Robert Wright in Wired:

Sam Harris, one of the original members of the group dubbed the “New Atheists” (by Wired!) 12 years ago, says he doesn’t like tribalism. During his recent, much-discussed debate with Vox founder Ezra Klein about race and IQ, Harris declared that tribalism “is a problem we must outgrow.”

But apparently Harris doesn’t think he is part of that “we.” After he accused Klein of fomenting a “really indissoluble kind of tribalism” in the form of identity politics, and Klein replied that Harris exhibits his own form of tribalism, Harris said coolly, “I know I’m not thinking tribally in this respect.”

Not only is Harris capable of transcending tribalism—so is his tribe! Reflecting on his debate with Klein, Harris said that his own followers care “massively about following the logic of a conversation” and probe his arguments for signs of weakness, whereas Klein’s followers have more primitive concerns: “Are you making political points that are massaging the outraged parts of our brains? Do you have your hands on our amygdala and are you pushing the right buttons?”

Of the various things that critics of the New Atheists find annoying about them—and here I speak from personal experience—this ranks near the top: the air of rationalist superiority they often exude.

More here.

Carl Zimmer in the New York Times:

James Priest couldn’t make sense of it. He was examining the DNA of a desperately ill baby, searching for a genetic mutation that threatened to stop her heart. But the results looked as if they had come from two different infants.

“I was just flabbergasted,” said Dr. Priest, a pediatric cardiologist at Stanford University.

The baby, it turned out, carried a mixture of genetically distinct cells, a condition known as mosaicism. Some of her cells carried the deadly mutation, but others did not. They could have belonged to a healthy child.

We’re accustomed to thinking of our cells sharing an identical set of genes, faithfully copied ever since we were mere fertilized eggs. When we talk about our genome — all the DNA in our cells — we speak in the singular.

But over the course of decades, it has become clear that the genome doesn’t just vary from person to person. It also varies from cell to cell. The condition is not uncommon: We are all mosaics.

More here.

Allison De Jong at ABC News:

The nation’s religious makeup has shifted dramatically in the past 15 years, with a sharp drop in the number of Americans who say they’re members of a Protestant denomination – still the nation’s most prevalent religious group – and a rise in the number who profess no religion.

On average last year, 36 percent of Americans in ABC News/Washington Post pollsidentified themselves as members of a Protestant faith, extending a gradual trend down from 50 percent in 2003. That includes an 8-point drop in the number of evangelical white Protestants, an important political group.

Reflecting the change among Protestants, the share of Christians overall has declined from 83 percent of the adult population in 2003 to 72 percent on average last year. In the same time, the number of Americans who say they have no religion has nearly doubled, to 21 percent.

More here.

Ed Yong in The Atlantic:

In 1920, the night before Easter Sunday, Otto Loewi woke up, seemingly possessed of an important idea. He wrote it down on a piece of paper and promptly returned to sleep. When he reawakened, he found that his scribbles were illegible. But fortunately, the next night, the idea returned. It was the design of a simple experiment that eventually proved something Loewi had long hypothesized: Nerve cells communicate by exchanging chemicals, or neurotransmitters. The confirmation of that idea earned him a Nobel Prize in medicine in 1936.

Almost a century later after Loewi’s fateful snoozes, many experiments have shown that sleep promotes creative problem-solving. Now, Penny Lewis from Cardiff University and two of her colleagues have collated and combined those discoveries into a new theory that explains why sleep and creativity are linked. Specifically, their idea explains how the two main phases of sleep—REM and non-REM—work together to help us find unrecognized links between what we already know, and discover out-of-the-box solutions to vexing problems.

More here.

Be it resolved, what you call political correctness, I call progress… from Munk Debates on Vimeo.

Brian D. Johnson at The Walrus:

Godard has a way of spinning every question into a cosmic tangent. A Brazilian journalist asked him about his approach to sound. A technical question. Godard replied that one his original titles for the film was An Attempt at Blue. “There are things that text and language cannot convey,” he added. “The voice is not the same as speech. And speech is not necessarily language. When it came to sound, the aim was to separate the sound from the image. We didn’t want it to be just an accompaniment. We wanted a true dialogue between the sound and the images.” Alluding to cinema’s original pioneers, he added, “I believe that the Lumière brothers, when they filmed the arrival of the train in the station, were thinking of all this.” Without a pause, he then jumped straight to French impressionism. “What the impressionists have brought into art is light. Then Cézanne brought colour, and colour has something to do with speech—even if we are talking about Heidegger here. The sound should not be too close to the images for me. The perfect screening should be in a café instead of on a TV screen.

more here.

Laura Freeman at Literary Review:

When Salvador Dalí came to lecture at the International Surrealist Exhibition in London in 1936, he arrived with two Russian wolfhounds on leads. He wore a deep-sea diver’s suit and carried a billiard cue. A jewelled dagger hung from his belt. The subject of his lecture was ‘Paranoia, The Pre-Raphaelites, Harpo Marx and Phantoms’. The audience couldn’t hear him through the diving helmet, so it was not immediately obvious that Dalí was suffocating. When friends did eventually sound the alarm, they found the bolts on Dalí’s helmet stuck fast. Send for a spanner! By the time they’d taken the helmet off, Dalí was close to death.

All in the name of surreal art. Nothing was too silly, too sensational, too childishly scatological for Dalí, André Breton, Marcel Duchamp and the squabbling Surrealist gang.

more here.

Jenny Uglow at the NYRB:

Nothing, however, prepares one for the tender ferocity of Bacon’s isolated, entrapped figures. In the earliest of these, the large canvas of Figure in a Landscape(1945), a curled-up, almost human form appears to be submerged in a desert—we see his arm and part of his body, but the legs of his suit hang, empty, over a bench. This is masculinity destroyed. The sense of desperation is even stronger in Bacon’s paintings of animals, such as Dog (1952), in which the dog whirls like a dervish, absorbed in chasing its tail, while cars speed by on a palm-bordered freeway, or Study of a Baboon (1953), where the monkey flies and howls against the mesh of a fence. In their struggles, these animals are the fellows of Bacon’s “screaming popes”: in Study after Velazquez (1950), a businessman in a dark suit, jaws wrenched open in a silent yell, is trapped behind red bars that fall like a curtain of blood. The curators connect Bacon’s postwar angst with Giacometti’s elongated statues, isolated in space, and to the philosophy of existentialism. Yet Bacon’s vehement brushstrokes speak of energy and involvement, physical, not cerebral responses. In Study for Portrait II (after the Life Mask of William Blake) (1955), you feel the urgent vision behind the lidded eyes. He cares, passionately.

more here.

Gobe Cherry in The Michigan Engineer:

A small device implanted under the skin shows promise for improving breast cancer survival by catching cancer cells and slowing the development of metastatic tumors in other organs. These findings, based on experiments in mice and reported in the journal Cancer Research, suggest a path for identifying metastatic cancer early and intervening to improve outcomes. “This study shows that in the metastatic setting, early detection combined with a therapeutic intervention can improve outcomes. Early detection of a primary tumor is generally associated with improved outcomes. But that’s not necessarily been tested in metastatic cancer,” says study author Lonnie D. Shea, Ph.D., the William and Valerie Hall Department Chair of Biomedical Engineering at the University of Michigan.

The study found 64 percent fewer metastatic cancer cells in the liver and 75 percent fewer metastatic cancer cells in the brains of mice implanted with the devices compared to mice without them, five days after both groups underwent surgery to remove cancerous tumors. This suggests that the presence of the device slows the progress of metastatic disease. The device is a scaffold is made of FDA-approved material commonly used in sutures and wound dressings. It’s biodegradable and could last up to two years within a patient. The researchers envision it would be implanted under the skin, monitored with non-invasive imaging and removed upon signs of cancer cell colonization, at which point additional treatment could be administered. The scaffold is designed to mimic the environment in other organs before cancer cells migrate there. The scaffold attracts the body’s immune cells, and the immune cells draw in the cancer cells. This then limits the immune cells from heading to the lung, liver or brain, where breast cancer commonly spreads.

More here.

Call and Answer

Tell me why it is we don’t lift our voices these days
And cry over what is happening. Have you noticed
The plans are made for Iraq and the ice cap is melting?

I say to myself: “Go on, cry. What’s the sense
Of being an adult and having no voice? Cry out!
See who will answer! This is Call and Answer!”

We will have to call especially loud to reach
Our angels, who are hard of hearing; they are hiding
In the jugs of silence filled during our wars.

Have we agreed to so many wars that we can’t
Escape from silence? If we don’t lift our voices, we allow
Others (who are ourselves) to rob the house.

How come we’ve listened to the great criers—Neruda,
Akhmatova, Thoreau, Frederick Douglass—and now
We’re silent as sparrows in the little bushes?

Some masters say our life lasts only seven days.
Where are we in the week? Is it Thursday yet?
Hurry, cry now! Soon Sunday night will come.

Robert Bly
from My Sentence was a Thousand Years of Joy
Harper Perennial

“… but who /
………….. drinks / from a mirage”
……………………………………. —poet, Sonia Bueno

Hard to Say

but we do:

vital hallucinations on driving a coast road 
new day blinding sea calm sequined motion
stiletto horizon running its blade south north

.. far
     . ……………………………………………. far off

……………………. we

swing through bends
on asphalt swells
top down

and suddenly or soon (hard to say)
we’re in breeze-driven mist
in a trough between two hills
……………………………………  …. wherein unsure

we eventually capitulate to inevitability
and at once or with time (hard to say)
substance morphs into
………………………………….  mirage
……………………

Jim Culleny
5/15/18

This last month or so I’ve been desperately trying to get the 2000s chapter fit for human consumption. I’ve borrowed a trick from my compatriot from West Yorkshire, David Peace, and am listening to music from each of the decades I’m writing about. YouTube also spins me off into a world of relevant tunes that put me in the mood for writing.

This has sent me on an interesting and at times disturbing trail in the last few weeks, as I’ve been working on fiction by another West Yorkshire author, Nadeem Aslam. Aslam’s 2004 novel Maps for Lost Lovers is alternately lyrical and overwritten, but is genuinely invested in women’s experiences and human rights. The novel is also partly about the increasing separation over time between different communities from the Indian subcontinent living in Britain, especially after the 1971 War that resulted in Bangladesh’s independence. Read more »

by Daniel Ranard

The fact that anything happens securely on the web should be mind-boggling. In some ways, the internet is like a group of people shouting at each other across an open field. How can you hold a secret conversation when anyone might be listening?  How do you prevent imposters, when you can’t always see the face behind the shout?

Imagine trying to establish, say, paperless currency. How do I pay you?  Maybe I just yell that I’m giving you ten (invisible) dollars.  But you won’t be sure that it’s really me, or that I really have the money. And when you try to spend it later, how will anyone know I gave it to you?

One solution is for everyone to place their trust in some individual or organization. When we have a private message to deliver, we whisper it to our trusted messenger, who passes it along in secret. Likewise, when I want to pay you, I tell a trusted organization – the bank. They check it’s really me, then subtract money from my virtual balance, notifying you that you’ve been “paid.”

Most of us prefer not to trust strangers unless we need to. So how can we conduct ourselves on the internet, without ceding power to any one group?

No, I’m not about to start preaching bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies. I just want to share some satisfyingly clever ideas from cryptography, which accomplish the seemingly impossible. Read more »