-selling BDSM romance series, is only the latest example. How is it, wondered pundits, that this particular movie is a hit at the height of the #MeToo movement? Why are women flocking to see a film about a rich, white man dominating a much younger, much less powerful woman?

There’s no obvious reason that a movement against misogyny, sexual assault, and non-consensual advances should be incompatible with fantasies of consensual, sexual submission. For one thing, fantasies of submission are not strictly a female feminine phenomenon.

More here.

Ben East in The Guardian:

In a squalid, lawless “fugee” camp (the letters R and e have fallen off the entrance gate) that looks and smells like a giant Portaloo, one of the characters in Mohammed Hanif’s ambitious third novel considers running away to the desert. “What’s the worst that can happen,” he thinks. “I’ll starve to death. I’ll roast under the sun. God left this place a long time ago… He had had enough. I have had a bit more than that.” This philosophical passage is spoken by a dog called Mutt, and Hanif’s book is undoubtedly a high-wire act. Red Birds constantly threatens to fall apart, its characters and locations both achingly realistic and elusively metaphysical. But that’s part of its charm: you never know where Hanif’s farce will go next. He starts with an American pilot crashing in the desert near a downgraded refugee camp “full of human scum” he was supposed to bomb. When Major Ellie finally reaches the outskirts of the camp, Mutt introduces him to a teenage refugee named Momo, who is using an old copy of Fortune as his guide to becoming a hotshot businessman.

Momo is also being harassed by a USAID worker nicknamed “Lady Flowerbody”, who sees him as ideal material for her book on the “teenage Muslim mind”. The irony is not lost on Momo’s mother, mourning for her eldest son, Bro Ali, who has mysteriously disappeared in the Hangar – an abandoned American refuelling facility next to the camp. “First they bomb our house, then they take away my son, and now [they] are here to make us feel all right,” she says.

More here.

Joseph E. LeDoux in Nautilus:

Behaviorism, which flourished in the first half of the 20th century, is a school of thought in psychology that rejects the study of conscious experience in favor of objectively measurable events (such as responses to stimuli). Due to behaviorism’s influence, researchers interested in emotion in animals have tended to take one of two approaches. Some have treated emotion as a brain state that connects external stimuli with responses.⁷ These researchers, for the most part, viewed such brain states as operating without the necessity of conscious awareness (and therefore as separate from feelings), thus avoiding questions about consciousness in animals.⁸ Others argued, in the tradition of Darwin, that humans inherited emotional states of mind from animals, and that behavioral responses give evidence that these states of mind exist in animal brains.⁹ The first approach has practical advantages, since it focuses research on objective responses of the body and brain, but suffers from the fact that it ignores what most people would say is the essence of an emotion: the conscious feeling. The second approach puts feelings front and center, but is based on assumptions about mental states in animals that cannot easily be verified scientifically.

When I was getting started in my studies of emotion in animals in the mid-1980s, I adopted a third approach to try to get around these problems.¹⁰ I treated emotions in terms of essentially non-conscious brain states that connect significant stimuli with response mechanisms, and feelings as conscious experiences arising from these non-conscious brain states.¹¹ My theory, therefore, emphasized the importance of feelings, but I argued that the brain mechanisms that control emotional responses and those that generate conscious feelings are separate. By separating processes that non-consciously detect and respond to significant stimuli from those that create feelings, emotional mechanisms could be studied in animals without having to solve the problem of whether animals feel emotion, while at the same time honoring the importance of feelings in the human mind and brain.

More here.

At the Sunoco in West Virginia

My father is dreamy, forgetful, aloof. But I’ve never actually been left
behind before. I walk behind an aisle of Frito-Lays and burst into tears.

I should’ve eaten the eggs he bought me at the Super 8. I should’ve saved
my allowance like he’d said. I should’ve made myself bigger, louder,

less forgettable. A female customer has her eyes locked on me as she speaks
into her boxy cell phone: Yes, maybe two minutes ago. Looks about ten,

barefoot, wearing pink pajamas. It takes about five minutes, but Dad
still beats the cops back to the station. His arms are too tan from years

on the water, moles dark as moons, and he takes me in them gingerly,
as if I am already dead, and because I’ve never heard him cry I whisper,

It’s okay, Daddy, I’m okay. He smells of unwashed denim and paint thinner.
He doesn’t notice the people staring, or the cop car rolling slow-motion

into the station, or the woman watching our reunion with her hands
over her mouth, relief that I am not actually abandoned,

although at some point, I will be, we will all be, as she knows,
as she too has been abandoned. I am eleven, and lucky. No one is yet dead.

It will be months before anyone dies. God forgive me, he whispers
into my child’s ear, and I realize in this scenario, I am the God

to whom he speaks. I could wield my power but won’t. Mom is across
the country. Dad wears a gold chain around his neck. I reach for it.

by Catherine Pond
from Narrative Magazine

Marian L. Tupy in Human Progress:

On Monday, William Nordhaus and Paul Romer were awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics. Nordhaus, the Sterling Professor of Economics at Yale University, is best known for his work in economic modelling and climate change. Romer, who teaches at New York University, is a pioneer of endogenous growth theory, which holds that investment in human capital, innovation, and knowledge are significant contributors to economic growth.

The two American economists’ research is vital in showing the way people underestimate the progress humanity has already made and the likelihood that it will continue well into the future.

In his 1996 paper, Do Real-Output and Real-Wage Measures Capture Reality? The History of Lighting Suggests Not, Nordhaus looked at the economics of light. Open fire, he noted, produced a mere 0.00235 lumens per watt (a lumen is a measure of how much visible light is emitted by a source.) Lumens per watt refers to the energy efficiency of lighting. A traditional 60 watt incandescent bulb, for example, produces 860 lumens.

A sesame lamp could produce 0.0597 lumens per watt; a sperm tallow candle 0.1009 lumens; whale oil 0.1346 lumens and an early town gaslamp 0.2464 lumens. An electric filament lamp, which was launched in 1883, achieved an unbelievable 2.6 lumens per watt and, due to subsequent technological improvements, managed to deliver an astonishing 14.1667 lumens by 1990. Yet that’s small beer compared to the compact fluorescent lightbulb, which delivered 68.2778 lumens per watt when it was launched in 1992.

More here.

Ed Yong in The Atlantic:

In 2014, two archaeologists, Katerina Douka and Tom Higham, paid a visit to Denisova Cave—a site high up in Siberia’s Altai Mountains that has become something of a magnet for scientists interested in humanity’s past. A decade ago, researchers found a pinky bone in the cave. After analyzing its DNA, they realized it represented a previously unknown group of ancient humans, distinct from either Neanderthals or Homo sapiens. That group became known as the Denisovans.

Three Denisovan teeth have been found in the same place since, along with the toe of a Neanderthal. But such recognizable bones are a rarity. When Douka and Higham visited the cave, they realized that the vast majority of bones recovered from it are tiny, unidentifiable slivers. It’s impossible to tell which body part they came from, let alone which species. Roughly 5 percent of them can be narrowed down to a specific class of animals—a mammal, perhaps, but nothing more precise. “They’re dug up, washed, and put in a bag, never to be seen again,” Douka says.

If analyzed, the DNA within these fragments could easily reveal the identity of their owner. But the fragments are manifold, and sequencing DNA is still laborious and expensive. It would be too costly to inspect every single sliver. So instead, Douka and Higham turned to a new technique that’s much faster and cheaper.

More here.

Bruce Schneier in the New York Times:

It’s no secret that computers are insecure. Stories like the recent Facebook hack, the Equifax hack and the hacking of government agenciesare remarkable for how unremarkable they really are. They might make headlines for a few days, but they’re just the newsworthy tip of a very large iceberg.

The risks are about to get worse, because computers are being embedded into physical devices and will affect lives, not just our data. Security is not a problem the market will solve. The government needs to step in and regulate this increasingly dangerous space.

The primary reason computers are insecure is that most buyers aren’t willing to pay — in money, features, or time to market — for security to be built into the products and services they want. As a result, we are stuck with hackable internet protocols, computers that are riddled with vulnerabilities and networks that are easily penetrated.

We have accepted this tenuous situation because, for a very long time, computer security has mostly been about data. Banking data stored by financial institutions might be important, but nobody dies when it’s stolen. Facebook account data might be important, but again, nobody dies when it’s stolen. Regardless of how bad these hacks are, it has historically been cheaper to accept the results than to fix the problems. But the nature of how we use computers is changing, and that comes with greater security risks.

More here.

Rachel Sugar in Vox:

CVS is a drugstore much like other drugstores, with one important difference: The receipts are very long.

How long are the receipts? For at least a decade, concerned shoppers have dedicated themselves to this question, producing a robust body of phone-picture literature on the subject. You could not major in CVS receipt studies, probably, but you could minor.

Not all CVS receipts are created equal. If you, a non-loyal shopper, mosey into CVS and buy some Tylenol and a package of seasonal candy, you will get a receipt that is unspectacular (read: a normal length). To get one of the iconically long CVS receipts, you need to use your ExtraCare card, which means you need to be an ExtraCare member. (You can join as long as you are willing to turn over your name and phone number in exchange for better deals.)

More here.

Zoovia Hamiduddin in Dawn:

A picture is worth a thousand words. In the case of Indian filmmaker (not to be confused with the Pakistani actor) Rahat Kazmi’s 2018 film Lihaaf: The Quilt, based on Ismat Chughtai’s controversial short story of the same name, the production’s publicity poster says perhaps more than a thousand words.

Kazmi’s Lihaaf has little bearing to Chughtai’s story. The intensely sexualised poster shows two sets of fair and lovely feet, adorned with paazeb [anklets], languidly intertwined. A very titillating, sensual, consensual and egalitarian image — you can’t tell which feet belong to the whiter-than-white mistress and which to the very dark maid. The poster brims with confidence and choice; a loud, proud statement about LGBTQ’s arrival on the Indian cinema screen. The plush, ruby red quilt on which the feet are presented may be Kazmi’s Lihaaf, but it is certainly not ‘Lady Changez’s’ quilt.

Chughtai, a card-carrying communist and proud early member of the Progressive Writers’ Association, would have been horrified at such a bourgeoisie representation of her writing. When she wrote Lihaaf, Chughtai was an unmarried, 20-something influenced by the likes of John Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, George Bernard Shaw, D.H. Lawrence and his inflammatory Lady Chatterley’s Lover and, most importantly, Rashid Jehan, who “fuelled my rebelliousness. She explained to me that what is considered impolitic and rude in society is often the truth; she became my inspiration.”

More here.

Deep Time

In the nuclear twilight
the animals, the plants
and the minerals of the earth
have acquired unparalleled powers
many times greater than those of humans.

Eras elapse:

Cactaceacene
Birguscene
Limulidacene.

The colors bleed out of things
and glob together in the sand
which radiates with increasing intensity
and soaring saturation

and all the markets
that have piled up
haphazardly over the centuries

collapse one by one

until the whole
ramshackle structure
comes down

and forms a hard, geometric puddle
of dead currency
teeming with animals.

New organisms spring up everywhere
in an explosion of life
of Cambrian proportions.

On an ancient island
of plastic
polystyrene mosses multiply
in the shadow
of venerable, old polystyrene trees.

Here live the spirits of mankind.

by  Dominique De Groen
from Poetry International, 2018
© Translation: 2018, Jonathan William Beaton

Adam Rutherford in The Guardian:

Somewhere in my parents’ photo albums there is a picture of me, aged seven or eight, lying in my bed, reading. On the wall, there are postcards from holidays, a poster of space pirate Han Solo crouching above a fictional snow lizard called a Tauntaun, and a picture of an equally alien but very real cephalopod, a nautilus, a mollusc with a pin-hole eye and tentacular cirri projecting from its tiger-striped shell. It was cut out from the second copy of Life on Earth that my father had acquired, the book that accompanied the BBC series by David Attenborough. The first was for reading, the second, bought cheap without a dust cover, was for the photos.

It’s difficult for me to appraise the work of Attenborough critically. I do what I do, to a large degree because of what he has done. Like so many people of my vintage, seeing the wonder of nature with him as our guide was inestimably influential in steering us towards science. That first book was published on Charles Darwin’s 170th birthday, a fitting tribute to the greatest idea anyone has ever had. I approached the 40th anniversary edition with a cautious awe. It does not disappoint. The new Life on Earth is as glorious as the first, if not more so for the sole reason that it has been considerably updated. Science never rests, and while the overarching Darwinian ideas in the 1979 edition are correct, many of the details have moved onwards significantly. It’s not simply that we have observed more of nature with ever increasingly sophisticated technology. Ideas about biodiversity and mass extinctions are now prominently included, and the revelation – now textbook – that birds are dinosaurs is front and centre, having been dismissed the first time round.

More here.