Natalie Wolchover in Quanta:

In 2014, a graduate student at the University of Waterloo, Canada, named Cohl Furey rented a car and drove six hours south to Pennsylvania State University, eager to talk to a physics professor there named Murat Günaydin. Furey had figured out how to build on a finding of Günaydin’s from 40 years earlier — a largely forgotten result that supported a powerful suspicion about fundamental physics and its relationship to pure math.

The suspicion, harbored by many physicists and mathematicians over the decades but rarely actively pursued, is that the peculiar panoply of forces and particles that comprise reality spring logically from the properties of eight-dimensional numbers called “octonions.”

As numbers go, the familiar real numbers — those found on the number line, like 1, π and -83.777 — just get things started. Real numbers can be paired up in a particular way to form “complex numbers,” first studied in 16th-century Italy, that behave like coordinates on a 2-D plane. Adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing is like translating and rotating positions around the plane. Complex numbers, suitably paired, form 4-D “quaternions,” discovered in 1843 by the Irish mathematician William Rowan Hamilton, who on the spot ecstatically chiseled the formula into Dublin’s Broome Bridge. John Graves, a lawyer friend of Hamilton’s, subsequently showed that pairs of quaternions make octonions: numbers that define coordinates in an abstract 8-D space.

More here.  [Thanks to Ali Minai.]

Olga Khazan in The Atlantic:

Carol Dweck, a psychology professor at Stanford University, remembers asking an undergraduate seminar recently, “How many of you are waiting to find your passion?”

“Almost all of them raised their hand and got dreamy looks in their eyes,” she told me. They talked about it “like a tidal wave would sweep over them.” Sploosh. Huzzah! It’s accounting!

Would they have unlimited motivation for their passion? They nodded solemnly.

“I hate to burst your balloon,” she said, “but it doesn’t usually happen that way.”

What Dweck asked her students is a common refrain in American society. The term “Follow your passion” has increased ninefold in English books since 1990. “Find something you love to do and you’ll never have to work a day in your life” is another college-counseling standby of unknown provenance.

But according to Dweck and others, that advice is steering people wrong.

More here.

Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone:

Bilal Abdul Kareem is an expert in staying alive.

Born Darrell Lamont Phelps, he grew up just north of the Bronx in Mount Vernon, New York. He did what lots of kids in his neighborhood were doing in the late Seventies and Eighties: He spent his time rolling on the floor laughing to comics like Flip Wilson and Richard Pryor.

Later, after college at SUNY Purchase in Westchester, he decided to try stand-up himself. Hecklers were a problem.

In upscale white clubs where he sometimes performed, audiences would clap politely if his jokes missed. Not so much in the Brooklyn clubs he worked. The mostly black audiences there let him have it when he was off.

“Black folks always want to get involved in the act, you know what I’m saying?” he recalls, laughing. “Then you gotta respond with some ‘Yo mama’s so fat’ jokes just to get them to sit down and shut up.”

Over a decade later, after some major life changes – he’d converted to Islam and found himself working as a TV reporter in the Middle East under his new name, Bilal Abdul Kareem – he again drew upon his stand-up experience to stay alive. Only he wasn’t worried about dying on stage this time. This time it was more serious.

More here.

Alissa Quart and Barbara Ehrenreich in The NY Review of Books:

Is the #MeToo “moment” the beginning of a new feminism? Coined by the civil rights activist Tarana Burke in 2006, the term took off in 2017 when celebrities like the actress Alyssa Milano began using it as a Twitter hashtag. Extensive reporting in The New York Times and The New Yorker on harassment in the entertainment and tech industries helped the movement bring down some of those fields’ most powerful figures. By speaking out, a number of famous actresses—some of them better known previously for their not-so-feminist roles as cute witches and beguiling prostitutes—have done so as well. To date, most of #MeToo’s attention has been aimed at the rich and influential: for instance, abusive talk show hosts and other notorious media figures.

#MeToo has too often ignored the most frequent victims of abuse, however, such as waitresses or hotel housekeepers. These are among the invisible people who keep society going—cleaning homes, harvesting our vegetables, and serving salads made of these vegetables. Who among those of us who depend on their labor knows their struggles or even their names? It can seem like an uphill battle to bring attention to the working-class victims of harassment, even though these women are often abused in starker and more brutal fashion than their counterparts in Hollywood.

Bernice Yeung, an investigative journalist for the reporting nonprofit organization Reveal, has helped correct this imbalance. Yeung is no tourist in the lives of the working poor women she covers. She has been writing about the plight of farmworkers and maids harassed and raped by their overseers for more than five years, in places far from executive offices—fields, basements, and break rooms. Her new book, In a Day’s Work, is a bleak but much-needed addition to the literature on sexual harassment in the US.

More here.

Amitava Kumar in The Baffler:

THIS WAS A FEW YEARS AGO. A publisher called from Delhi to ask if I would write a short book about my hometown, Patna, in eastern India. I thought of the rats that had carried away my mother’s dentures and said yes.

My model for the book about Patna, a book about a city, was E.B. White’s classic essay Here is New York. “This piece about New York was written in the summer of 1948 during a hot spell.” The first sentence of White’s foreword: a promise that my book, too, could be done quickly. When summer came, I went to Patna. Each day I would step out of my parents’ home, a little Moleskine notebook in my pocket, and return at night with stories.

When my book was about to be published, a newspaper editor asked me to write a piece about the process of putting the book together. Using my notebook number eighteen as an example, I simply described a day, starting with a 9:00 a.m. visit to the railway station and ending with me coming home at 10:00 p.m. after watching a rehearsal for a play about caste. I’m telling you all this because this is what my newspaper piece had gleaned from my notebook about what happened at 10:00 p.m.:

My sisters are talking in the room that is at the far end of the house. This used to be my room when I was a boy. I’m downloading photographs on my computer, but I eavesdrop on their conversation. My elder sister is a doctor, married to a doctor. He has a sister, who is a doctor—and her husband, also a doctor, is having an affair. The woman with whom he is having the affair is not a doctor. She is the receptionist at his hospital. They meet for sex at a gym that is across the street from the hospital.

The newspaper in which this essay appeared is a national daily; on the morning of its publication, my elder sister called me. She was upset. I was in Delhi on my book tour and she was in Patna. She said that her brother-in-law would be furious. I laughed. I said, “Don’t worry, don’t worry, he’s not a reader. I doubt he reads an English newspaper anyway.” I was laughing, but I was also nervous.

More here.

Frederico’s Ghost

The story is
that whole families of fruitpickers
still crept between the furrows
of the field at dusk,
when for reasons of whisky or whatever
the cropduster plane sprayed anyway,
floating a pesticide drizzle
over the pickers
who thrashed like dark birds
in a glistening white net,
except for Frederico,
a skinny boy who stood apart
in his own green row,
and, knowing the pilot
would not understand in Spanish
that he was the son of a whore,
instead jerked his arm
and thrust an obscene finger.

The pilot understood.
He circled the plane and sprayed again,
watch a fine gauze of poison
drift over the brown bodies
that cowered and scurried on the ground,
and aiming for Frederico,
leaving the skin beneath his shirt
wet and blistered,
but still pumping his finger at the sky.

After Frederico died,
rumors at the labor camp
told of tomatoes picked and smashed at night,
growers murmuring of vandal children
or communists in camp,
first threatening to call Immigration,
then promising every Sunday off
if only the smashing of tomatoes would stop.

Still tomatoes were picked and squashed
in the dark,
and the old women in camp
said it was Frederico,
laboring after sundown
to cool the burns on his arms,
flinging tomatoes
at the cropduster
that hummed like a mosquito
lost in his ear,
and kept his soul awake.

by Martin Espada
from After Atzlan
publisher, David Godine, 1992

Melissa Harrison in The Guardian:

Early on in Helen Jukes’s A Honeybee Heart Has Five Openings she ponders the increasing popularity of urban beekeeping, referring to the idea that “one possible psychological response to the apprehension of a threat is to begin producing idealised versions of the thing we perceive of as being at risk”. That’s also a good explanation for the current crop of bee books: not just A Honeybee Heart and Thor Hanson’s Buzz, but Kate Bradbury’s wonderful The Bumblebee Flies Anyway and Maja Lunde’s The History of Bees, among others. Books, like hives, are ways of capturing something and holding on to it: either helping to preserve it, or looking at it closely before it’s gone.

A Honeybee Heart is in the tradition of H Is for Hawk and other recent works that combine natural history with memoir. Some have felt rather stale and derivative, or have overplayed the author’s emotional link with the creature in question. Happily, Jukes avoids this: she’s interested in bees because, well, bees are interesting, and if anything the personal side is played down, particularly at the start of the book. Having had some experience helping a beekeeper in London, she decides to get a hive not long after moving to Oxford. Bored in her job, restless and lacking stable attachments, Jukes discovers that keeping bees helps to anchor her, and she explores the way in which they change her, just as her efforts alter the behaviour of the bees. There’s some satisfying (if at times slightly pat) mirroring as the personal and apine sides of the book progress in tandem, but she wears her considerable research lightly. I only wish I could have envisaged her hive better: it’s a “top bar” type rather than the more familiar Langstroth, and her descriptions of what the bees were building each time she opened it seemed fascinating, but went clean over my head. It is not unreasonable to ask how many more nature memoirs the market can support; the answer, I think, is only the best. Finely written and insightful, A Honeybee Heart is surely one of them.

More here.

Frank Winkler in Nature:

If malignant cells from solid or blood cancers enter the central nervous system (CNS) and grow there, the treatment options and clinical outlook deteriorate rapidly. In a type of leukaemia called acute lymphoblastic leukaemia (ALL), invasion of the CNS commonly occurs. To try to limit this, people with the condition often receive radiation or chemotherapy that targets the CNS. If more-effective and less-toxic approaches became available to prevent disease spread to the CNS, this might benefit many people with ALL. Writing in Nature, Yao et al.¹ report a hitherto unknown route that ALL cells use to enter the CNS, and suggest a possible therapeutic approach that is worth investigating.

When leukaemia spreads into the CNS, this process, termed metastasis, is mainly limited to the region known as the subarachnoid space, which contains cerebrospinal fluid that bathes the brain and spinal cord. The subarachnoid space is surrounded by membranes called the dura mater, the pia mater and the arachnoid, which are collectively called the meninges and are also colonized by cancer cells (Fig. 1). Yao and colleagues used mouse models of ALL to investigate how human leukaemia cells spread into the CNS. They focused on the enzyme PI3K, which is a key regulator of signalling pathways needed for growth, survival and invasion by cancer cells.

More here.

Sheri Berman in The Guardian:

Over a year into Donald Trump’s presidency, commentators are still trying to understand the election and the explosion of intolerance following it. One common view is that Trump’s victory was a consequence of pervasive racism in American society.

Studies make clear, however, that racism has been decreasing over time, among Republicans and Democrats. (Views of immigration have also grown more favorable.) Moreover, since racism is deep-seated and longstanding, reference to it alone makes it difficult to understand the election of Barack Obama and Trump, the differences between Trump and the two previous Republican nominees on race and immigration, and the dramatic breakdown of social norms and civility following the elections. (Social scientists call this the “constant can’t explain a variable” problem.)

This does not mean racism is irrelevant; it matters, but social science suggests it does in more complicated ways than much commentary suggests.

Perhaps because straightforward bigotry has declined precipitously while more subtle, complex resentments remain, understanding how intolerance shapes politics requires examining not just beliefs, but also the relationship between beliefs and the environments people find themselves in. This distinction has important implications for how we interpret and address contemporary social and political problems.

More here.

Holly Case in Lapham’s Quarterly:

In his book The Main Questions of Modern Culture from 1914, the German philosopher Emil Hammacher wrote about the questions of his time—among them the social, woman, and worker questions—their causes, and the longstanding desire to solve them and others, tracing their causes and solution-seeking back to Immanuel Kant and other eighteenth-century idealists. “Since people began to be surprised by that which was once considered self-evident, there have been questions and tasks whose solution is felt as a need and a necessity,” Hammacher wrote on the eve of the Great War. “Never before have there been so many riddles storming the people as there are today.”

Emil Hammacher did not survive the war. He was killed at the front in France, but The Main Questions of Modern Culture was celebrated by no less a figure than Thomas Mann, who in 1918 praised Hammacher as “the young philosopher from Bonn…whom I would very much like to call my posthumous friend” in his conservative defense of Germany’s involvement in the war, Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man. In spite of Mann’s posthumous blessing, Hammacher did not even attain that moderate amount of fame required to be included in the German Biographical Encyclopedia. But his thought was as steeped in the problem of action (What is to be done?) as the leftist György Lukács’, and constitutes a more accurate summation of what the age of questions had wrought: namely, doubt and despair, and a loss of faith in the Lösung (solution).

More here.

Peter Dockrill at Science Alert:

CRISPR has been heralded as one of the most important breakthroughs in modern science, but there could be a hidden and potentially dangerous side effect to the wonders of its genetic editing technology, a new study reveals.

A systematic investigation of CRISPR/Cas9 genome editing in mouse and human cells has discovered that the technique appears to frequently cause extensive mutations and genetic damage that the researchers say wouldn’t be detected by existing DNA tests.

“This is the first systematic assessment of unexpected events resulting from CRISPR/Cas9 editing in therapeutically relevant cells,” explains geneticist Allan Bradleyfrom the Wellcome Sanger Institute in the UK.

“We found that changes in the DNA have been seriously underestimated before now.”

It’s not the first time scientists have raised alarm about the potential pitfalls of CRISPR.

More here.

Jonah Goldberg in The National Review:

Jamelle Bouie, the chief political correspondent for Slate, recently penned an essay suggesting that the Enlightenment was racist — though the real point seemed to be that liking the Enlightenment too much is kind of racist. Regardless, the essay set off quite a hullabaloo, mostly on Twitter. His main targets were two new books, Enlightenment Now, by Steven Pinker, and Suicide of the West, by yours truly. Jordan Peterson, the controversial Canadian psychologist bogeyman of the moment for many liberals, was namechecked for good measure.

A wide array of writers took sides, either condemning the essay or defending it. The battle lines mostly tracked the Left–Right divide, but not entirely. For instance, Ross Douthat of the New York Times and National Review sided with Bouie, tweeting “That the Enlightenment was and remains a mixed bag whose intellectual-political-economic matrix made racism worse for a while (and may again, who knows?) is neither a radical nor an ignorant opinion.”

Before I go on, let me disappoint many of my defenders and state here that I think Douthat is mostly right. The Enlightenment was a mixed bag and it remains one as well. But Bouie, who makes many fine points, is ultimately wrong — and in many of the ways that I think Pinker is wrong in his discussion of the Enlightenment.

More here.

James Poulos at The New Atlantis:

Since at least Dante, the poetic vision of destiny in the West has bound up together love and the heavens. In this sense our highest poetry worked to reconcile and harmonize the personal at its most intimate and the natural at its most cosmic — in Dante’s case, through the Divine. That sort of poetry could be described as a practice of the art of humanism, properly understood. Yet strangely, despite remarkable leaps forward in spacefaring technology that promise to unite the personal and the cosmic in an epochal way, today’s Western vision of destiny has become fractured and contested. It is no longer accepted belief that poetry, divinity, destiny, and the personal love of being human are all constituent parts of a harmonious experience of being.

This problem — and it is a problem — is encapsulated in the uncertain place of Mars in the human conversation today. That conversation is dominated by matters of politics, science, and economics. Though it is obvious that these things should play a role in how people wrestle anew with the age-old question of our relation to Mars, something is badly and historically amiss in the absence of love, humanism, and poetry from these conversations.

more here.

Bence Nanay at nonsite.

Still, the application of the idea of the history of vision does not stop, and does not begin,  with modernity. As Jonathan Crary argues at length, the general mode of perception may have undergone some important form of change already in the first half of the 19^thcentury. And theorists of postmodernism rely on the principle of the history of vision as much as theorists of modernity do. Frederic Jameson, for example, argues that postmodernism offers “a whole new Utopian realm of the senses.” The premise all these arguments share is that history, and art history, can be understood, at least partially, as the history of perception. This assumption is so deeply ingrained in much of the discourse on 19^th and 20^th century art and culture and in (at least some branches of) art history and aesthetics that it has been taken for granted without further discussion. As Whitney Davis summarized, “according to visual-culture studies, it is true prima facie that vision has a cultural history.” And one of the guiding ideas of post-formalism has become the claim that vision (and imagination) has an (art) history.

more here.

David E. Cooper at the TLS:

Martin Heidegger’s writings owe their fascination to their fusion of radical criticism of the Western philosophical tradition with a dark, trenchant diagnosis of the “homelessness” and “destitute” condition of human beings in modernity. Heidegger’s work has enjoyed unrivalled influence in a wide range of twentieth-century philosophical movements or fields – phenomenology and existentialism, pragmatism and postmodernism, hermeneutics and poetics, theology and environmental ethics. Phenomenologists and pragmatists could applaud his “destruction” of Cartesian rationalism, existentialists his call to “authenticity”, and environmentalists his reflections on “the devastation of the earth”. Heidegger’s influence might have been greater still if potential admirers had not been deterred by his challenging vocabulary or by his connection to Nazism.

more here.

James Hamblin in The Atlantic:

It all happened quickly. In the 1990s, during the original “Got Milk?” campaign, it was plausible to look at a magazine, see supermodels with dairy-milk mustaches, and think little of it. Now many people would cry foul. With nut milks dominating the luxury café-grocery scenes frequented by celebrities, an image like that would surely elicit cries of disingenuousness: There’s no way you actually drink cow’s milk! And if you do, it’s probably skim or 2-percent milk, which leave no such thick mustache!

Difficult as it may be for Millennials to imagine, the average American in the 1970s drank about 30 gallons of milk a year. That’s now down to 18 gallons, according to the Department of Agriculture. And just as it appears that the long arc of American beverage consumption could bend fully away from the udder, new evidence is making it more apparent that the perceived health risks of dairy fats (which are mostly saturated) are less clear than many previously believed. A new study this week in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition is relevant to an ongoing vindication process for saturated fats, which turned many people away from dairy products such as whole milk, cheese, and butter in the 1980s and ’90s. An analysis of 2,907 adults found that people with higher and lower levels of dairy fats in their blood had the same rate of death during a 22-year period.

The implication is that it didn’t matter if people drank whole or skim or 2-percent milk, ate butter versus margarine, etc. The researchers concluded that dairy-fat consumption later in life “does not significantly influence total mortality.” “I think the big news here is that even though there is this conventional wisdom that whole-fat dairy is bad for heart disease, we didn’t find that,” says Marcia de Oliveira Otto, the lead researcher of the study and an assistant professor of epidemiology, human genetics, and environmental science at the University of Texas School of Public Health. “And it’s not only us. A number of recent studies have found the same thing.” Hers adds to the findings of prior studies that also found that limiting saturated fat is not a beneficial guideline. While much similar research has used self-reported data on how much people eat—a notoriously unreliable metric, especially for years-long studies—the current study is noteworthy for actually measuring the dairy-fat levels in the participants’ blood.

More here.

Blake Morris in Nautilus:

By the time Donald Johnson got the call to come to the crime scene, the victim had been dead for hours. A first responder opened the apartment door to find a woman lying on the edge of her bed, nude from the waist down, bound and gagged with duct tape. She had been bludgeoned to death. The homicide detectives needed an expert to gather the evidence. That was where Johnson came in. Then a senior criminalist for the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, Johnson surveyed the apartment. Shards of ceramic lay on the kitchen floor, remnants from a broken jar that once held flour. Johnson noticed two sets of footprints in the flour, ignaling to him that there were two assailants. Clothes spilled from a chest against the wall across from the bed. From the mangled lock, Johnson could tell the chest had been forcibly opened, perhaps with a crowbar. There was also blood on the lock, with a trail of drops on the floor leading to the sink where the assailant had washed his hands.

It was more than enough blood evidence for Johnson to get a complete DNA profile.

This ghastly crime happened 28 years ago, but a replica of the scene is on display in a classroom at the Hertzberg-Davis Forensic Science Center at California State University, Los Angeles, where Johnson, 60, has worked as an associate professor in the criminalistics program since 2003, and is currently working on new forensic technology called the Spatter Origin Revealing System to improve how investigators can solve crimes by examining blood. Aside from serving students, the Forensic Science Center is also the working crime lab for the Los Angeles Police Department and Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. As the largest crime lab in the country, second only to the F.B.I.’s, the Forensic Science Center conducts DNA analysis, questionable documents analysis, narcotics testing, trace evidence analysis, and ballistics testing, in addition to blood spatter analysis. For teaching purposes, Johnson often recreates real crime scenes that he worked on as a criminalist before he left the field in 2003. For this one he used a mannequin and sterilized pig blood.

More here.

Brown Penny

I whispered, ‘I am too young,’
And then, ‘I am old enough’;
Wherefore I threw a penny
To find out if I might love.
‘Go and love, go and love, young man,
If the lady be young and fair.’
Ay, penny, brown penny, brown penny,
I am looped in the loops of her hair.

O love is the crooked thing,
There is nobody wise enough
To find out all that is in it,
For he would be thinking of love
Till the stars had run away
And the shadows eaten the moon.
Ah, penny, brown penny, brown penny,
One cannot begin it too soon.
.

W.B. Yeats